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    In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul
    In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul
    In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul
    Ebook67 pages38 minutes

    In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul

    By Svetlana Alexievich

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    "I love life in its living form, life that’s found on the street, in human conversations, shouts, and moans." So begins this speech delivered in Russian at Cornell University by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. In poetic language, Alexievich traces the origins of her deeply affecting blend of journalism, oral history, and creative writing.

    Cornell Global Perspectives is an imprint of Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The works examine critical global challenges, often from an interdisciplinary perspective, and are intended for a non-specialist audience. The Distinguished Speaker Series presents edited transcripts of talks delivered at Cornell, both in the original language and in translation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCornell Global Perspectives
    Release dateJan 15, 2018
    ISBN9781501726927
    In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul
    Author

    Svetlana Alexievich

    Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankovsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-hand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’.

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      Book preview

      In Search of the Free Individual - Svetlana Alexievich

      I LOVE LIFE IN ITS LIVING FORM, life that’s found on the street, in human conversations, shouts, and moans. That sort of life is genuine, not yet shaped by someone else’s ideas or talents.

      This probably comes from my childhood. My parents were village teachers and there were always plenty of books at home. But in the evenings, I was drawn away from books to the benches outside where the women of the village gathered. It was the post-war period, when young boys were still getting themselves blown up in the forest by German and partisan mines. As far as I remember, only women lived in the village. No men had returned from the war. In the evenings, after milking the cows and finishing up the housework, the women would sit outside and talk about life and death. They talked about the war: how they saw their loved ones off, how they waited for them. How they believed the gypsy women who promised them miracles. It seems to me that I learned everything there was to know about love from their stories. Their stories affected me more than books. Life seemed mysterious and frightening.

      It took me a long time to find a genre that corresponded to the way I viewed the world …to the way my eyes saw and ears heard … a genre that corresponded to my memory.

      I chose the genre of the human voice. In my books, ordinary people, the ones we still refer to as the little men or women, talk about themselves. I discover my books on the street, I hear them outdoors. Sometimes I spend an entire day with one person. It’s important to catch words in flight, as they’re born. It’s important not to miss the conversational part of life, which we often neglect, dismiss as unimportant, leaving it to disappear in the bustle of life, in the darkness of time. It seems surprising that this could be literature. But I want to make every bit of our life into literature. Including ordinary, everyday words.

      For over 30 years I chronicled the Red Empire. This unprecedented communist project spanned a vast territory and affected an enormous number of people—over 200 million. The Russian Bolsheviks attempted to remake man, ancient Adam, into a new type of human being—Homo sovieticus. The Red Man that I write about is a creation of the Soviet idea, the builder of communism, as he called himself. This chronicle comprises five books, but they are really one book about the history of the Russian-Soviet soul. They cover a period of almost one hundred years and several generations. I managed to speak to people who had seen Lenin and Stalin, who did time in Stalinist labor camps, but believed in Stalin, cherished their party membership cards, those little red booklets with the leaders’ profiles embossed on the cover. I remember an old woman who seemed to me to have risen from the dead. She was a communist who had spent 17 years—her entire sentence—in a distant corner of Siberia and miraculously survived. And yet she threatened to denounce me to the KGB because I was slandering the great leader and a great, heroic era. Communism was their religion.

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