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Memoria, Alexievich, and a New Genre: A Collage of Human Voices:

An Annotated Bibliography

(N. B. Because there are four different spellings for Alexievich’s last name and two different spellings for her first name, all from reputable sources, I have chosen to use the most common spelling within the annotations for consistency.)

Primary Sources:

Alexievich, Svetlana. “I Love and I Will Love Again.” Chtenia: Readings from Russia, vol. 1,

no. 2, 2008, pp. 121-126. Alexievich records a memoir from 1988 that deals with the

ethnic cleansing (pogrom) between the Christian Armenians and the Muslim Turks in

Baku, Azerbaijani SSR, Soviet Union, reminiscent of the holocaust of 1915. The young

woman speaking recalls everyone living together in peace: Azerbaijanis, Russians,

Armenians, Ukrainians, and Tatars. She says that they all had one nationality, Soviet, and

all spoke Russian. She even falls in love with an Azerbaijani named Abulfaz whom she

eventually marries. The village is a happy place with everyone celebrating the Persian

New Year. No one locks the doors and all are welcomed with “milky pilaf and red tea

with cinnamon or cardamom” (52). After high school, she works as a clerk in the

telegraph office. She is well known and is never stopped or asked for papers, until one

day. There is a new guard and he asks, but she has forgotten her documents at home.

They call her boss to vouch for her and she is very angry with the guard. A few days

later, he shows up at the office and asks her to the movies. She discovers that they like

the same movies and their relationship begins. She goes to her father and says she is in

love. The father asks if he is a good boy. She responds, “Very. But his name is Abulfaz”

(55). Her father is silent because the boy is a Muslim. Their brief happiness is soon

shattered. Muslims begin gathering in the square “all dressed in black, dancing and

singing”: “Death to unbelievers! Death” (54). This goes on for several months

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with it becoming more and more dangerous for Armenians. In Sumgait, 30 kilometers way, the

horrors of the ethnic cleansing begins. One girl who also works in the telegraph office

starts sleeping in the storeroom and will not say why. Eventually, she relates what

happened to her relatives. Her mother is stripped and set fire in the courtyard and her

pregnant sister’s throat and stomach are slit open. Her father is killed with an axe, only

being identified by his boots. Yet, television, radio, and newspapers say nothing about the

violence. Shortly, the young woman’s Aunt Zeynab is hiding in a neighbor’s house and

all her belongings being stolen. Abulfaz is threatened with violence from friends and

family for his Armenian wife. By the time the unrest reaches Baku, the young woman is

pregnant and a girlfriend risks her husband and two children in order to hide her. The

savagery is such that the Muslims were killing any Armenians. Russian troops do arrive

and stop the violence, but the scenes of carnage are such that “[the troops] fainted from

what they saw” (59). The young woman, her mother, and Abulfaz flee to Moscow, where

the woman gives birth. Out of respect, Abulfaz visits his Muslim family often, eventually

not returning to his wife and child for seven years. When he does finally return, “he

walked into the apartment and put his arms around [their] daughter” and collapses (61).

However, Moscow is not easy either. They “are not registered . . . [they] have no rights . .

. . And there are thousands like [them]” (63). Armenians clean toilets, lay bricks, carry

bags of cement and avoid the skinheads with swastikas. Now, with capitalism and a new

sense of nationalism, Russia is for Russians, not them.

Alexievich, Svetlana. The Last Witnesses: A Hundred of Unchildlike Lullabys. Molodaya

Gvardiya, 1985.(Excerpt) Alexievich interviews people who were children during WWII.

Alexievich notes that there were 26,900 WWII orphans raised in Belarus, but that a total

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of thirteen million children die during that time. Although very old now, the survivors’

memories tell of the horrors, loss, fear, hunger, and death. Some have few memories of

their original parents. For example, a five-year-old boy sees his mother kissing his

father and instinctively knows it will be the last time he will see him. Eventually, his

mother is found lying by the highway. She is buried where she fell. Another girl is only

three and is found beside her dead mother. She is put on a train for Khvalynsk and the

Cherkasovs adopt her. She has no memories of her real parents. However, Alexievich is

surprised by how much others do remember. In 1943, a ten-year-old boy remembers

bombs being dropped on his village. SS troops march into their village and begin killing

all the dogs and cats, even chickens. The civilians race into the forest to hide, while the

Germans burn their town. His family has hidden in them a ditch. They can hear dogs

barking, foreign words, and shooting. Their father has managed to conceal a grenade. If

the soldiers find them, he will pull the pin and everyone will die, but the German voices

go further and further away. In the evening, they meet a larger group of town folk. An old

man asks if the boy would like sweets or a piece of bread. They little boy replies, “A

handful of cartridges.” Another child is a twelve-year-old girl from Leningrad. Her entire

school is evacuated to the Urals. She says that they are marched into the park where they

“ate it.” They have learned about edible grasses and the shoots from small pine trees. It is

1942 and there is terrible famine. The children’s home in the Urals has a hard time

feeding them. She also remembers seeing her first German. He is a prisoner brought to

work in the coal mines. When the German prisoner sees them, smells them, his jaw starts

moving involuntarily. He’s starving too. One child has a leftover piece of bread and gives

it to him. Although hungry themselves, the children start saving morsels for the German.

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By 1943, things are getting better and the home has good bread and plenty of porridge for

the children. Years later as an adult watching TV, she sees Palestinian refugees queuing

up, hungry, with little metal bowls and become hysterical. The memories of hunger never

leave. Children may not be heartless, but it seems the Germans were. A seven-year-old

girl recalls her mother working as a scout and leaving four children alone in a cabin: the

girl, her little brother, and two cousins (a boy and a girl). They are quiet in the darkness,

hoping no one will find them, then they hear “Germans, Germans.” Someone says in

Russian to come outside and they obey. A German all in black walks up and aims a

machine-gun at them. The seven-year-old does not even get a chance to embrace the little

ones. She wakes to the sound of her mother crying while digging a hole. The little girl

makes a small cry and the mother races to her. The mother cradles the girl in her arms; all

the other children are dead. The child has 9 bullet wounds but is alive. Alexievich’s book

notes the tragedies and the immediate loss of innocence when WWII devastated the

Soviet Union.

Alexievich, Svetlana. “On the Centenary of Revolution.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian &

Eurasian History, vol. 18, no. 2, Spring2017, pp. 229-235. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1353/kri.2017.0016. The piece commemorates the centenary of the Russian

Revolutions of 1917. Historians acknowledge that “commemoration of the past is

fundamentally shaped by the politics of the present” (229). Such commemorations are

accompanied by debates about the connectedness of the past and the present, as well as

the relationship between “academic history” and “contemporary politics” (230). Because

of the mass action and violent upheaval in 1917, Putin does not believe the revolution

provided much useful history. However, he does celebrate the prerevolutionary imperial

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regime and has encouraged nostalgia for the tsars. He acknowledges Russia’s successes

and ignores its failures. Also, Putin rises to power after the devastating decade of the

1990s, with economic crisis, poverty, and new criminal element. However, the 1990s do

usher in a new openness, the opening of archives and the hope for new histories. That

enthusiasm is short-lived as Putin orders archives shut. Alexievich’s Secondhand Time

records “the history that they [Putin’s regime] had been hiding” (235).

Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time – The Last of the Soviets: An Oral History. Translated

by Bela Shayevich, Random House, 2016. Secondhand Time is Alexievich’s biggest

undertaking to date. It covers the decades of 1991-2001 and 2002-2012. It is the

tumultuous time that ushered in the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Central

Committee of the Communist Party, the eruption of ethnic cleansing in parts of the Soviet

Union, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the ten-day standoff between the

supporters of Yeltsin and the supporters of the Russian Parliament, Vladimir Putin’s rise

to power, and Russia’s forceful annexation of Crimea. Although two consecutive

decades, there is an interesting divide between the mindsets and values of the older and

the younger generations. Moreover, the stories are intimate accounts of serving,

suffering, and hustling. Alexievich organizes the book into two sections: Part One the

Consolation of the Apocalypse-Ten Stories in a Red Interior and Part Two the Charms of

Emptiness-Ten Stories in the Absence of an Interior. The Red Interior narratives the 10

years immediately after the end of the Cold War, a time when Alexievich was growing

up. Alexievich refers to these as “kitchen” stories, anecdotes from the ordinary man. The

kitchen is the center of life for Russians. The kitchen “is not just where we cook, it’s a

dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox” (18). Those who disagree with the

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politics of the time are called “kitchen dissidents,” because the privacy of the kitchen was

the only safe place to share honest opinions. However, the people were not all anti-

Soviet, instead they just want more blue jeans, VCRs, cars, nice clothes, and good food.

