Nobel awards literature prize to war documenting

In one it’s most notable awards, Nobel awarded it’s literature prize for 2015 to Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time. She’s a Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer. Of her most famous books, “War’s Unwomanly Face” documenting women through WWII, “Zinky Boys” which handles first-hand accounts of the was in Afghanistan, and “Voices from Chernobyl” as an oral history of a nuclear disaster.

In an interview with her just after winning the prize she describes her feelings, “Of course, it’s a joy, it would be strange to hide it. But it makes me anxious as well because it revived all these great shadows: Solzhenitsyn, Bunin, Pasternak, all the Russian Nobel Laureates in literature. Belarus never got a Prize. It is of course an anxious feeling to realize that neither tiredness nor disappointment may let me lower the bar now. It’s been a long way, a huge work has been done and something new is waiting for me.”

Alexievich has been described as the first journalist to win a Nobel prize in literature. When she was asked about what influenced her to take this journalistic approach in writing, she said, “Everything happens so fast and intensively in the modern world that neither one person nor the whole culture are able to conceive it. It is just too fast, unfortunately. There is no time to sit and think it over, as did Tolstoy, whose ideas matured over decades. Every person, me too, can only try to grasp a small piece of reality, conjecture only. Sometimes I leave only 10 lines out of 100 pages of my text, sometimes one page. And all together these pieces are united in a novel of voices creating the image of our time and telling what is happening to us.”

Her writings about war influenced her as a writer and as a human being and she explains, “In every family, in my family … the year of 1937, Chernobyl, the war. It can tell a lot, everyone has these stories… every family can tell you this novel of pain. And it’s is not that I have this point of view or that I like how people think in such situations. No, it is our life. Imagine a person who emerged from a madhouse and is writing about it. Should I tell this person: ”Listen, why are you writing about this?” Like Primo Levi, who wrote about concentration camps and couldn’t tear himself away from them, or Chalamov who was overtaken and killed by the camp, he just could not write about anything else. I myself have been wondering who we are, why our suffering cannot be converted into freedom. It is an important question for me. Why does slavish consciousness always prevail? Why do we change our freedom into material benefits? Or to fear, as we did earlier?”

Alexievich expressed that whenever she’s writing she always feels like she’s talking to a friend. “The question that worries me is how long we can walk this road of horror, how much a human being can bear. That’s why the poetics of tragedy are important for me. It is important when somebody says that he or she has read such horrible books and feels better, that a reader got tears and these were purifying tears. You should have all this things in mind and not just overwhelm people with horror,” she adds.