"Everyone Speaks in Their Own Voice, and Everyone Has the Right to Defend What They Really Think" | Beijing Book Fair

S. A. Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel laureate in literature, has come to Beijing. She is a writer, and also a journalist.

This is Alexievich's second trip to China. 27 years ago, with the Soviet Union still intact, she came as a member of a delegation of Soviet writers. 27 years later — 25 years after the Soviet collapse — she is back as a Belarusian writer and the 2015 Nobel laureate in literature, carrying a new book, Secondhand Time, to meet Chinese readers. It tells the story of ordinary Russian lives from 1991 through the post-Soviet years to 2012.

"Russia's problem, or the Soviet Union's, was that it rushed to say goodbye to the past without any clear idea of the future, without knowing what the future was. A person with no future soon becomes anxious. Worst of all, he loses hope for life," Alexievich said in an interview with the press.

Besides being a Belarusian writer, Alexievich is better known for being a journalist, and for the nonfiction writing that goes with it. She graduated from the journalism department of Minsk University in 1972 and went straight into reporting and nonfiction. Before her prize, the last time a work of nonfiction took the Nobel Prize in Literature was 62 years earlier, with Winston Churchill's war memoir The Second World War.

In last year's citation, the Nobel committee wrote: "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

"Polyphonic" means that when Alexievich reconstructs these large historical events, she lets different people all speak, so that many parts sound at once.

For each book she interviews more than a hundred people who lived through the events, most of them ordinary people, and a single book takes her five to ten years. Her best-known works are The Unwomanly Face of War, about the women who fought in the Soviet army in World War II; Voices from Chernobyl, about the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant (the newer edition is called I Don't Know What to Say, About Death or About Love, a Chinese title that has drawn plenty of criticism); and Zinky Boys, about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Secondhand Time is the last of her "Voices of Utopia" cycle, five books on the Soviet Union.

If you have read her, you may remember certain very fine-grained details and spoken accounts. They arrive in front of you in a perfectly flat, unremarkable way, and that is exactly where their force comes from. Alexievich almost never sums up her subjects or judges them; she lets them talk. Even the words in which people refuse her are sometimes written down and kept.

Perhaps because her subjects always circle large historical events like Chernobyl or the Afghan war, you feel the absurdity and the helplessness of history, the state, human nature, and institutional distortion all twisted together. The feeling is strongest once you realize that the text in front of you is not fiction. You get something similar reading Primo Levi on Auschwitz — in a way their accounts resemble each other, except that what Levi recounts is usually his own experience.

As Alexievich sees it, everyone has the right to defend what they really think. Only then can we see objectively what actually happened at that moment in history.

Some readers see her as an heir to the Russian literary tradition of Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Fyodor Dostoevsky, pressing at the large subjects of human nature, the soul and suffering.

Others hold that in her writing she has picked out the sensitive parts of Soviet history, departing from the official account, and for that she has been called a "traitor who doesn't love her country."

It was this writing against the authorities that forced Alexievich out of Belarus, to live in Italy, France, Germany, Sweden and elsewhere. In 2011, after ten years of drifting around Western Europe, she finally went home to Minsk.

"Under every dictatorship, writers are always fragile. (But) a person should not give up the tie to his homeland or his responsibility to it, so I came back to Belarus," Alexievich said.

This August she traveled from Minsk to the Shanghai Book Fair and then to Beijing. We met her for the first time on the 25th, at the readers' meeting for Secondhand Time at the Beijing Book Fair. China's weather did not agree with her and she was unwell, so the 67-year-old writer canceled her signing — but she insisted on telling Chinese readers what she thinks about writing, history and freedom.

To let you feel her more directly, we decided to transcribe part of the conversation.

Excerpts from the event:

Z: moderator; S: S. A. Alexievich

Z: Why is the book called Secondhand Time?