These are things that most Soviets never had. The stories open with “On the Beauty of

Dictatorship and the Mystery of Butterflies Crushed against the Pavement,” an account

from Elena Yurievna, third secretary of the district party committee, 49 years old. She

boldly states that she is a communist, but no one wants to listen to her anymore. To her,

“Lenin was a gangster, and . . . Stalin” a criminal (41). She says, what the world sees is

Moscow, but “Russia isn’t Moscow” (42). People still live very poorly. They feel lied to,

“that no one had told them that there was going to be capitalism; they thought socialism

was just going to be fixed” (42). She remembers the beginning of perestroika, with

people being communists one day and ultra-democrats the next. Yet, she loves the word

“comrade” (43) and will “never stop loving it” (43). She “takes pleasure in writing

‘USSR.’ She says that was my country; the country I live in today is not. I feel like I’m

living on foreign soil” (43). She talks about her father who fought in the Russo-Finnish

War. He is at war for six months but is never the same again. Upon arrive back in

Russia alive, he is agreed as a traitor. The soldiers are accused of “saving [their] own skin” (44).

He is sentenced to six years in a prison camp for “betraying the Motherland” (45). He

endures hard labor building a “railway over the permafrost” (45). He is so changed that

his own mother does not recognize him. Yet, Elena’s father does not “hold a grudge”

(46). He considers himself and what happened to him “a product of the era” (46). Elena

grows up to be a Young Pioneer, and besides a school education she is taught “how to

plow, to mow the grass . . . how to load a cart with hay and how to make a haystack”

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(47). As an adult, she is proud of her humble upbringings and does not understand

Russians today that are “chasing after the good life . . . ” (47). She states that Russians

were “fooled by the shiny wrapper” of capitalism, “but heaps of salami have nothing to

do with happiness” (48). For Russians, having salami, good salami and a lot of it, is a

sign of wealth or prosperous times. She remembers the lines and the quotas. “Stores were

completely empty . . . . Stores would run out of milk within an hour of opening . . . . If

they put out salami, it’d be sold out in seconds” (49-50). She claims at least “socialism

isn’t just labor camps . . . . Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion

rules” (51). Now, instead of free people, there are gangsters and they are not afraid of

anything. For example, she asserts a businessman “was shot to pieces” in broad daylight

(54). Eventually, as an avowed communist, Elena loses her job and begins to worry about

her own safety. She looks for a long time for a job before returning to teaching. None of

her colleagues from the district party committee fare much better. One instructor kills

himself; another has a nervous breakdown. Some go “into business . . . . The second

secretary runs a movie theater” (72). She closes by musing that maybe too she “could

have another life” (72). She just is not sure what it would be like. In the second half of

Secondhand Time, Alexievich writes “On a Loneliness That Resembles Happiness,”

about Alisa Z., an advertising manager, 35 years old. For her, the twenty-first century is

“money, sex, and two smoking barrels . . . .” (337). According to Alisa, it is the first time

people got their hands on some real money, so she is in no hurry to marry and have kids.

She values her career and herself. She feels that “men consider women games, war

trophies, prey, and themselves hunters” (337). However, Russian women want “their

knight in shining armor to come galloping” with “a sack of gold” (337). Alisa is brought

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up in a typical poor Russian family, but is an unusual person. In school, boys are taught

to drive cars and girls are taught make meat patties. Alisa always burns them. While

being reprimanded, Alisa declares she will not be making “anyone meat patties,” as she is

“going to have a housekeeper” (338). This generation is embracing the dreams of

capitalism. Capitalism is nothing her parents understood or wanted, but it excited people

like Alisa. When of age, Alisa leaves home and rushes to Moscow with “two hundred

dollars and a few rubles in [her] pocket” (339). The adventure is intoxicating, “enterprise,

risk . . . . The mighty dollar” (339). She is in Moscow in August of 1991 when the putsch

takes place. The television and radio do not carry any news about the potential coup.

Alisa admits that the putsch was the most important event of her life. Now, many

factories are not paying their employees with money, instead people at “meatpacking

plants paid workers in salami – candy or sugar” (340). The people are bartering for

everything, like trading frying pans for irons. Many foods are rationed. There are lines of

people everywhere. Meanwhile, Alisa starts working for a newspaper. By then, “foreign

cars appeared . . . . The first McDonald’s on Pushkin Square . . . Polish makeup . . . [and]

the first commercial on TV for Turkish tea” (341). A new class of businessmen is rising:

technocrats, bandits, and venture capitalists” (341). As a young, beautiful 22-year-old

woman, she would be the one sent out to “interview these capitalists” (342). She finally

meets her knight, older man with a wife and two sons. For Alisa, “love is also a kind of

business, everyone is taking their own measure of risk” (343). He is a big spender and

makes sure that she has everything: “a big house, an expensive car, Italian furniture. And

a daughter [that she] adores,” yet she lives alone (343). The pregnancy ends the

relationship, but he is never happy. For these ultra-rich, normal activities no longer

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satisfy them. They have developed “special entertainment,” like playing prisoner or street

beggar (347). Of course, their “bodyguards [are just] around the corner” (347). They even

hunt and kill human beings for sport. “Some unlucky homeless guy is handed a thousand

bucks . . . . All you have to do is pretend to be an animal. If you make it out alive, that’s

fate . . .” (347). The games are sick and perverted beyond belief. Meanwhile, Alisa is

fine. She works for an advertising agency because it pays better and her daughter is

grown. Alisa has become part of the successful working class in Moscow. She says that

one of her closest friends is also single, but he juggles “three cellphones . . . works

thirteen to fifteen hours a day. No weekends, no vacation” (349). When asked about

happiness, she replies, “Are they happy? [This is] a different world . . . . Loneliness is a

kind of happiness” (349).

Alexievich, Svetlana. “A Solitary Human Voice.” Chtenia: Readings from Russia, vol. 2, no. 4,

2009, pp. 113-124. Alexievich recounts the memories of Valentina, the wife of a

liquidator from Chernobyl. It is her birthday (October 19, 1986) and they have guests

over for dinner. In the middle of the meal, her husband is urgently called from the table

as a car is waiting. He is a construction worker at Chernobyl and leaves without even

taking a hat. She knows where he is going, and only a sixth sense of the danger. In the

power plant’s cafeteria, the workers are given noodles and canned foods, while the bosses

and generals dine on “fruit, red wine, mineral water,” with “a dosimeter for every man”

(115). The ordinary workers did not have “a single dosimeter for the whole brigade”

(115). When the liquidator returns home, there are knots in his lymph nodes and he says,

“They’ll go away” (115). By the time his wife forces him to the doctor, the lymph nodes

are “the size of eggs” (116). The oncologist says, “Another Chernobylite here” (116).

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After radical surgery, he is sent home with feeding tubes and more. His wife foolishly

thinks the doctors have saved him. She must prepare fresh food, grind it, and squeeze it

into the “biggest of the tubes,” the one going to his stomach. (116). However, he no

longer has a sense of taste or smell. His wife will not tell him that others are dying, and

his body starts changing in horrifying ways. His nose moves and grows three times

larger, his eyes go in different directions, and tumors crawl all over his body. His chin

disappears, his tongue falls out, his veins pop and begin to bleed. His wife loves him

desperately and will not leave his side. She dutifully feeds and bathes him until the end.

With death looming, her husband writes in his notebook, as he can no longer speak,

“When I die, sell the car and the spare tire, and don’t marry Tolik,” his brother (120).

“The first [worker] died after three years [from the disaster] . . . . [Her] husband died last”

(114). All she has left is “his watch, his military ID, and his medal from Chernobyl”

(120).

Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.

Translated by Keith Gessen. 2nd ed, Picador, 2006. Alexievich feels compelled to

document some of the people who lived through the worst nuclear disaster of modern

times: Chernobyl. Research confirms that the blast was 350 times worse than Hiroshima.

She comments that it is “pretty unanimous . . . that the Soviet system had taken a poorly

designed reactor and then staffed it with a group of incompetents” (xi). During the critical

“first ten days when the reactor core was burning and releasing a steady stream of highly

radioactive material . . . , the authorities repeatedly claimed that the situation was under

control” (xi). In reality, “no one knew” (xi). To save Russia, and in fact most of Europe,

Soviet officials pour “thousands of men into the breach” (xii). These first responders

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“wouldn’t break down until weeks or months later, at which point they’d die horribly”

(xii). She interviews over 500 people, claiming that there are more survivors than victims.

It is particularly important to her because it happened very close to her home in Belarus.

Because of Chernobyl, “the country lost 485 villages . . . . Of these, 70 have been forever

buried . . . .” (1). The reactor explodes on April 26, 1986, and by May 5, 1986, the

radiation has already reached the U. S. and Canada, becoming “a problem for the entire

world” (2). Most of her stories are individual accounts, but in a few instances she records

a chorus of voices like a group of school children or a group of Chernobyl activated

soldiers. The book opens with the wife of a deceased fireman. The wife recalls waking to

her husband rushing around their sleeping quarters in the firehouse. Her husband says,

“There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon” (5). He leaves without protective gear,

just in his shirt sleeves. The roof of the reactor is covered with burning bitumen and

graphite. At 7 AM, she is told he is at the hospital and he’s bad; “they are all bad” (6).

