On the Belarusian Freedom Day, Svetlana Aleksijevitj is in Sweden, where a staged reading of her "Second-Hand Time" is being held at the Dramaten. The book is the latest in her grand project "Voices of Utopia", where she explains the Soviet human and what arose in the vacuum after communism.
Strangely enough, it is even more relevant now than when it was published in 2013: Svetlana Aleksijevitj notes that her books "refuse to become history".
As an author, I like it, but as a humanist, it's hard to see that nothing changes for the better. The processes I witnessed, when people sought a firm hand, for Stalin to rise again — now we see it happening. Fascism is rising again, and Putin is a kind of Stalin for our time.
About Belarus
From exile in Berlin, Svetlana Aleksijevitj is now writing a book about the events in Belarus in 2020, when leader Aleksandr Lukasjenko declared himself the winner of the election, and mass protests erupted.
The situation has become more complicated since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she says. But while Belarusians resist Lukasjenko, Russians barely protest against Putin, and Svetlana Aleksijevitj believes it's due to a deeply rooted imperialism.
The masses' order was for Russia to rise from its knees, and the only way they could do it, according to the imperialist idea, is through war.
When communism collapsed, the West tried to offer its own social model, but capitalism's consumerism did not fill the void, Aleksijevitj claims. Now, Donald Trump is trying to mediate peace in Ukraine as a "businessman", and the 9 billion kronor the EU is spending on a joint defense gives no hope.
It's the old answer. It's what they've always done — they're arming up. There are no new ideas about how to build the future.
Anxious
She reproaches herself and the intellectuals for not having understood the significance of the Chechen War in 1994. Today's development began there, she believes.
Literature and culture have an enormous important task, Svetlana Aleksijevitj thinks. But in these "confused times", she has found it harder to interview people.
They are unsure about everything, they are anxious. And anxiety can end in any way, it can end with a big world war.
She continues writing her book, whose title comes from a poem by poet Konstantinos Kavafis; "Waiting for the Barbarians".
Unfortunately, I think the development is heading in that direction.
Born: 1948 in Ukraine with a father from Belarus and a mother from Ukraine.
Current: Dramaten.doc is giving a staged reading of "Second-Hand Time" on March 25, and Svetlana Aleksijevitj will then be in conversation with Dramaten.doc's artistic director, author Dmitri Plax.
Career: Has worked as a teacher and journalist. Debuted as an author in 1985. Her life's work "Voices of Utopia" includes five documentary books, which began with "War Has No Female Face" (1985), about the women who fought for the Red Army during World War II. Also included are "The Last Witnesses" (1985), "Zinc Boys" (1990), "Prayer for Chernobyl" (1997), and "Second-Hand Time" (2013), about the fall of the Soviet Union.
She is a multiple award winner, including the Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize, the Triumph Prize, the Leipzig Book Fair's Literature Prize, the Kapuściński Prize, and the German Book Trade's Peace Prize (2013). In 2015, she received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
