Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich
Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich
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Secondhand Time
The Last of the Soviets

Author: Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich

Narrator: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, Kimberly Farr, Kirby Heyborne, Hillary Huber, Rebecca Lowman, Jorjeana Marie, Coleen Marlo, Kathleen McInerney, Fred Sanders

Unabridged: 22 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/24/2016


Synopsis

The magnum opus and latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—a symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia

When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul.” Alexievich’s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.

In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it’s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres—but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Here is an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it once dominated a third of the world.

A magnificent tapestry of the sorrows and triumphs of the human spirit woven by a master, Secondhand Time tells the stories that together make up the true history of a nation. “Through the voices of those who confided in her,” The Nation writes, “Alexievich tells us about human nature, about our dreams, our choices, about good and evil—in a word, about ourselves.”

Read by a full cast:
Amanda Carlin  
Mark Bramhall 
Cassandra Campbell 
Kimberly Farr 
Kirby Heyborne 
Hillary Huber 
Rebecca Lowman 
Jorjeana Marie 
Coleen Marlo 
Kathleen McInerney 
Fred Sanders 

Praise for Svetlana Alexievich and Secondhand Time

“For her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”—Nobel Prize Committee

“For the past thirty or forty years [Alexievich has] been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual, but [her work is] not really about a history of events. It’s a history of emotions . . . a history of the soul.”—Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy

“Secondhand Time [is Alexievich’s] longest and most ambitious project to date: an effort to use an oral history of the nineties to understand Soviet and post-Soviet identity.”—The New Yorker 

“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

“[Alexievich’s] books are woven from hundreds of interviews, in a hybrid form of reportage and oral history that has the quality of a documentary film on paper. But Alexievich is anything but a simple recorder and transcriber of found voices; she has a writerly voice of her own which emerges from the chorus she assembles, with great style and authority, and she shapes her investigations of Soviet and post-Soviet life and death into epic dramatic chronicles as universally essential as Greek tragedies. . . . A mighty documentarian and a mighty artist.” —Philip Gourevitch

About The Author

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, 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 nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include War’s Unwomanly Face (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand 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.”


Reviews

Goodreads review by Ilse on November 04, 2022

There are some who are in darkness And the others are in light And you see the ones in brightness Those in darkness drop from sight. (Bertold Brecht, The Threepenny Opera) Last year I read Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History, in which Orlando Figes outlines the history of the Soviet Union as ‘a hu......more

Goodreads review by Ioana on May 28, 2016

"We sit atop the ruins of socialism like it's the aftermath of war." UNLIMITED STARS. One of the best books I've ever read. THE most personally touching and relevant book I've EVER read. A book that penetrates the soul of my being and explains me to myself. An Autobiographical Review this book is......more

Goodreads review by Paul on March 07, 2021

This is an excellent and essential book but there was simply too much of it, it’s nearly 700 pages long. Transcriptions of dozens of interviews with dozens of Russians, all ex-Soviet citizens, about what it was like to live through the collapse of the USSR, the defeat of communism and the rise of th......more

Goodreads review by Metodi on May 29, 2024

26.02.2022 Съществата уродливи от тази книга държат на власт чудовището Путин вече над 20 години. Фашистката им агресия срещу суверенна Украйна е вече факт, хиляди невинни са убити, още хиляди ще бъдат убити, градове и села ще бъдат разрушени. Проклети да са и Путин и върхушката му, но и хомо совиети......more

Goodreads review by فايز غازي on July 31, 2023

- سفيتلانا ألكسييفيتش، الصحافية التي نالت جائزة نوبل غير عادية في الأدب عن أعمالها الصحافية، تقطّر الألم وتسكبه كلمات... فعلى الجميع اذن الإستعداد لجرعات متتالية من الألم والحزن والفجائع. - سفيتلانا ألكسييفيتش تقوم بتسجيل ما يقوله الآخرون ويشعرون به. تترك لهم الحرية بالكشف عن مشاعرهم العميقة، عن تلك......more


Quotes

Praise for Svetlana Alexievich and Secondhand Time

“There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and Putin’s ascent. . . . But the nonfiction 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 Secondhand Time.”—David Remnick, The New Yorker

“Like the greatest works of fiction, Secondhand Time is a comprehensive and unflinching exploration of the human condition. . . . Alexievich’s tools are different from those of a novelist, yet in its scope and wisdom, Secondhand Time is comparable to War and Peace.”The Wall Street Journal

“Already hailed as a masterpiece across Europe, Secondhand Time is an intimate portrait of a country yearning for meaning after the sudden lurch from Communism to capitalism in the 1990s plunged it into existential crisis. 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.”The New York Times

“The most ambitious Russian literary work of art of the century . . . There’s been nothing in Russian literature as great or personal or troubling as Secondhand Time since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, nothing as necessary and overdue. . . . Alexievich’s witnesses are those who haven’t had a say. She shows us from these conversations, many of them coming at the confessional kitchen table of Russian apartments, that it’s powerful simply to be allowed to tell one’s own story. . . . This is the kind of history, otherwise almost unacknowledged by today’s dictatorships, that matters.”The Christian Science Monitor

“Alexievich’s masterpiece—not only for what it says about the fall of the Soviet Union but for what it suggests about the future of Russia and its former satellites. . .  Stylistically, Secondhand Time, like her other books, produces a mosaic of overlapping voices… deepened by extraordinary stories of love and perseverance.”Newsweek

“A trove of emotions and memories, raw and powerful . . . [Secondhand Time] is one of the most vivid and incandescent accounts of [Soviet] society caught in the throes of change that anyone has yet attempted. . . . Alexievich stations herself at a crossroads of history and turns on her tape recorder. . . . [She] makes it feel intimate, as if you are sitting in the kitchen with the characters, sharing in their happiness and agony.”The Washington Post

“An enormous investigation of the generation that saw communism fall, [Secondhand Time] gives a staggeringly deep and plural picture of a people that has lost its place in history.”San Francisco Chronicle