Yet, no one is talking about the radiation. Her husband and several others are taken to a

hospital in Moscow. It is “a hospital for people with acute radiation poisoning. In

fourteen days a person dies” (12). It is not long before he cannot digest food, wrinkles in

sheets create body wounds, his body is covered in boils, and clumps of hair are left on his

pillow. He has received four times the lethal dose of radiation, and is dying. When he

coughs, “pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth” (19). At the end,

he is so swollen that his uniform is cut and laid over the top of his body and he is buried

barefoot. Since he is very radioactive, he is interned in a “sealed zinc casket, under

cement tiles” (19). In another monologue from a cameraman called Sergi, he recalls

everything near the reactor looking normal. “People are digging in their gardens, there

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are tractors and seed drills in the fields. . . . Nothing’s blowing up” (105). Gorbachev has

been on the radio saying, “Everything’s fine, everything’s under control” (105).

However, soldiers are washing roofs and have buried an entire layer of top soil, but

everything is covered in a radioactive dust. Sergi recounts the scariest part is that no one

understands anything. Those who carried radiation dosimeters “gave one set of figures,

the newspapers gave another” (106). The countryside is beautiful with apple trees in

bloom and bumblebees buzzing around. “People are working, the gardens are blooming”

(107). Then he realizes that he does not “smell anything” (107). “The body reacts to high

doses of radiation by blocking the function of certain organs” (107). No one understands

and those evacuated sneak back to their farms. Where else would they go? A teacher

remembers that death becomes so commonplace that children are talking about dying and

not asking “how are babies made?” (115). For children of Chernobyl, death is

everywhere. “If they stand in line for fifteen, twenty minutes, some of them start fainting,

their noses bleed . . . . They’re always tired and sleepy. Their faces are pale and gray.

They don’t play and they don’t fool around” (115-116). The whole village has become

“the raw materials for a scientific experiment, for an international laboratory” (121).

“There are ten million Belarussians, and two million of [them] live on poisoned land. It’s

a devil’s laboratory” (121). The Chernobyl Zone has created a different world, a new

nation. For Alexievich, “it’s a separate world, a world within the rest of the world – and

it’s more powerful than anything literature has to say” (236).

Alexievich, Svetlana. Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War. Translated by Julia

Whitby and Robin Whitby, W. W. Norton, 1992. Alexievich interviews and weaves

together the memoirs of over 43 people connected to the Russian ten-year war in

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Afghanistan (December 25, 1979 to February 15, 1989). The book is testimonials from

people such as nurses, widows, tank crews, military advisers, doctors, helicopter pilots,

privates, mothers and more. Almost every remembrance echoes they were doing their

“international duty.” All Russian citizens are raised with a love for the Motherland and an

intense sense of responsibility to serve the nation. Once in Afghanistan, the military is

pitifully under supplied. Much of their meager equipment is from WWII, ill-suited for

extreme heat and sniper warfare. Also, soldiers (18-19 year olds) complain of constant

hunger. In addition, the soldiers sell everything to buy souvenirs to take home to mothers

and girlfriends, even bullets that could be used against them the next day. Often the

female cooks, secretaries, and nurses sell themselves to make money too. The corruption

is widespread, with wealthy parents buying their sons out of service. However, the

warfare is horrific. Supposedly, the Russians are there to liberate the local people from

the radical Mujahideen, but the villagers, women and children included, are often the

ones murdering Russian soldiers. Ironically, the politics, warfare, and fears are much like

America’s war in Vietnam. There is also a savagery that is hard to fathom. Russian

prisoners are mutilated beyond comprehension: legs, arms, and heads cut off and skin

flayed from the body. Or, prisoners have their arms and legs amputated with tourniquets

applied so they survive but are only living torsos. However, savagery is not limited to

Afghans. The Russians would level an entire village for the death of a comrade, animals

included. If soldiers do return home alive, they suffer from malaria, hepatitis, and PTSD.

Back home, wives, parents, and friends are told nothing of the war. When a loved one is

killed in combat, he arrives home is a sealed zinc coffin and the family is only told he did

“his duty.” Family members are never sure if they really received their loved ones’

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bodies. A substantial part of the book recounts the grief and disillusionment of mothers.

They have taught their sons to admire heroes and to do their duty for Mother Russia, only

to realize everything about the war is a lie. Their boys died for nothing. At first, the

soldiers are considered returning heroes, but eventually the news services begin to leak

the futility and savagery of the war. Like veterans from Vietnam, the Russian soldiers are

demonized as warmongers and blamed for a war they did not start. However, the grief of

the mothers is almost unbearable. A mother gives the military her son and they send back

a coffin plus “a pair of blue underpants, a toothbrush, and half a bar of soap” (139).

Another mother has spent every day for the last four years in the cemetery next to her

son’s grave, except for eleven days when she was in the hospital after a heart attack.

Ultimately, Alexievich’s exploration illuminates a period in Russian history that few

know about. She records humanity’s struggle with violence, loss, and grim self-

awareness, under the worst of possible circumstances.

Alexievich, Svietlana, and Rafat Milach. 7 Rooms. Translated by Jamey Gambrell, 2nd ed.,

Kehrer Verlag, 2013. Polish photographer Rafal Milach spends several years

photographing seven people that were living in the Russian cities of Moscow,

Yekaterinburg, and Krasnoyarsk. The collection is an intimate looks at a generation of

people caught between the old Soviet regime and the new Russia of Putin. As an

introduction, Alexievich shares excerpts from three people (a 52-year-old doctor, a 22-

year-old driver, and a 36-year-old engineer), all who attempt suicide, while trying to

make sense of their shifting reality. She starts with the fifty-two-year old doctor

and her husband who regularly visit Moscow, but for the first time they do not go to Red

Square. The doctor remembers her excitement on the train, the military marches blaring

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on the PA system and the comrade passengers as they pulls into the capital. On Arbat Street, a

popular thoroughfare, she is stunned to see Komsomol membership cards on sale next to

painted nesting dolls, war medals too. She stops a policeman, demanding the crime be

prevented, only to learn “objects from the era of totalitarianism . . . may be sold” (4). She

wants everything to be like it was before: everyone equal, boundless love for the

Motherland, and the national anthem playing every morning in the streets. As a child, she

becomes a Young Pioneer (a Communist organization operated for elementary school

children), receiving her red bandana and her Komsomol card. Then, her dearest dream is

to die, “to give [her] life for the Motherland” (5). The girl is such a patriot that she would

have denounced her own father had she been older. Her father is part of the revolution

and is thrown out of the Communist Party. Still, he would reported crimes by writing “a

letter to Comrade Stalin, even though all his teeth has been knocked out in prison . . .”

(7). Now the middle-aged doctor is trying to comprehend her new life: some citizens rich

and others so poor they cannot afford bread or milk. An Armenian woman is murdered

and hanged on her bakery door with bags of bread below her feet. There is no order

anymore, no meaning, so a handful of pills will solve the problem: “I [the doctor] thought

I could stop them with my death” (9). She lives but is never the same. With the young

driver, Alexievich records a life full of illness and unfulfilled dreams through his

mother’s eyes. His mother is a journalist with high ideals who teaches her son to stand up

and tell the truth – it is his duty. The boy’s greatest wish is to drive race cars but in

Russia that is impossible. At sixteen, his mother scraps together enough money to buy

him a cheap motorcycle, “his wish, his heart’s desire, his dream. To move, rush, fly!”

(12). While riding, he is stopped by the police, asked for papers, and when he has no

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money, the bike is smash and the boy beaten. Eventually, the boy gets a job driving taxis,

but he sees lots of stealing and lying. His mother encourages him to report the activity – it

is his duty. He does, and the boss is furious and forces the boy to quit. His last driving job

is as a security guard at Gosbank. He brags that “no traffic cop has the right to stop my

car anymore!” (14). That night he returns after a walk covered in blood, again. While

smoking on a bridge, he is stopped by two policemen, put him in jail, beat him, and

forced to sign papers saying that all his belongings had been returned to him. The driver

swears: “Tomorrow, I’ll go to work, get a gun and shoot those bastards! I’ll leave the last

bullet for myself” (16). The mother pleads with her son all night to forget such nonsense

and be grateful for his job. He says,” I probably wouldn’t be able to shoot people

anyway” (16). The following morning he is found in the bank’s locker room with a bullet

hole to the temple. Finally, Alexievich’s last piece opens with the engineer painfully

waking up in a hospital bed. Her husband only asks if he should do the laundry himself or

wait for her. She responses, “Wash your socks, and leave the rest” (19). She lives with

her husband and son in a comfortable apartment. Her parents have been workers at a

porcelain factory and save every penny. She says, “I would have lived my life the way

my parents did. But everything changed all of a sudden . . . capitalism” (20). It breaks the

“plan” she “knew how to life by” (20). She is an engineer-technician, a typical job for a

woman in Russia. With capitalism comes layoffs. No men, of course, the layoffs are

“single mothers, divorces women, and people” close to retirement (20). She does not

have to work because her husband’s salary is enough to live on. She tries to be content

with cooking, cleaning, knitting, but she realizes one day “that they [her husband and

son] didn’t even notice her” (21). She did not miss the factory work – it is the social

Cheryl Wiltse 17

aspect. The women “drank tea about three times a day, and each of [them] talked about

herself” (21). Life is hectic but satisfying and full -- then she mattered. Again, she tries to

invest herself in domestic things: making dresses, frying meat patties, putting on make-

up, but it turns out she is “not a professional homemaker” (23). Something starts to

happen to her. She stops liking herself: her hair, posture, gait (23). One evening, she

hears the door open and knows it is her husband. In a flash, she swallows down half a

bottle of vinegar essence and throws “the bottle in the garbage chute . . . . So there’d be

no traces” (23). In that moment, she realizes that suicide is ridiculous and, ironically, had

not consumed enough essence of vinegar to die.

