Svetlana Alexievich, a 67-year-old dissident writer who was born in Soviet Ukraine and grew up in Belarus, became the first female Russian-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature Thursday. The choice was clearly a political one, as often happens with the prize, and it was understood as such: My first thought when I heard the news was that as far as the Swedish Academy is concerned, the Cold War is back. The Russian opposition journalist Oleg Kashin seemed to concur, writing that the Nobel would make Alexievich’s voice loud enough to rival Putin’s. And in her first public response, Alexievich denounced Russia’s involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, calling it an “occupation” and a “foreign invasion.”

“I love the kind Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world,” she said, “but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, Putin, and Shoigu,” she said. (Beria was a key political figure under Stalin; Shoigu is Russia’s current Minister of Defense.)

Unlike most Nobel laureates in literature, Alexievich writes nonfiction. Her chief technique is collage. She combines the voices of many ordinary to give us a new vision of historical events: World War II and its aftermath, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Chernobyl. Alexievich believes in the importance of remembering the horrors of the past in order avoid repeating them. In Unchildlike Stories, an oral history of the children of the Second World War, she writes, “A man without a memory is only capable of doing evil, nothing else but evil.” Alexievich fits naturally into the post-Holocaust and post-Soviet ethic of memory as preventive medicine. In this, she is a Nobel laureate in the style of Solzhenitsyn. So far, so Cold War.

But Alexievich’s work is more complicated than the political narrative suggests. Alexievich was originally a journalist, and says that she learned early on that “the best way to learn about life was through the sound of human voices.” In War’s Unwomanly Face, about the experiences of Soviet women who served during World War II, she writes, “In apartments and cottages, on the street and in the train…I listen…More and more, I turn into one large ear, always turning to another person.” Alexievich has said that her work is inspired by the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich, who wrote “collective novels” or “epic choruses” about the horrors of war.

Another of Alexievich’s clear influences is Dostoevsky, whom she mentions often. She shares his belief that compassion is the greatest hope for humankind, and his rejection of the cycles of revenge that have dictated so much of human history. Like Dostoevsky, Alexievich uses seemingly artless prose, littered with ellipses, to give us truth, conveyed through the gathering strength of many voices. Like Dostoevsky, Alexievich is concerned not only with national realities, but with universal human values. It will be a pity if she is understood as a strictly anti-Soviet or anti-totalitarian writer. Although her work paints a lovingly detailed picture of Soviet and post-Soviet reality, her concerns transcend historical particularities.