This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. In this magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, the author of Voices from Chernobyl reinvents a singular, polyphonic literary form, bringing together the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in a formidable attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble.Īlexievich’s method is simple: ‘I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Seventy plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new kind of man, the Homo sovieticus.’ This ‘red man’: that’s whom Alexievich has been studying since her first book, published in 1985 – a people and a culture condemned to extinction by the implosion of the ‘This was perhaps communism’s only achievement. And it accomplished this.’ writes Svetlana Alexievich. ‘Communism had an insane plan: to refashion the “old” breed of man, ancient Adam.
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