Alexiyevich, Svetlana. “Landscape of Loneliness: Three Voices.” Nine: An Anthology of

Russia’s Foremost Women Writers. Translated by Joanne Turnbull, New Russian

Writing, 2003. From research for The Wonderful Deer of the Eternal Hunt, a new book

on love, Alexievich shows the reality of three women’s relationships during and post

Stalin: Voice One’s lover is charismatic and strong, but expects her to be self-sufficient;

Voice Two’s lover is weak and it is pity that keeps them together; and the woman that

represents Voice Three is self-sufficient, does take care of her man, but shows a portrait

of true love. All three woman have been married more than once. Voice One is a woman

who leaves her husband for another man. She says, “Love’s not a glorious feeling,” but it

is all-consuming (8). At the beginning, they are colleagues and pass each other on the

train and in the office. She admits that it takes a long time before she is willing to leave

everything for him and when she does there are many tears. They have a child and the

woman is unprepared for “diapers and more diapers” and the washing machine overflows

with the “baby screaming,” while she is trying to mop up water (12). She is crying and

Cheryl Wiltse 18

desperate, but all her new husband has to say is: “How quickly you crack” (12). Mentally,

she repeats that she “was a long time coming to him, it was a difficult journey” (12). She

does not understand his lack of sympathy, until she realizes the other women he knows.

His mother has worked in a prison camp as the livestock specialist. She writes him a

humorous letter that she was attacked by the guard dogs because they did not recognize

her, but on the positive side the hospital has clean sheets. The dogs tore her flesh and she

jokes about it. Another of his mother’s friends has been interrogated so violently that she

has broken vertebra which she cinches up with a corset, always looking “elegant and

erect” (13). These are the women that her husband is used to and she is expected to be

like them. For her, love does not complain. With Voice Two, she marries because she

feels sorry for men – she believes them all so needy and lonely. She says, “Where’s the

joy?” (16). Her father is a military man during the time of Stalin and as such the family’s

living environments are camps, some prison camps. As a child, when she and her siblings

would see something terrible, like a prisoner cut off his own hand, her mother “found

[them] and led [them] away” (19). The woman never intends to marry, and admits she

“didn’t pick a very good husband” (19). Her first husband has been a drinker and smoker.

He claims that “I’ll fall part” without her (19). He is so persistent that they do marry, but

returning to drink, she divorces him. She again marries, but he is a man she meets on a

vacation to Sochi. For six months, he follows her around like a puppy, phones her, courts

her. He is a gentle soul who is tired of being alone and she feels sorry for him. She

ponders, “Maybe that’s love?” (25). For her, love nurtures and compromises. With Voice

Three, her first marriage is based strictly on sex. They fight, make love, cry, and make

love again, but emotionally she does not need him. When she ends the relationship, her

Cheryl Wiltse 19

husband is bewildered and begs her to stay. Although pregnant, she leaves anyway. With

her child, a reliable job, and freedom, the woman is satisfied with her life. Yet, the Fates

are not finished with her. She meets an older man while at the seaside on vacation. He

“came walking along, just a man, very ordinary-looking, not young” (29). Becoming a

couple, they get questions like “Is he your grandfather? Is he your father?” (30). He is

needy and she says, “A Russian woman is ready to suffer: what else can she do” (30).

They marry and she does fall in love. For some reason, he eats all the bread in the house,

“any amount” (31). She learns that he has been in a prison camp as an enemy of the

people for twelve years. He is tortured “with a burning light,” not allowed to “sleep for

days on end,” and the guards steal his “bread rations” (31, 40). At one point he is

“covered in boils drenched in pus, laying on bare boards in the winter (37). The guards

comment in amazement, “That one [is] alive” (37). Gleb, her husband, later writes in his

journal: “Our men are martyrs, they’ve all suffered some trauma – either in the war or in

camp” (32). His wife says Russian women think a “man is part hero and part child. She is

his rescuer” (32). Although a nurse, nanny, and lover, she does love him, deeply love

him. She gives him happiness that he had never known before. However, the happiness is

short lived. Gleb is stricken with cancer and she holds his hand until the end, realizing “I

was happy with Gleb. Yes, it was hard work, but I’m happy, I’m proud that I was able to

do that work” (42). For her, love is work, but one that brings the greatest joy.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and

Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981. Bakhtin’s The Dialogic

Imagination offered theories of how to analyze the epic versus the novel, the prehistory

of novelistic discourse, the forms of time and of the chronotope, and discourse in the

Cheryl Wiltse 20

novel. It is a very energetic endeavor. Born into the gentry, Bakhtin received an excellent

education and used obscure works to illustrate his ideas. His main focus was language:

that discourse had a unique operation and that it was not static. He also showed that

novels have unique organizing principles. For example, he said at the heart of language

there are two forces (centrifugal and centripetal): one keeping things apart and the other

making things cohere. Language was also socio-ideological, “belonging to professions, to

genres, to generations,” etc. (xix). The novel genre was difficult to define, but Bakhtin

stated that it is a “consciously structured hybrid of language” (xxix). However, the novel

had a new relationship to language than other genres. Amazingly, his definition of the

novel genre was capable of comprehending classical texts all the way to Don Quixote.

Lastly, he asserted that people cannot apply traditional stylistic patterns to the novel

because they will not work. He claimed that language was always changing and growing,

and hence, it was alive, always “becoming.” In addition, he offered new words and

phrases for understanding his theory. For instance, he used the word “heteroglossia,”

meaning the function in an utterance where the speaker selects the “other’s” words to aid

understanding. Or, he also stressed the “chronotope,” an examination of the intersection

of time and space. Bakhtin was unique in that he recognized the “immense plurality of

experience more than anything else [and it] distinguishes Bakhtin from other moderns

who have been obsessed with language” (xx).

Bakhtin, M. M. “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings

from Classical Times to the Present. Translated by Ladislaw Matejka and I. R. Titunik.

Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 924-963. Bizzell and

Herzberg have selected important excerpts from Marxism and the Philosophy of

Cheryl Wiltse 21

Language and The Problem of Speech Genres. In the first selection, Bakhtin states that

ideology is a product of reality (natural or social). For example, a statue reflects the

society that created it. Such artifacts are “signs,” and the viewer gives it meaning. For

instance, “bread and wine become religious symbols in the Christian sacrament of

communion” (928). In that sense, bread and wine represent a certain reality as well as

being a form of reality by themselves. The word is “the purest and most sensitive medium

of social intercourse” (931). Words become utterances “constructed between two socially

organized persons” (932). Thus, a “word is a bridge thrown” between one person and

another (933). In addition, the social situation and its social participants determine the

“form and style” (933). The social situation dictates “which term, which metaphor, and

which form may develop in an utterance” (935). So, Bakhtin is saying that the social

situation is loaded with meaning on multiple levels.

Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Eds.

Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1986. This book is a collection of

essays by Bahktin: “Response to a Question,” “The Bildungsroman,” “The Problem of

Speech Genres,” “The Problem of the Text,” Notes Made in 1970-71,” and “Toward a

Methodology for the Human Sciences.” To begin, Bakhtin sets out types of

bildungsroman: the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, the biographical novel, and the

novel of human emergence. Bakhtin says that the bildungsroman novel displays “the

image of man in the process of becoming” (19). To Bakhtin, other novels have a ready-

made hero that does not change over time. Additionally, the bildungsroman is a novel of

education, where man becomes a new type of human being. For example, often novels

have a cyclical time where the development of man are phases in nature. By cyclical

Cheryl Wiltse 22

time, Bakhtin means time of year, agricultural cycles, or age of man. Or, cyclical time

can shift from ages of man to generations, which moves from “cyclical time” to

historical. Besides, physical growth, the hero can take a path from youthful idealism to

skepticism and resignation. He further says that the bildungsroman is related to “the early

biographical novel of emergence” (24). For instance, he mentions Fielding’s Tom Jones,

with the main character learning difficult lessons over time. Besides man changing,

Bakhtin has a unique understanding of what most would consider “fixed” things. For

instance, he sees a mountain as a dynamic object. Although to the eye, it looks immobile.