S: Say "secondhand" and the first thing in everyone's head is secondhand clothes. Calling this book Secondhand Time was my diagnosis of what was happening in my own country at the time. There is a meaning behind the name. We were once republics of the Soviet Union, and after each of us became a new country we should have had something of our own, a national thing, new ideas, new views, new points of view.

And what actually happened? Nothing was new. We all went back. Whatever it used to be, that is what it has become again. That is where the name Secondhand Time came from. I regret it very much — there should have been something new, and instead we went back. In the 1990s everyone was shouting for freedom, but how many of those people shouting for freedom understood what freedom is? Everyone thought freedom would arrive tomorrow. But think of a man behind bars in prison: he will never walk out from behind those bars in his life, so freedom means nothing to him — and he is free too.

We understand this freedom with a touch of romanticism. Freedom looks close to us, but the road is long. Only now do we feel and understand how long the road to freedom is. When I interviewed these people I also asked them what freedom is, and many of them had no answer, because they had never thought hard about it. They were used to accepting. So it is the point I just made: to get freedom in the real sense is a hard and very long road.

Z: You have said you interviewed more than 200 people for this book, and that the writing took five to ten years. How do you organize that much interview material?

S: Without exaggerating, my study is a warehouse of paper, every kind of paper piled together. Writing a novel about love, or a novel about history, is not an easy thing to begin with. By the fourth or fifth year the thread and the structure come out on their own.

The hardest part is not collecting the material and putting it together. The hardest part is making what comes out of it ring true for every single reader. That is hard to explain. In the fourth year a thing takes shape, a kind of instinctive force at the level of the spirit.

In literary work, in music, in the more artistic fields, a lot of it cannot be reasoned out or described. Tchaikovsky had his famous pieces; a director may want them reproduced exactly, described — but they were made in a state that not many people can feel or understand, and only there does a person create something and set something down. It happens when instinct pushes. When we write books we still pass this kind of feeling to people through words. Where music and literature differ is that music is not carried by words; it is another way of performing and presenting altogether.

Z: Your new work is about love and old age. In your earlier books there was a lot of love against the backdrop of a great era, and that love tends to look sorrowful. How is the love in the new book different?

S: The first batch of books, about five of them, focused on people surrounded by great ideas. Now my focus has shifted a little. People now are an entirely different person: they care more about the eternal subjects, about love and death, and they are more willing to use a limited life to do something big. That is the difference, if there is one. At first I thought that dealing with people who talk about love, who talk about life and death, might be easier to handle, less tragic. It was not what I had imagined. The subjects of love and death turned out to be more complicated than the earlier books.

Z: What do you think love is?

S: To write the book about love I interviewed more than 200 people, and asking more than 200 people that question gets you more than 200 answers. Yesterday I heard a very good one. The literal words were that love is a marvelous painting, and there are many things inside the painting. I thought that was a very philosophical answer. What love is — that is also an interesting subject to discuss with other people.

Z: You said you would use the Nobel money to start a writing club to help nonfiction writers. China has many nonfiction writers. If they wanted to join the club, what advice would you give them?

S: I come from Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Minsk is a small city, Belarus is a small country, and there is not much information where we are. So what I want to build is, taken literally, an intellectual club — inviting experts to come and lecture, giving people there more chances to learn and more chances to reach information. There are many difficult factors in the times and the surroundings we live in now, but intellectuals, certain social elites, have a duty and an obligation to spread their knowledge further, to help others more. I hope more people will come to us, share with more people, talk with us in person.

By elites I mean the better writers and creators. They have an obligation to use this method to explain to everyone what is happening in our society and why it is happening, to take the reasons apart with us, and to work out what we should do in these circumstances. We used to be republics of the Soviet Union, before it broke up; now it has broken up, and if we stay in the mental state of that breakup, that clearly will not do. Russia and Ukraine share one root, and still there is conflict between them — war and fascism should be the things that wake us up.

Z: Your books combine many first-person voices, and many combinations of time, space and setting. People call this polyphonic writing. Why do you write this way?

