Chasing truth through literature

Chinese readers line up to meet Alexievich at a book-signing event in Beijing. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Few among the guests and readers at the events in Beijing could speak Russian. The 68-year-old writer looked exhausted and lonely.

However, she tried to answer the questions people kept asking, such as: How do you do your interviews? How can your books based on interviews be called literature? How do you get closer to truth?

Instead of purely chronicling history, she says that for decades she has been recording the emotions of the time, the soul of history. That's how she turns her interviews with people into literature.

She insists that she was not trying to collect horrors of wars or the 30-year history before the Soviet Union disintegrated to scare people. Instead, she wants to spread love through writing.

In 1985, Alexievich published her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, followed by well-known titles such as Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War and Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a

Nuclear Disaster.

Her latest book, Second-hand Time, is the last in her "factional" chronicle The History of the Red Man.

Secondhand Time comprises her interviews from 1991 to 2012, in which Alexievich has ordinary Russian citizens recount the past 30 years, showing what it has been like to live in the Soviet Union and in the new Russia.

"I'm interested in little people," she said in her Nobel Prize-ceremony speech.

"The little, great people, is how I would put it, because suffering expands people. In my books these people tell their own little histories, and big history is told along the way."

In Secondhand Time, she recorded people's memories of oppression, famine, terror and massacres－memories that still live with them although history has turned a new page. Now people struggle to fit into a society obsessed with consumerism.