In fact, the mountain chain is “under the influence of various factors” (29). He says a

mountain “constantly pulsates” (29). What he means is that mountains are subjected to

erosion/eruption and as such do change in appearance and orientation. There is also what

Bakhtin calls “organic time.” That is when the sun rises or sets. With sunset, work stops

and people return home or the church bell rings and people say rosaries. He refers to

these activities as “everyday time.” However, organic time is inseparable from everyday

time. So, life is described and measured by time: things that happen at certain times and

within those events are signs of historic time like tree growth. There are connections

between the past and the living present (the chronotope). Historical time is “creative”

since it has an effect on the present and may even determine the future. Bakhtin then

turns to folklore as a human yardstick of time. He claims that “folklore humanizes and

intensifies one’s native space” (52). Land is “consecrated by legend, song, and ballad”

(53). Throughout history, “each spring, hillock, grove, and bend in the coastline had its

own legend, its own memories, its own events and its own heroes” (52-53). As one can

Cheryl Wiltse 23

see, Bakhtin’s theory of the novel is very complex but useful for understanding the way it

functions in time and space.

Berney, Lou. “Genre Is Not a Four-Letter Word: Satisfying and Subverting Reader

Expectations.” The Journal of the South Central Modern Language Association, vol. 34,

no. 2, Summer2017, pp. 6-14. EBSCOhost. Berney, a seasoned writer, has been invited to

speak to an audience of academics about the crime/mystery novel. He says, as a writer it

is crucial to understand the conventions and expectations of one’s chosen genre,

including the expectations of the audience. Bad fiction disregards the anticipations of the

audience and good fiction satisfies those expectations, but in a fresh and surprising way.

A good writer knows what is usual about the genre, but he consciously thinks: “What do I

have to preserve, what can I ditch, and what can I monkey around with?” (9). However,

Berney is not one to follow the “rules of a genre,” so he pushes the limits to see what he

can get away with and what he cannot. He acknowledges that “there are certain

indispensable elements specific to each particular genre, but as the Buddha says, there are

many paths to the center” (10). For him, storytelling is honoring the important part of

expectation (the what) while creating something fresh and new (the how).

Secondary Sources:

Alter, Alexandra. “Belarussian Voice of Survivors Captures Nobel in Literature. New York

Times, 9 Oct. 2015. P. A1(L), Biography in Context. Alter notes that Alexievich is the

fourteenth woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the few to be honored

for nonfiction. Alexievich’s work falls into the “literary tradition of deeply reported

narrative nonfiction” that follows the style of the novel. Earlier practitioners in this style

are titans like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion. The Nobel is awarded

Cheryl Wiltse 24

for a “writer’s entire body of work” and recently has been given to European writers not

familiar to most Americans. In early years, Alexievich was searching for a style “that

would allow her to capture the lives and voices of the individuals at the center of historic

events.” She wants to record history but with a focus on “human feelings.” Alexievich

also bucks the status quo by writing about “contentious elements of Soviet history” and

has paid the price for it. She has been labeled a “traitor, as unpatriotic.” As the title Zinky

Boys suggests, she has written about the young, dead Russian soldiers that were shipped

home in zinc coffins. She has been demonized for the book but did not back down.

Because of her honest rendering of Belarus history, she leaves the country and has lived

in Italy, France, Germany, and Sweden. In an interview on German TV, she says that she

hoped the “international attention would give her a degree of protection in Belarus”

because freedom of the press does not exist. Currently, there are only four of her books

available in translation. However, her most ambitious book to date has been just released,

Secondhand Time. It is an oral history that covers the 1990s to 2012, recording Russians

who lived through “the fall of the Soviet Union.” It is ironic, or deliberately intended, that

her award should be presented just as “Russia is once again flexing its military muscles.”

Past Russian Nobel Prize laureates have received their “awards in exile” or “were denied

a visa to attend the Stockholm ceremony.” President Vladimir Putin’s reaction to

Alexievich has been a dismissal of her accomplishments and a blatant claim that

“Svetlana just doesn’t have enough information to offer a clear evaluation of what is

happening . . . .” Of course, Putin is one of the few who can compete with a Noble

laureate in the media, but he will surely be a loser because she will always have the last

word.

Cheryl Wiltse 25

Chemaly, Soraya. "Today’s Nobel Prize in Literature Is a Win for Humanity." Time.Com.

09 Oct. 2015. EBSCOhost. Chemaly points out the dismissal of women’s words that

trickles through all of western society. She begins with the fact that Svetlana Alexievich

was the 14th woman to win the Nobel Prize out of 111 winners. It is evident that society

still values the narratives of men over women. Chemaly claims that the continuance to

prefer male “speak” over woman creates a “dangerous epistemological distortion” in

“what it means to be human.” By ignoring women’s experiences and stories allows for

sustained “gendered violence and injustice.” In order for women to be taken seriously in

publishing, they have used male synonyms or gender-neutral names. Examples Chemaly

offers are J. K. Rowling, the Bronte sisters (Bell brothers), Louisa May Alcott (B. A.

Evans), Harper Lee (Nelle Harper Lee), Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), and Alice

Bradley Sheldon (James Tiptree). This bias, of course, extends to awards for writing such

as, the Pulitzer, Man Booker, National Book Critics’ Circle, and more. This is not a “war

of the sexes,” but there is an implicit bias in society. The irony is that literary fiction

remains dominated by male writers, yet their works are mostly read by women and it is

accepted that the male voices will accurately represent both genders. This also means that

men, particularly white men, are the majority of authors for children’s books, board

games, television programs, and video games. As a result, children of color can suffer

because this media does not validate their life experiences. The propensity to value men’s

words over women’s causes misunderstanding and silences when it comes to “sexual

harassment, menstruation, intimate partner violence, rape, menopause,” and much more.

With Alexievich’s Nobel win society can easily think that women are receiving equal

recognition, but that is not true. Research demonstrates that when as little as 17% of a

Cheryl Wiltse 26

crowd is female, people think the gender split is 50/50. While there is no place to lay

blame, literary and media institutions must recognize the problem and become part of the

solution.

Grey, Tobias. “Why Russia Still Longs for a Tsar; Svetlana Alexievich’s Powerful Soviet Oral

History “Secondhand Time” Offers a Unique Window into the Fall of the USSR.”

Newsweek, 17 June 2016. Biography in Context. Alexievich focuses on ordinary people,

from “construction workers in Siberia to helicopter pilots in the Ukraine.” She has been

compared to respected historians such as Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn. As a 68-year-

old journalist, she is the first nonfiction writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature since

Winston Churchill in 1953. Her first five books consist of what she calls “The History of

the Red Man.” Her most recent publication, Secondhand Time, took over ten years to

complete and has a prophetic vision of the future of Russia. An interviewee in the book is

an official from the Kremlin who wanted to remain anonymous. He says many Russians

have “a tsarist mentality.” He believes that Russians need a “general secretary or a

president, either way it has to be a tsar.” Russia simply has not accepted democracy.

Although Putin is not popular outside of Russia, even Alexievich does not demonize him.

In fact, within Russia, Putin is liked more than hated. Secondhand Time focuses on

“Russia’s older generation . . . [that] yearn for the days when the dictator [Stalin] ruled

the Soviet Union.” The reason for a nostalgia look back at Stalin is because of the

miserable 1990s and capitalism. Was Russia going to remain strong or transition into a

place” where decent people can live?” Ultimately, the people chose “strong.” Yet,

Gorbachev’s relaxing of governmental controls, allowed for old tensions to resurface,

particularly between the Muslim and Christian factions. Where people had lived

Cheryl Wiltse 27

peacefully for decades, turned into civil war. Places like Tajikistan, Abkhazia, and Baku

erupted into chaos. Alexievich says such violence shows that “our politicians cannot

respond to the challenges of the times.” Ironicially, Alexievich’s books are not allowed to

be published in her own home country of Belarus. President Alexander Lukashenko

initially congratulated Alexievich her Nobel win, but two days later retracted the

statement and called her “a slander of Russia.” Her first book, War’s Unwomanly Face,

“was held by the censors for two years” before allowing it to be published. She received a

letter of congratulations from Mikhail Gorbachev and credits him for “creating a climate

of openness that allowed” for her work. Further, her work is likened to a “mosaic of

voices, both complementary and dissenting.” Surprisingly, she never writes questions in

advance for her interviews. Instead, she is happy to let her subjects “ramble on.” There is

often typical Russian gallows humor as well, but her history concentrates on ordinary

people’s everyday lives, where most histories only look at major events.

Eidelman, Tamara. "Ignoble Reactions." Russian Life, vol. 59, no. 1, Jan/Feb2016, p. 64.