S: There are many characters in my books, many voices, everyone talking about his own affairs; it is a work in many parts. We are also under the influence of a herd culture: something happens, and whatever he says, I say too. Something happens, he says Stalin was wrong, and I say the same. It ought to be the way it is in my books, in many parts, everyone speaking in his own voice.

Under that culture many people lose the sense of responsibility they should have. Was Stalin good or not — he had his good moments and his bad ones, and everyone should speak in his own voice from his own position. What I value most is the voices in all these books of mine. They are saying what they really think, and they all have the right to defend what they really think. Only then can we see objectively what actually happened at that moment in history.

Z: Who are you apart from being a Nobel laureate? How do you define yourself?

S: I am one member of a group of people living in this era, and we are trying to understand what has happened, why it happened, and what we should do. I love my life very much and I am a happy person, because when you do what you like — collecting material, arranging interviews with people, sorting it all out, presenting it to readers in your own way — those are all things I like. I do what I like, so I am a happy person.

I have put this same question to someone else. I once asked a Polish writer who he was, and his answer left me with something to think about: I am a person of the world, not of this or that country, not fenced in that way, simply a member of the era. I once wrote a book about Chernobyl, another subject I took on, and I went into the Chernobyl zone myself. When you are there a feeling surrounds you at every moment: you forget which people you belong to, which country you are from. You only feel that, because of a disaster like this, you are a person who could disappear from this world.

Disaster, and above all a nuclear disaster like Chernobyl, has one other good side: it helps wake us up to look at ourselves, to start from ourselves when we think about things. That Chernobyl book was published in ten countries, and what it tells people is a warning, an alarm. It is not about how a person was lost, not about who killed whom, but that with the sun rising as usual and everything perfectly normal, people and life can still disappear from this world.

Z: Your books give us lives and details that stop the heart. How does that happen?

S: When I write about something, a disaster or a story like that, my thinking is not confined to the specific events. I am more concerned with bringing out what is human in the people who went through them. In the books you can see who we loved when war or disaster came, who we felt sorry for, who we were waiting for — all these human things show through against the large backdrop of historical and social events. It is inside the very small life of each person that these very large events of the world take place; every small person is someone who lived through the large event.

Z: When you gather material through spoken interviews, what methods do you use to make sure what people tell you can be trusted? Is the truth more important, or the feeling?

S: I talk with many people, at length, about a great many things. I write a lot down and it turns into a great deal of material, but what I actually write out is not all of it — it is a few particular lines. There is a contrast between the raw face of the material as it comes to me and the artistry made with the methods of art, and in between there is still more work to do. Many of my books have also become the scripts of documentaries; a lot of documentaries have been made, and in them you can see real people on camera telling their own stories.

Z: I feel a lovable tone inside your solemn, large-hearted writing. Is that lovable tone something inherent in you?

S: In our lives there is good and there is evil, there is good and there is bad, and they cannot be pulled apart. Sometimes you may feel that everything you meet in one stretch of time is the bad side, the evil side, that the negative things have all gathered at once — but thanks to what is good in human nature, thanks to kindness, you get past the stretch that feels bad to you. By nature people fall into despondency and disappointment easily, and I still love people like that very much.

People have this other side too. I did see killing and being killed in the Afghan war, and such scenes are genuinely hard to forget, such moments hard to get through. On the whole, what I want is for my books to show people not hatred so much as the spreading of love. The purpose and the meaning of my work are not to gather the dark, frightening, sinister things together and give readers a scare. I want people to feel the true, the good and the beautiful, to get something out of it in their spirit, to become Human beings in the full sense of the word.

Z: You have written so many books. Years from now, when people judge you, what would you yourself hope to hear?

S: If you are talking about judgment, that last question already gave me the best judgment there is. When readers feel in my books not hatred, not evil, but something good — that is the highest praise you can give me. I was born for love, and I write for love.

Cover image from: nytimes, wallpaperswide