Water… He was fascinated by water… He loved lakes, rivers, wells. Especially the sea. He wrote a lot of poems about water. ‘The quiet star has gone white like the water. Now it’s dark.’ Another one: ‘And only water flowing… Silence.’ [A pause.] We don’t go to the sea any more.

These infrequent authorial interventions remind us that what we are reading is the result of as many as 20 interviews with an individual. She records the conversations, has someone else transcribe them, and then works from the transcript, by hand, composing coherent narratives out of hours of conversation. The ellipses which pepper her books serve a dual function, mimicking conversational pauses and also allowing her to bring together fragments into a coherent whole, in what might be described as a montage technique. Occasionally, a chorus of anonymous voices is heard, and the form alters, mirroring the conditions — a demonstration, say — in which she has come across them:

— Bury Lenin already, and without any honours.

— You American lackey! What did you sell out our country for?

— You’re idiots, brothers…

— Yeltsin and his gang robbed us blind. Drink! Prosper! One day, it’ll all come crashing down…

— Are they afraid of telling the people outright that we’re building capitalism? Everyone is prepared to pick up a gun, even my housewife mother.

— You can get a lot done with a bayonet, but sitting on one is uncomfortable.

— I’d like to run over all of those damn bourgeois with a tank!

— Communism was dreamt up by that Jew, Marx…

— There’s only one person who can save us, and that’s Comrade Stalin. If only he’d come back for just two days… he’d have them all shot, and then he can be once again laid to rest.

— And glory be, Dear Lord! I’ll bow down before all of the saints…



Alexievich’s interview technique, which we never see in action, focuses on the mundanity of individual lives. Out of this, a bigger picture, and the bigger questions, emerge. As she explains in her introduction — the only time her voice is heard over more than a few lines — to Second-hand Time:

I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and attempt to tell a story. Make some small discovery. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. I look at the world as a writer, not strictly an historian. I am fascinated by people…

Since winning the Nobel, becoming the first non-fiction writer to receive the award since Winston Churchill in 1953, Alexievich has overwhelmingly been described as a journalist in the media, a label she rejects. She attended journalism school in her native Belarus, but as a means to an end, to learn how to write. As she told the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen last autumn, “I’ve known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer.” In an interview with Le Figaro, she confirmed this: “Back home, we call it ‘a novel of voices’… It’s not journalism. I felt constrained by the profession. The topics on which I wanted to write, like the mystery of the human soul, like evil, didn’t interest newspapers, and reporting the news bored me.”