EBSCOhost. Eidelman writes of the surprising backlash leveled against Alexievich and

the Nobel Committee after her win in 2015. Alexievich’s colleagues and others have

complained that her works are not literature. Yet, these critics are out of touch with how

contemporary literature has evolved and how new genres have emerged. They see

Alexievich’s work as just a collection of interviews, missing the “masterful collage” of

voices and “authorial perspective” that transforms her work into great literature. Some

complain that the prize was politically motivated because she does not like Putin,

president of Russia, or Lukashenko, president of Belarus, in a post-perestroika world. The

Nobel Committee has even been accused of trying to humiliate Russia for the Sochi

Cheryl Wiltse 28

Olympics and the annexation of Crimea. Of course, the question is: “What on earth does

the Nobel Committee have to do with these events?” (64). Eidelman believes all the

ruckus boils down to envy and people in the industry questioning why they did not win.

As a final note, Eidelman adeptly points out that Alexievich’s work captures the “spirit of

humanism” and offers “an insightful compassion towards people, in keeping with

Russian literature’s greatest traditions” (64).

“The Enlightening Power of a Woman’s Voice.” Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada] 26 Oct. 2015,

p. A14, Biography in Context. Alexievich likes to write about events that few have ever

recorded. It has always been understood that war was “a man’s business.” However, all

that people know about war has been told from a male perspective. So, Alexievich has

sought out Russian women who experienced WWII as nurses, cooks, soldiers, and more.

The result was her book War’s Unwomanly Face. When asked, women recounted the

“oft-repeated male story . . . denying [their] own experience.” Alexievich says she is “an

ear, not a pen.” She listens to the private stories of suffering and triumph, exposing them

to the world. Her recent award sent a powerful message “about the importance of the

female perspective in the public sphere.” Her books have been translated into 20

languages “with millions in circulation.” She has even put her celebrity to use by

criticizing the Russian annexation of Crimea. Alexievich’s works are not easy reads.

They have been called “dreadful masterpieces” because of the matter of fact presentations

of horrific events. Yet, her work is honest and enriches people’s thinking about difficult

times.

Gessen, Masha. "The Memory Keeper." New Yorker, vol. 91, no. 33, 26 Oct. 2015, pp. 36- 41.

EBSCOhost. Gessen notes that Alexievich is the first to be awarded the Nobel Prize

Cheryl Wiltse 29

for writing about living people, entirely through interviews. Her books deal with

“historical crises – the Second World War, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the nuclear

disaster at Chernobyl, and the collapse of the Soviet Union – through the voices of

ordinary individuals” (36). Theirs are oral histories full of anguish, “so raw that is can

stretch both credulity and the reader’s tolerance for pain” (36). Alexievich once said that

people live with a veneer of banality and her job is to rip through that. The Permanent

Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, says Alexievich’s interviews have

created a new genre, “a history of emotions – a history of the soul” (36). In other words,

she has shaped a new genre in form and content. Nevertheless, typical of past Russian

Nobel laureates, Alexievich’s work is demeaned. With Vladimir Putin in office, the state

ideology is “anti-democratic, nationalist, and suspicious of voices like Alexievich” (38).

She receives as much hate mail from Russians as she receives praise from other parts of

the world. There are personal attacks too, calling her Jewish and lesbian. She is not

Jewish and her personal life is unknown. Surprisingly, Alexievich comes from a small

country, Belarus, with a population fewer than ten million. However, it is probably the

most “Soviet” of the fifteen post-Soviet countries with a state-controlled economy and

suppression of free speech. Smuggled in from Russia, her first books sold on the black

market in Belarus. After working for a newspaper, writing poetry, plays, and screenplays,

Alexievich wants to create a new text. She drops the author’s voice and the typical

chronologies and circumstances of people’s histories. Alexievich believes that she must

preserve every word, every utterance, every silence. “It matters how they [interviewees]

place words next to each other,” so she records all meetings (39). She wants to return to

the voices she heard as a child, when village women would gather and tell stories of

Cheryl Wiltse 30

World War II. She focuses on women because they speak of feelings, also there are few

male survivors of WWII and they speak only of events. The book evolves into “War Has

Not a Woman’s Face.” Mikhail Gorbachev actually read it and uses a portion in a speech.

This is the very brief time of glasnost that ushered in a “new openness in literary and

intellectual life” (38). Her second book, “The Last Witnesses,” deals with people who

had experienced WWI as children. Because of perestroika, it is now possible to question

the myths and policies of the old Soviet state. For her third book, “Zinky Boys,”

Alexievich travels to Afghanistan, “where the Soviet Union has been fighting Afghan

rebels and the Mujahideen since 1979” (38). She is shocked by the behavior of the

soldiers: laughing, drinking, and trading. They want to bring home souvenirs to their

mothers. With no money, they trade bullets for trinkets, bullets that will be used against

them the next day. Yet, “Voices from Chernobyl,” fourth in the Red man cycle (Red man

being a Soviet person), is the easiest to write. Nothing like that disaster has every

happened before, so people had nothing to hide, no state sentiment to protect. Her fifth

and final work in that series is “Second-Hand Time,” capturing “post-Soviet ethnic wars,

the legacy of the Gulag, and other aspects of the Soviet experience” (40). Alexievich ends

by saying, “We are surrounded by victims. Who did it all to them?” (41).

Kalugin, Dmitri. "Soviet Theories of Biography and the Aesthetics of Personality."

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3, Summer2015, pp. 343-362.

EBSCOhost. For Kalugin, biography is like “a work of art. It obeys the prescriptions of

genre” but also is “a unique artifact created by an individual author” (344). Kalugin

attempts to explain the evolution of over three centuries of Soviet theories of biography

as a genre. One of the first eloquent statements about biography is made by Pierre

Cheryl Wiltse 31

Bourdieu. He understands a person’s life as a “production of narrative,” stories about the

self. What is not readily visible is how social institutions “generate pre-determined forms

of human existence” (344). Soviet diaries and memoirs acknowledge particular

influences such as approved “dominant state-sponsored forms of discourse” (344). For

example, in the 18th century, there really are not any biographies, as are known today,

because of state politics. By the 19th century, biographies were characterized by rigid

state censorship and decorum, often dealing with the lives of generals and bureaucrats.

Early 20th century biographies feature “Soviet party functionaries, war heroes, and heroes

of labor” (345). So, human life as text is represented two ways: as a “story about a

member of the socially proximate group” versus the general public as “a group of

consumers of cultural production” (345). Biography is slow to evolve in Russia due to

state control. In 1808, Aleksei F. Merzliakov defines biography by saying: “the

biographer should select such persons whose life by itself is of interest [zanimatel’na]

and rich in events, those who have drawn universal attention either by their social station

or their distinguished merits . . . “ (346). By the middle of the 19th century, there is a

reversal in the philosophy of biography, emphasizing a person’s inner life over his

individual deeds. This particular inner life is call “lichnost,” meaning personality. The

rise of the biography is also made possible because of Russian intellectuals who saw

lichnost (the personality) “as an elusive, peculiar principle, inherent in the human being

that ties” to the universal and the private (348). The biography becomes an inner

exploration. Moreover, in Russia, a person’s biography is valued because it stresses the

common life and the communality in direct opposition to the individuality in the West

(349). With the introduction of the 20th century Russian Formalists writers admit that

Cheryl Wiltse 32

biography fails “to capture human individuality,” so biographical texts become a

contradiction in that they try to “rationalize an essence that necessarily rejects

rationalization,” because of its “rich and complex” nature (350). Later in the century,

Formalists begin to focus on literary merits. For example, they pose the question: “Is a

poet’s biography necessary for understanding [his] creation?” (351). As a result, a

person’s life is important only because of its ties to literature. Their ultimate goal is “to

detect a literary quality in texts that were not previously seen as literary” (351). This new

emphasize on art as an “essential lens for accessing the author’s life,” devalues previous

texts like “diaries, letters, and memoirs” (352). Such biographies are relegated to the “ill-

defined domain of the history of culture” (352). Eventually, there is a movement to look

at marginalized genres of biography; however, the movement did not try to elevate

“memoirs, diaries, or correspondence to the status of literature” (353). Instead, there is an

attempt to find “literariness” within them. A new understanding of personality as it

relates to biography emerges: “the production of one’s own character . . . is thus revealed

as a form of social creativity . . . (353). This appreciation of the everyman’s form of

journal pushes personality into “the foreground of research in literary studies” (354). In

the end, although personality can be described in relationship to history or performed

roles, it ultimately defies “all interpretations that seek to reduce its status . . . . “ (356).

Lätheenmäki, Mika. "On Meaning and Understanding: A Dialogical Approach." Dialogism:

An International Journal of Bakhtin Studies, no. 1, Apr. 1998, p. 74-91. EBSCOhost.

