It is not just Russia, but the whole of the former USSR, and it is a developing story that has only managed to snake through two tumultuous decades. Her earlier books like Chernobyl Prayer were limited in scope, but in Secondhand Time, the canvas is big. Like Vertov, Alexievich moved around with a voice recorder. The nearest thing to her kind of writing can, perhaps, be found not in books, but in Dziga Vertov’s classic movie on ordinary daily life in a city in Soviet Russia, Man with a Movie Camera. A new genre, because she had no literary models before her to follow. So does “blue jeans”.Īlexievich had to invent a new genre to make the reader feel history as it was shaping up in unlikely nooks, like a Moscow kitchen. The word “salami”, by the way, has a high hit count in conversations in the book. Soviet dissident literature might have described gulags, but the conversationists in this book tell about deprivations in everyday life, like craving for salami.
The cacophony (or, polyphony, as the Nobel committee’s much-quoted citation said) of voices slowly seeps into his or her head.
If the author is not telling any ‘stories’, what is the reward for the poor reader? The reader gets a unique opportunity to live through the period.
Alexievich seems to be following Roland Barthes’ instruction: “Having described the flower, the botanist is not to get involved in describing the bouquet.” There is no tyranny of author-imposed discourse, no gestalt. The book is an ensemble of voices - one-on-one talks with individuals, street noises, random snatches of voices in a beer bar, conversions around a table at the wake for a war veteran who had committed suicide…All these add up to nothing. She had engaged people in conversation mostly about Soviet life, which was extinct by that time. Within these periods, the author offers no dates, no chronology. Partitioning her book into these two decades is the only giveaway. What makes Svetlana Alexievich’s book Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets different is that she weaves no invisible threads running through the periods she had chosen to record, namely, the two pivotal decades in the history of the countries of the former Soviet Union - Boris Yeltsin’s Nineties and the Putinist 2000s.
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