February Group Read: Second-Hand Time

Svetlana Alexievich won The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.

From the Nobel website https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2015/alexievich/facts/:

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.

In Second-Hand Time, the author's most recent work, the voices of Alexievich's witnesses chart the ending of the Soviet era.

Thank you for suggesting this for a group read - I started reading it last week, as it's a bit of a chunkster, and I'm very much enjoying it.

I just d/l this today. I was going to read A Suitable Boy, but since they took the ebook off Kindle US and the audio book is abridged, I'm passing on that one. I can't wait to start this one.

>3 Tess_W: Early starts are no problem. Shame about A Suitable Boy.

>2 Jackie_K: Glad it's going well. I'm starting now.

Just picked it up from the library!

Started reading yesterday, so far just very general but I'm counting on it getting more specific!

I don't have the book yet, but I hope to get it soon. I'm not 100% sure I'll be able to get it read this month, but I'll follow along and add when I get to it.

My husband just picked it up from the library for me. Don't know when I'll start or how much I'll read but I will give it a try.

I'm about a third of the way through it (I started in mid-Jan though!) and am finding it fascinating. It did take me a little while to get into the style of it, I think I expected a lot more commentary from her, whereas it is mostly verbatim interviews. Some of them I've found very moving (for example this evening I read something from a man who survived the pogrom in Minsk after escaping from being buried alive in a mass grave).

I read Voices from Chernobyl and The Unwomanly Face of War, both of which were absolutely gut-wrenching. I thought I'd feel more detached from Second-hand Time because it is about politics, but it's so much more than that. About quarter of the way through.

>5 JayneCM:, >7 LisaMorr:, >8 hailelib: Welcome!

I have a copy of the book, but it will be a week before I can start it. Looking forward to it, though.

Well this book is definitely a surprise for me--because I'm ignorant! I thought this book was by Stalin's daughter, Sveltana Alliluyeva!!!!!!! I'm about 1/4 into the book and some parts are dragging, especially the long one about disillusionment.

>12 RidgewayGirl: Welcome!

>13 Tess_W: Disillusionment seems to be a central theme.

So many different voices, different views of the same events. It's fascinating to read what people thought about Stalin, the disgust at his crimes, the reverence for a strong leader. There are shades of Make Russia Great Again.

It's a very readable translation. I like it a lot better than the Pevear and Volokhonskytranslation of The Unwomanly Face of War, which I found stilted and confusing.

I'm over half way through and I love the first-person stories. That being said, I think it may be overkill?

I've just finished this and can't wait to discuss it further! I found once I was about 60% of the way through I really raced through it.

I agree about the translation, @pamelad, it was very readable.

I've finished the first section. It ended with the stories of Anna M, an architect, and her son, a military hero who now sells plumbing equipment. Anna was taken to the camps at four months, removed from her mother, and brought up in an orphanage. I cried for Anna, then I read her son's story about the honoured veteran Ivan D, about what Ivan did in the camps and, even more importantly, what he felt about his actions, and was horrified.

I'm having to measure out the pages, because it's too devastating to read too much in one go.

How's everyone going? I'm still finding it devastating. So much corruption and brutality. So much sadness.

Nearly at the end.

I've finished; but I'll wait till others are done before chiming in!

It looks as though Tess, Jackie and I have finished and no one else has started. So chime, Jackie and Tess!

My take: Firstly, as a piece of history this book is invaluable. The stories we intimate and interesting. That being said, the book was much too long. Many of the stories were so similar that the book seemed to drag. There was no analysis or comparison. I was waiting for the author to have a smashing finish; but nothing. I firmly believe the book could have been cut in half and had the same impact on me.

I liked that the stories were so personal, and went into people's thoughts and feelings and domestic lives, not just historical events. We learned a lot about the ways that real people lived in the Soviet Union. I was particularly interested in the accommodations that loyal Soviet people had to make to accept Stalin, how people said that the Soviet way of life couldn't have happened without Stalin, despite the murders, the prison camps and the starvation that they had experienced. It was a surprise that no one knew about the war in Afghanistan, or the gulags.

I appreciated the layering of the stories. Similar events seen from different viewpoints, by different generations. Gorbachov, Yeltsin and Putin. The putsch. The inside view of the violence in Azerbaijan and Chechnya. The domestic violence.

The violence against women made a strong impression: alcoholics drinking away their wages and beating their wives and children; the young woman who went as a police officer to Chechnya and came home in a coffin, labelled a suicide but probably the victim of her drunken male colleagues; the young Jewish girl raped and killed by partisans.

The only negative, from my perspective, was the subjectiveness of the author's choices. It became clear, as the book progressed, that she was seeking out stories she'd heard of, and I wondered if she was looking for evidence to support her own theories: the Russian love of suffering; that Russians cannot be free; the love of war. It's a quibble, because we know that she collapses stories and people to make the narrative flow, so selecting the stories that fit the narrative is just another example of artistic licence.

I loved it - but I agree with both of you!

I found it really moving to hear people's personal stories, and although some were quite similar I thought that that helped reinforce the impact of the times on the whole population, and not just on a collection of individuals (if that makes sense). Like @pamelad I was really struck by the domestic violence, and also the nostalgia for Stalin in particular. I was also struck by some of the everyday common experiences - the kitchen as a place of dissent/discussion, and salami as a metaphor of capitalism being the two that came up quite a lot.

I agree with @tess_schoolmarm that what I would have liked to have seen much more of is some analysis or commentary from the author. It took me a little while to get into the verbatim style, although once I realised that that was what I was getting, I settled into it a bit better. But given that the author too lived through all this, some sense of her own take on it all would have been good. I did feel that her being so much in the background just letting the people say their thing showed someone with a very small ego (I'm pretty sure if I was her I'd be interjecting my own thoughts all over the place, not necessarily to the improvement of the book!).

The one thing I felt quite uncomfortable with was the accounts from people who were clearly mentally ill (at least one person was very open about that). Whilst I think it's important, of course, for their voices to be heard, and not to be spoken for or silenced, nevertheless I felt quite voyeuristic reading those accounts.

I did like that she didn't just speak with people from Russia, but included several of the other republics. I found the accounts of the Tajiks she spoke with particularly interesting. And the account of the Armenian woman married to the man from Azerbaijan, and how all of a sudden neighbours, friends, and even family members turned against each other. It really reminded me of accounts of the break-up of former Yugoslavia.

Thank you for heading this up pamelad! I'm glad I read it and glad I can read your and Jackie's take on the book.

>21 Tess_W: >23 Jackie_K: I believe that the author's purpose is to let people speak, without intruding her own analysis and judgements. Her choice of which voices she records and the ways she juxtaposes them take the place of analysis and comparison. In her introduction, Remarks from an Accomplice, Alexievich states her purpose: I'm trying to hear out all the participants of the socialist drama....

She's more of a participant in this book than in the others I've read because she's a sovok herself. In the other two, Voices from Chernobyl and The Unwomanly Face of War, she's clearly an observer.

I will keep Voices from Chernobyl on my wishlist as I think it might be more readable (for me) at 256 pages and I'm very interested in the subject matter. As I noted earlier, when I started, I thought I was reading the book written by Stalin's daughter (with a similar name); but I was surprised but not sorry I read the book!

Interestingly, the other week having finished Secondhand Time, I read Comradely Greetings, which is a series of letters between Pussy Riot activist while she was in a prison camp, and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. It was very interesting to see a bit of an account from the camps in the modern era, and sad to see the continuities from the camps described in Alexievich's book.