Latheenmaki states that past concepts about the act of communication in linguistics, like

Saussure’s, are inadequate. The ideas of dialogue and dialogism, which are complex and

multifaceted, have taken the place of “code models.” Dialogism is likened to the “study

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of human behavior and action” with its “double-voicedness, intertextuality, alien words,

parody and so on” (75). Dialogism provides new tools to understand and explain “verbal

and social interaction” (76). Previous models for comprehending language ignored the

speaker’s contribution to meaning as well as the listener’s role. Dialogism sees verbal

interaction as a form of social interaction, so communication must be a mutual goal

between the speaker and the listener. Past code models are rigid, claiming that

communication was a “mechanical transmission of information” (77). In other words, the

speaker (active) “encodes” his message into a “linguistic form” that the listener and he

share, so the listener (passive) does nothing but receive the material. The dialogical view

suggests many roles in communication, as a “complex whole” (77). Dialogism stresses

context as not “existing prior to, or outside of utterance” (78). As a result, verbal

interaction is “embedded in social life” and cannot be separated from it. For example,

listening and answering are interconnected because of the “future reaction of the listener”

(78). Because of the intertextuality, there is a give and take of understanding between the

speaker and listener. Bakhtin claims there even are two types of meaning: meaning and

sense. For him, meaning is the “potential linguistic expression in an utterance,” where

sense is the “actual meaning in a given context” (79). However, meaning and sense are

“intertwined” to create real communication. Previously, studies assume that words,

sentences, and text have a literal meaning, a “ready-made fixed meaning” (80). Now, it is

believed that communication is a give and take relationship. For Bakhtin, meaning

happens in “concrete social contexts” and is not ready-made. A speaker cannot talk about

the meaning of words in an abstract way. Instead, words must be anchored to things and

occasions for understanding to happen. In order to explain the meaning of words or

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phrases, the speaker must provide different uses of the word/phrase to convey

understanding. So, the meaning assigned to words/phrases are conditional by how others

have used them. Latheenmaki closes by saying that dialogism is not against other

approaches to linguistics, instead it enhances the discussion of how language works.

Lawson, James. "Chronotope, Story, and Historical Geography: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Space-

Time of Narratives." Antipode, vol. 43, no. 2, Mar. 2011, pp. 384-412. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00853.x. Lawson claims that narrative is a distinct and

unique way of knowing, through the use of Bakhtin’s chronotope. The chronotope is first

presented by Einstein as a time-space configuration. However, Bakhtin applies the

chronotope to Dostevsky’s work and it becomes a note-worth concept independent of

physics. The chronotope is a starting point for studying real encounters and conflicts

through the narrative. The chronotope also links the multiple voices in the narrative. It

provides a framework and a bridge for understanding. For many researchers and writers,

the narrative is a unique way of building knowledge. However, the chronotope is not just

an encounter of a character in time and space. It is a conscious creation with “otherwise-

hidden roots of encounter and conflict: the multiple, overlapping chronotopes of real-

world processes, activities, and developments” (386). As a form of writing, the narrative

works in history and fiction as a vehicle to convey meaning, and there are clear

expectations of each type of writing for the audience. A story is always told through a

narration, and is “the real-world process of story-telling” (387). The chronotopes “of

narration—the time and space for the telling—are shaped by physical or

cultural/linguistic distancing and shaping” (387). There are three elements that they

affect: the audience, the teller, and the story. For example, in a novel, a fundamental

Cheryl Wiltse 35

element is the presence of many voices, the polyphony – the multiple voices that

represent the real world. Within those voices will always be conflict, a dialogical

interaction, where meaning is made. Chronotopes also can be fixed or dynamic.

Examples of “fixed” would be a road that “aligns time directly with distance,” but a

doorway could represent a “critical turning point in the plot” (389). “Dynamic” could

deal with a person whose character traits do not change throughout the entire narrative,

like James Bond. Also, “the chronotopic bridge explains how real-world space-time

inform the text” (389). “For instance, the novel depends on spies, detectives, or servants

as mediating figures to gain knowledge in a plausible way about events that occur behind

closed doors” (389). Further, there are truths available only through narrative. For

example, historians must construct a plot, a framework for historic events. Some argue

that historians uncover plots. Regardless, there is a plot to hang the chronological events

that took place. When a historian creates a plot, his “narrative embraces both history and

fiction; all narrative offers something unique, and what it offers enhances historical

explanation” (392). Creating a flow of events requires a creative act that is unique to the

narrative. Some argue that histories as a genre are unreliable and unscientific because

they are created by writers. Other says that histories must be created as a fixed thing in

order to have meaningful discourse. Bakhtin believes the truth of a narrative “is precisely

what is repeatable and constant in it” (393). As such, a narrative must be a linear

construction with the plot as a map. These narratives are interwoven to illuminate events.

In order to hold an audience’s interest, these narratives include specific devices:

“flashbacks, flash-forwards, varying the pace, rhythm, and direction of spatial

displacements” (394).

Cheryl Wiltse 36

Morson, Gary Saul. "Bakhtin and the Present Moment." American Scholar, vol. 60, no. 2,

Spring91, p. 201-222. EBSCOhost. Morson tackles Bakhtin’s understanding and

appreciation of the genre of the novel. Morson begins by refuting past theorists

mistakenly thinking that Bakhtin was a Marxist. Just because Bakhtin was alive during a

Marx’s time period, did not make him a Marxist. Bakhtin refuses to “accept either a

class-based account of morality” and did not find value in such literary characters (203).

Marxist works have set characteristics and Bakhtin states that great works exceed all

categorization, “casual or genetic explanations” (203). Literary works cannot be divorces

of society or history, but they are not completely defined by them either. Bakhtin stresses

the importance of dialogue versus Marxist dialectics. Dialogue is open-ended and

happens among “real, living people,” where dialectics is a “process of thesis, antithesis,

and synthesis” and can happen “within a single consciousness” (204). Bakhtin states,

“Take a dialogue and remove the voices . . ., remove the intonations . . . , carve out

abstract concepts and judgements from living words and responses, then cram everything

into one abstract consciousness—and that’s how you get dialectics” (204). Morson

continues by saying that Bakhtin’s work does not fit into any “Current Literary Theory”

either. Bakhtin rejects such labeling and existing literary theory, calling them

“theoretism.” What he means by theoretism is any thinking that tries to reduce human

actions into a “system governed by a set of rules,” that one could glean a set of norms

from and deny “that anything of significance has been left out of the process” (205).

Bakhtin believes that these systems have three basic parts: Laws or rules, evidence that

confirms those rules, and a little leftover stuff that does not apply to the rules. For

example, Saussurean linguistics divides language into a “system of rules (langue)” and

Cheryl Wiltse 37

evidence of the rules in practice (parole), declaring everything else is “too formless . . .

for serious investigation” (206). Bakhtin see the same patterns in Freudianism and

Marxism. He says, it is a misunderstanding of the “proper role of the humanities” (206).

These great classifications of language reduce art to “transcription,” mere “generalized

description by a set of impersonal laws” (206). Real life (or a depiction of real life in art)

defies rules or regulations. At any particular moment, one must recognize that life and

personal decisions are unique and “unrepeatable.” That concept leads Morson to

Bakhtin’s idea of creativity. How can there be creativity if great systems reduce the

creative acts to a set of rules and circumstances that lead to the operation of the rules?

These systems fail to acknowledge the “potential for the unforeseen and the weight of

real, irreducible significance” (207). For example, ethics consumes a great deal of

Bakhtin’s intellectual life. He says, ethical choices cannot be decided in advance on the

basis of some transcription of the rules. Nothing substitutes for presence. The

“unforeseeable particularities are too important and the consequences of a wrong decision

too terrible for [anyone] to abdicate choice to a set of abstract and easily describable

rules” (207). Applying a system of rules to the psyche like Freudian or Pavlovian is also

problematic. For Bakhtin, these systems “deny freedom, responsibility, and creativity”

(208). Such approaches “leave no place for everything that constitutes what he called the

living core of personality” (208). As art forms, Bakhtin feels the novel captures the

“living core” best, the “vision of people as freely responding to complex . . .

circumstances” (208). Bakhtin likes Dostoevsky best because he was “the writer who

most palpably and realistically captured the very feel of human freedom” (213). The

brilliance of Dostoevsky’s characters is their depth of consciousness, not their Freudian

Cheryl Wiltse 38

unconsciousness. With Freud, behavior is reduced to “conditions and diseases rather than

moral responsible choices” (214). Without consciousness (self-awareness), there is not

the burden of responsibility. So, human freedom is full of choices and that freedom and

those choices give man’s character “unfinalizability” (214). People grow and change

constantly, regardless of circumstance or because of circumstance. It is precisely this

unpredictability that makes up the “genuine life of personality” (214). For Bakhtin, “to

treat someone as human is to treat him as capable of surprise;” he is always “becoming”

(215).

Palattella, John. "Searching for a Language." Nation, vol. 303, no. 5/6, 8/1/2016, pp. 27-30.

