Second-Hand Time
Svetlana Alexievich
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From the publisher
Second-hand Time is published here as a limited edition casebound hardback as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ First Decade Collection, featuring marbled endpapers and signed and numbered bookplates.
Translated by Bela Shayevich
Second-hand Time is the major work from Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. Here she brings 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.
Fashioning a singular, polyphonic literary form by combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, Alexievich creates a magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, a brilliant, poignant and unique portrait of post-Soviet society out of the stories of ordinary women and men.
‘In this spellbinding book, Svetlana Alexievich orchestrates a rich symphony of Russian voices telling their stories of love and death, joy and sorrow, as they try to make sense of the twentieth century, so tragic for their country.’ J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature
‘Absolutely fantastic.’ Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity
‘The non-fiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Second-hand Time.’ David Remnick, New Yorker
‘A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people talking in their kitchens.’ Rachel Donadio, New York Times
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankovsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-hand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’.