Aleksievic ascolta molte voci di donne, come quella dell’infermiera, che racconta le molestie subite dai compatrioti, i tentativi di violenza dai quali è riuscita a difendersi. Svetlana Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In her books she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. With her "documentary novels", Svetlana Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. Her major works are her grand cycle Voices of Utopia, which consists of five parts. Svetlana Alexievich's books criticize political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus. savaşın neden başarısız olduğu, afganların gerilla taktiği ve neden en başta savaşa lüzum görüldüğü de açıklansaydı keşke dedim bazen.

Read this book and be changed. Read it again and again be changed. Read it a third time and ask yourself if we do not discover our humanity by tragedy alone. Alexievich is like a doctor probing the scar tissue of a traumatised nation (Guy Chazan Financial Times) My son was in the Vitebsk parachute division. When I went to see him take his oath of allegiance, I didn’t recognize him; he stood so tall.Out there you felt quite differently about your country. ‘The Union’, we called it. It seemed there was something great and powerful behind us, something which would always stand up for us. I remember, though, the evening after one battle – there had been losses, men killed and men seriously injured – we plugged in the television to forget about it, to see what was going on in the Union. A mammoth new factory had been built in Siberia; the Queen of England had given a banquet in honour of some VIP; youths in Voronezh had raped two schoolgirls for the hell of it; a prince had been killed in Africa. The country was going about its business and we felt completely useless. Someone had to turn the television off, before we shot it to pieces. As part of the regime of military secrecy conscripts are generally sent to their units straight from the training-camp) The authorities want to use us to clamp down on organized crime. If there is any trouble to be broken up, the police send for ‘the Afghans’. As far as they are concerned we are guys with big fists and small brains who nobody likes. But surely if your hand hurts you don’t put it in the fire, you look after it until it gets better.

I’m not strong enough to go on crying day after day…I watch a man with his wife and child, three of them going somewhere together and my soul begins to scream….’If only you could get up for one single minute to see what a lovely daughter you’ve got . On 29 August I decided summer was over. I bought Sasha a new suit and a pair of shoes, which are still in the wardrobe now. The next day, before I went to work I took off my ear-rings and my ring. For some reason I couldn’t bear to wear them. That was the day on which he was killed. Everybody wanted to be like him. Even I, his own mother, would imitate him. I would sit down at the piano the way he did, and sometimes start walking the way he did, especially after he was killed. I so much want him always to be present in me. They took one look at us in the Village Soviet and said, ‘Why wait two months. Go and get the brandy. We’ll do the paperwork.’ An hour later we were husband and wife. There was a snowstorm raging outside.

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We got married in the winter, in my village. It was funny and rushed. At Epiphany, when people guess their fortunes, I’d had a dream which I told my mother about in the morning. ‘Mum, I saw this really good-looking boy. He was standing on a bridge, calling me. He was wearing a soldier’s uniform, but when I came towards him he began to go away until he disappeared completely.’

He was always small. He was as small as a girl when he was born, just couple of kilos, and he grew up small. I’d cuddle him and call him my little sunshine.

I’ll sit with him until evening and far on into the night. Sometimes I don’t realize I’ve started wailing until I scare the birds, a whole squall of crows, circling and flapping above me until I come to my senses and stop. I’ve gone there every day for four years, in the evening if not in the morning. I missed eleven days when I was in hospital, then I ran away in the hospital gown to see my son. The war had its own ghastly rules: if you were photographed or if you shaved before a battle, you were dead. It was always the blue-eyed heroes who were the first to be killed: you’d meet one of those types and before you knew it, he was dead. People mostly got killed either in their first months when they were too curious, or towards the end when they’d lost their sense of caution and become stupid. At night you’d forget where you were, who you were, what you were doing there. No one could sleep during the last six or eight weeks before they went home. When he was away I got used to the waiting, but if I saw a funeral car in town I’d feel ill, I’d want to scream and cry. I’d run home, the icon would be hanging there, and I’d get down on my knees and pray, ‘Save him for me, God! Don’t let him die.’ Alexievich serves no ideology, only an ideal: to listen closely enough to the ordinary voices of her time to orchestrate them into extraordinary books Come la madre che accoglie felice e gioiosa il figlio reduce dal fronte, per poi accorgersi che è sempre più silenzioso, sempre più legato ai suoi commilitoni, sempre più portato alla violenza, come se la guerra non fosse rimasta laggiù, ma lo avesse seguito a casa.

The haunting history of the Soviet-Afghan War from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 I went to meet him off the bus. His hair had gone grey. He didn’t admit he wasn’t on leave, that he’d asked to be let out of hospital for a couple of days to see his mother. He’d got hepatitis, malaria and everything else rolled into one but he warned his sister not to tell me. I went into his room again before I went off to work, to see him sleeping. He opened his eyes. I asked him why he was not asleep, it was so early. He said he’d had a bad dream. Superbly translated... Alexievich's choice of truth as hero is the right one for the age of Putin and Trump (Giles Whittell The Times) Non sono neanche più riuscito a indossare i miei jeans e le mie camicie di prima della guerra, perché erano ormai gli abiti di un altro, di una persona ormai estranea, anche se mia madre mi assicurava che avevano conservato il mio odore.In what follows, I haven’t given people’s real names. Some asked for the confidentiality of the confessional, others I don’t feel I can expose to a witch-hunt. We are still so close to the war that there is nowhere for anyone to hide.