EBSCOhost. In an interviewed of Svetlana Alexievich in August of 2016, Palattella

focuses on the “Red Man Cycle,” collectively known as her first five books. Palattella

calls her new genre “sui generis, blending the forces of fact with the capaciousness of

fiction to create a new, vital literary compound” (27). Alexievich calls herself a human

ear. She says that she reads voices. Following in her father’s footsteps, after seven years

as a journalist in the Soviet Union, she says that it is too constrictive, lots of censorship.

As a journalist and listener, Alexievich believes that the ordinary person’s story should

take center stage and that there needs to be new ways to talk about his/her experiences.

They are not heroes or great leaders, but they do expand human knowledge. Rather than

focusing on factual tidbits, Alexievich omits them. She concentrates on emotions. She

says, “’For me, the history of human emotions is an alternative kind of history. It’s

separate from big history, concerns the kind of things that history proper won’t deign to

touch’” (28). Alexievich gets to the heart of an experience. She knows what people in the

Soviet are expected to say “the script,” but she manages to get people to say what they

Cheryl Wiltse 39

really saw and felt. However, she believes that truth is splintered. Each person has his/her

own truth. It is only by listening to everyone that society can learn what really happened.

Patterson, David. "Mikhail Bakhtin and the Dialogical Dimensions of the Novel." Journal of

Aesthetics & Art Criticism, vol. 44, no. 2, Dec. 1985, p. 131-139. EBSCOhost. Patterson

analyzes Bakhtin’s discussion on the “dialogical interaction with in the novel” (131).

Bakhtin says as reading the novel changes the reader, or the reader’s understanding of the

world, the reader also changes the meaning found in the novel. The novel as an artifact

has a dynamic presence, changing infinitely. The novel is made up “of a combination of

discourses and the responses to those discourses” (131). The language that is used in a

novel, is a particular way of seeing the world. Language makes up the “ideologeme,” a

worldview, “a manner of viewing, evaluating, and representing the world—thus a

primary ingredient of novelistic discourse” (132). The novel is the meeting place between

two or more consciousnesses. As such, it is the juncture where space and time intersect—

“the point where two consciousnesses encounter one another” (132). That idea is the

chronotope. At the moment of the chronotope, there is the encounter between the word

and alien word. “This encounter . . . gives life to discourse and to the word” (132). If the

discourse in a novel is dialogical, then it is transformational. One would also have to

question the language used. If there is a multiplicity of discourse, then the text is a form

of polyglossia—polyglossia makes the experiences that happen in a novel possible.

“Polyglossia introduces to language a process of speaking and response and makes

discourse responsive to the discourse of the other” (133). Discourse comes alive because

of familiar language and language of the alien, transforming one another. When

discourses collide and are understood, consciousness is free to move into new meaning.

Cheryl Wiltse 40

“It opens up new discourse and thus to the creation of new meaning,” or for Bakhtin the

“Creative Act” (133). The inappropriate word makes new meaning possible, because of it

is cynical frankness, unconventional mask, or crude etiquette. “The generation of truth [a

novel’s truth or a reader’s truth] or the creation of meaning is rooted in the inappropriate

word” (134). The alien inappropriate word collides with a reader’s own understanding or

truth, setting “into motion the movement of dialogue” (134). Thus consciousness is not a

static state – it is a dynamic activity, “a process of listening and response” (135). So if

consciousness is always evolving, then the “fundamental aspects of the polyphonic

novel” are ever evolving too (135). Polyphonic “has come to define the novel in all its

dialogical dimensions” (135). When thinking of the idea of multi-voiced, there is the

speaker/listener and the author/reader. However, for Bakhtin there is a third position that

relates to the openendedness of dialogical discourse and dialogical truth. Between the

speaker/listener and author/reader there is an understanding of meaning. Yet, there could

be a third position that leaves the possibility of still another meaning, an unrealized,

unfinalized truth yet to be revealed. So, the truth in the novel, or understanding/meaning

in the novel, is always becoming. The truth is the multi-valence of potential meanings

between the meetings of author/reader, so there can never be a “final, definitive response

to the novel” (136). The novel and its truth/meaning is a language of collusions.

"Svetlana Alexievich." Contemporary Authors Online. Gale, 2015. Biography in Context.

Svetlana Alexievich is the fourteenth woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in

October of 2015. The Swedish Academy secretary Sara Danius calls Alexievich’s style a

type of “polyphonic writing” that captures the suffering and courage of modern times.

Few Nobel Prizes have been given for nonfiction and none for interviews of living

Cheryl Wiltse 41

people. Setting out to tell the stories of actual people, Alexievich records the taboo

memoirs of survivors from WWII, Afghanistan, and Chernobyl. She uses first-person

testimonies and weaves them into haunting compilations.

“Svetlana Alexievich.” Newsmakers, vol. 1, Gale. 2016. Biography in Context. Alexievich was

born in Stanlislavov, Ukraine, but her family moved to Belarus when she was a young

child. Her parents were teachers that gave her a love for learning. Alexievich spent warm

summer nights listening to war stories from Soviet widows. Later, Alexievich worked as

a boarding school attendant, a teacher in a rural classroom, and a trainee at a newspaper,

to accure the two year minimum work experience required for college admission. In

1972, she received her degree in journalism and began working at newspapers in Brest

and Minsk. Her first novel, I Was Leaving the Village, was rejected for publication by the

government for being too critical of the Soviet Union. She was determined to let the

witnesses of Soviet atrocities speak. Because of her interviewing process, Alexievich

soon realized that she needed a way to record the conversations. However, it would take

three month’s salary to buy a tape recorder, and she would again struggle with

censorship. In 1985, War’s Unwomanly Face was finally published and The Last

Witnesses: A Hundred of Unchildlike Lullabies quickly followed. Alexievich actually

went to Kabul, Afghanistan, to enhance her compilation of Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices

from the Afghanistan War (1990). Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear

Disaster (1997) got Alexievich immediate critical acclaim. It chronicled the worst

nuclear disaster in peacetime. Yet, the criticism and harassment became too much, so

Alexievich left Belarus in 2000. She lived in several European cities such as Berlin and

Paris, but she finally returned home in 2011. Alexievich has an unconventional writing

Cheryl Wiltse 42

style. She said that the famous author Gustave Flaubert’s called himself a “human pen,”

so she must be a “human ear.”

Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Theory and History of Literature,

Vol. 13). Translated by Wlad Godzich, U of Minnesota P, 1984. Todorov complements

Bakhtin on two levels: “that he is the most important Soviet thinker in the human

sciences and the greatest theoretician in the twentieth century” (ix). He takes a broad

brush and looks at Bakhtin’s work in this fashion: Epistemology of the Human Sciences,

Major Options, Theory of Utterance, Intertextuality, History of Literature, and

Philosophical Anthropology. Bakhtin borrows the idea of the chronotope from Einstein

and the natural sciences. It deals with the intersection of time and space. Further, Bakhtin

works on his theory of utterance in the 20s and develops a more sophisticated theory in

the 50s. He revolutionizes Saussure’s idea of utterance and says that there is a difference

between the utterance and a sentence. One has a social context and the other does not

need one. With intertextuality, Bakhtin means that no utterance stands in isolation. There

can be no meaning in an utterance “without relation to other utterances” (60). In the

History of Literature, Bakhtin sets out his theory of discourse in the novel. He begins

with the epic versus the novel. The epic is linear in fashion and the events/heroes are

static, unlike the novel that is dynamic in nature. He moves on to genres, specifically

genres of novels. Bakhtin says that all genres are “socio-historical” (80). A genre is

related to reality by two things: listener and life. It deals with the relationship between the

written work and the world. Basically, genre is a model of the world put forth in text

form.

Ulinich, Anya. “The Souls of Soviet Folk.” Wall Street Journal – Online Edition, 28 May 2016.

Cheryl Wiltse 43

p. 1. EBSCOhost. Ulinich begins with a brief summary of Alexievich’s 1930s

Secondhand Time: of twenty-seven people living in one apartment, of neighbors

becoming informants on neighbors, and of desperate Russians committing suicide. Some

of the narratives are so horrific that heartbreak becomes “second nature.” The stories are

dark and tormented, and there is also the possibility of unreliable narrators. Reflecting

back, “the system [Soviet Union] was butchering people,” but “the people didn’t show

one another much mercy either” (C7). The view of humanity in Secondhand Time is

depressing, hopeless, yet it is also an exploration of the human condition. Alexievich

poses the questions: “What makes us human? Are people good, evil, or neither? What

happens to our humanity when we are put under extreme stress?” (C7). The stories

demonstrate that “everyone is a victim of war” (C7). Alexievich gets countless people to

share their tales and compiles twenty-one years’ worth of interviews (1991 to 2012) to

complete her book. It starts with a simple historical timeline, but it is not long before

readers are unsure of where and when things are taking place or the age the narrators.

Ultimately, the heart of the book reveals how “people’s humanity crumbles under the

pressure to survive” (C7).