If recently we were talking about the writer of Russian origins Ayn Rand, today we address the work of another emblematic author of identical Soviet origins, the Belarusian Svetlana Alexyevich, brand new nobel prize for literature in 2015.
And I bring her to this space connecting her with Rand because they both compose analogous works in terms of their transcendence beyond the narrative. Rand contributed his philosophical vision and Svetlana gives us a more sociological vision in her lyrics.
In both cases the question is to approach the humanistic as an essence on which to develop knots of thought or plots as authentic chronicles that from realism, when not full reality, seek that assault on consciousness.
Svetlana Alexievich has made her bibliography an intense sociological showcase in which the essay also has a place, if not everything investigated with journalistic overtones does not end up being nuanced in its case by that essayistic complement towards the reader's meditation.
Anyway, Alexievich is an indispensable reference to complete an overview of the panorama of the countries that made up the Soviet Union, about its roots in a 20th century that lasted even longer in those parts and ended up forging a common imaginary in the diversity of so many new emerging peoples.
Top 3 recommended books by Svetlana Alexievich
Voices from Chernobyl
The undersigned was 10 years old on April 26, 1986. The unfortunate date on which the world was approaching the most certain nuclear disaster. And the funny thing is that it had not been a bomb that threatened to consume the world in a Cold War that continued to threaten after World War II.
Since that day Chernobyl joined the dictionary of the sinister And even today, getting closer through reports or videos that circulate on the internet about the great exclusion zone is scary. Is about 30 kilometers of dead zone. Although the determination of "dead" could not be more paradoxical. Life without palliative has been occupying the spaces previously occupied by humans. In the more than 30 years since the disaster, vegetation has won out over concrete and local wildlife is known in the safest space ever known.
Of course exposure to radiation still latent cannot be safe for life, but animal unconsciousness is an advantage here compared to the greater possibility of death. The worst thing about those days following the disaster was undoubtedly the occult. Soviet Ukraine never offered a complete view of the disaster. And among the population that lived in the area, a feeling of abandonment spread, which is well reflected in the current HBO series about the event. Given the great success of the series, it never hurts to recover a good book that complements this review of such a global disaster. And this book is one of those cases in which reality is light years away from fiction. Because the stories of those interviewed, testimonies of a few days that seem suspended in the limbo of surrealism that sometimes covers our existence, make up that magical whole.
What happened in Chernobyl is what these voices tell. The incident was due to whatever reason, but the truth is the collection of the consequences narrated by the characters in this book, and by so many others who can no longer have a voice. The naivety with which the events were faced by some inhabitants who were confident in official versions is disturbing. The discovery of the truth is fascinating and terrifies the consequences of that underworld of concentrated nuclei that exploded to change the face of that territory for decades to come. A book in which we discover the tragic destinies of some inhabitants deceived and exposed to disease and death.
The end of Homo Soviéticus
Communism or the greatest paradox of human reason. The project towards class solidarity and social justice turned out to be an absolute disaster.
The problem lay in believing that the human being was capable of materializing what the great benefits of communism announced as the social panacea. Because the destructive component of power in a few hands and permanently was ignored. In the end it was about, as we can discover in this book, a laboratory communism, a manufactured alienation that Aleksievich undresses from the transcription of interviews with the inhabitants of that horror made system.
Inside stories that are past, no doubt, but hundreds of living testimonies still from an atrocious time. Some attempts to soften the matter, such as Gorbachev's own perestroika, failed to alleviate the effect of a system with the endemic evil of authoritarianism becoming incompatible with development. The end of that Homo Soviéticus was that evolutionary spark awakened from the inertia of a world siege to the system of perdition.
War does not have the face of a woman
Perhaps the only aspect in which communism practiced that equality was precisely in its most sinister aspect, the warlike. Because in this book we find references to women engaged in the same fronts as the men who populated the Red Army.
And perhaps all those, men and women, were those who had the least reason to go to war. Because after Hitler on the horizon, Stalin was in the rear. Enemies of humanity on either side. Little or no hope of positive results in the event of victory. And those women doing their dark military duties may not yet have been aware of the stark paradox of their case.
Because the system would once again sell the idea of defending the homeland, it would exalt the Soviet values of equality and the necessary defense of the achieved status. For the Soviets, World War II was a strange battlefield with real enemies and sinister ghosts that darkened all hope.
An apocalyptic scenario dotted with violence of all kinds, hopelessness and terror. New testimonies recovered by the author to confirm, from a first outburst of feminine vision, the disaster of disasters, the worst of wars spread across a vast battlefield called the USSR. And despite everything, Alexievich extracts that necessary humanity from the sum of chronicles and awakens the atavistic sensation that the greatest souls appear among all types of misery and crudeness.
