I recently read Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich as part of by Nobel laureate reading project, which is still slowly chugging along. She won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015.
This book took me about a month to get through, and while I’m glad I did, I probably won’t be reading more of her work anytime soon. The book contains mostly first person accounts of former Soviets Alexievich interviewed between 1992 and 2012. The interviewees are primarily people who grew up in the USSR, often under Stalin, and are now living in capitalist Russia or other former Soviet states. Alexievich writes in the first chapter, “We’re paying our respects to the Soviet era. Cutting ties with our old life. I’m trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama…”
Their stories contain a lot of common themes: the juxtaposition of hardship and pride they felt under Stalin and other Soviet leaders was one, the difficulty of adjusting to the new Russia and its massive wealth inequality was another. One passage I highlighted seems to sum up a lot of the book: “We turned out to be ill suited for the new world we’d been waiting for.” People who were taught and absorbed Soviet ideals as children and young adults had a hard time adjusting to the new paradigm. Their feelings of betrayal and confusion were ever-present.
And I think that might be part of why I found it so hard to get through the book and why I am not champing at the bit to read more of Alexievich’s work. For how long it was, there wasn’t a lot of variation in the book. Of course, everyone’s story was different, but the themes were so similar between a lot of them that I didn’t really know why I was reading yet another account of someone who had grown up Soviet and was now trying to adjust to a capitalist Russia. I wanted to have Alexievich as more of a guide: why did she select these particular stories, what stood out to her about the narrators? She was telling people’s stories in their own words and letting us draw conclusions and interpretations, and I think I would just have preferred a different book. I am going to try to find some further analysis or interpretation of the book that might help me understand it better. I was grateful for the introductory chronology of the post-Stalin USSR and the copious footnotes from the translator explaining references to Soviet and post-Soviet figures I wasn’t familiar with.
Side note: this book mentions salami more than any other book I can remember. After I finished it, I searched and found 43 instances of the word salami. The book is 515 pages long, so that’s about a salami every 12 pages. That seems like a lot of salami.
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