STOCKHOLM (AP) — Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for works that the prize judges called "a monument to suffering and courage." 
 
 Alexievich, 67, used the skills of a journalist to create literature chronicling the great tragedies of the Soviet Union and its collapse: World War II, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the suicides that ensued from the death of Communism. 
 
 Her first novel, "The Unwomanly Face of the War," published in 1985 and based on the previously untold stories of women who had fought against the Nazi Germans, sold more than 2 million copies. 
 
 Her books have been published in 19 countries. She also has written three plays and the screenplays for 21 documentary films. In its brief citation the Swedish Academy, cited Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time." 
 
 Last year's literature award went to French writer Patrick Modiano. 
 
 This year's Nobel announcements continue with the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the economics award on Monday. All awards will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896. ||||| -- I'll get down on my knees to beg you--please, find our Anna Sushko. She lived in our village. In Kozhushki. Her name is Anna Sushko. I'll tell you how she looked, and you'll type it up. She has a hump, and she was mute from birth. She lived by herself. She was sixty. During the time of the transfer they put her in an ambulance and drove her off somewhere. She never learned to read, so we never got any letters from her. The lonely and the sick were put in special places. They hid them. But no one knows where…. The whole village took care of her, like she was a little girl. 
 
 
 
 Unlike most recent Nobel Prize winners, Svetlana Alexievich writes simply and directly, without any tricks of style, and the emotion she distills is heartbreaking. For these words are not her own, but those of survivors of the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, faithfully transcribed by her down to the silences, tears, and hesitations, and lucidly translated by Keith Gessen. Start at the beginning, or open to any page, and you will find yourself drawn into these poor people's lives: townspeople who go out on their balconies to watch the unusual colors of the reactor fire, farmers forced to leave their crops and cattle, soldiers and firemen drafted in with inadequate protection to clean up the mess. It is very easy to read, and unbearably human. Or starkly human and eventually unbearable to read, because the stories of stolen lives are told in their raw form and never let up. 
 
 
 
 The book is framed by two longish sections headed "A Solitary Human Voice," the accounts of widows, newlyweds and very much in love, seeing their husbands come back and basically rot before their eyes. It continues with monologues, dialogues, choruses, the voices of soldiers, resettlers, children, all meticulously attributed with their real names. There is tragedy, of course, and even more pathos. One returning soldier burns all his clothing except for his army cap which is coveted by his little boy; two years later, the child is dead of a brain tumor. One woman smuggles out her radioactive cat in a suitcase. Another goes to see her doctor: 
 
 
 
 -- "Sweety," I say, "my legs don't move. The joints hurt." "You need to give up your cow, grandma. The milk's poisoned." "Oh, no," I say, "my legs hurt, my knees hurt, but I won't give up the cow. She feeds me." 
 
 
 
 There is rumor and superstition here, but much genuine faith; ignorance and a strange kind of poetry. Bewilderment is only the other side of the coin to a previous belief in the stability of the simple life; sorrow is the obverse of love. The light of the disaster illuminates the lives of ordinary people; I could well believe that this is a better portrait of the Russian soul than any number of novels. There are even touches of characteristic black humor: 
 
 
 
 -- There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. "Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!" Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. "Don't worry," she says. "They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss." 
 
 
 
 One man tried to write about his experiences. "I sent the story to a journal. They wrote back saying that this wasn't a work of literature, but the description of a nightmare." Which makes me ask the question of Alexievich herself: a nighmare certainly, but is this literature as we know it? It felt more like the raw materials waiting to be made into literature by someone else. Being a theatrical person myself, I kept on wondering how I might select from those monologues and choruses to put them on the stage, set them to music perhaps, at any rate do something to give them shape and overall meaning. The author divides her book into three major sections: The Land of the Dead, The Land of the Living, and Amazed by Sadness. But the texture of the narratives is much the same in each; there is no obvious structural arc, no particular reason why you should continue to subject yourself to such a succession of tales of woe. But perhaps I would be wrong to try to force these stories into a shape that has some meaning. They HAVE no meaning, no larger redemptive purpose. And that is her point. 
 
 
 
 Keith Gessen, the translator, opens with an introduction giving some of the facts and dates of the disaster. But with the exception of a brief preface, Alexievich herself does not. In her equally brief closing section, In Place of an Epilogue, she explains why, and also why she feels the subject is so urgent: because living in a country with 350 atomic bombs, the threat of nuclear holocaust is all too real. Let me end my review, therefore, with her own voice after reading so many others: 
 
 
 
 -- I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts--they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinated me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them. These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future. ||||| ANA LUCIC: Voices from Chernobyl is a startling, emotional book. What is the main emotion or effect you were trying to achieve with its readers? 
 
 SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: There is an opinion, after so many years, that we know everything there is to know about Chernobyl: that it’s a thing of the past, and that nobody wants to hear about it anymore. But, in fact, not only has it not been forgotten, the phenomenon of Chernobyl has never been properly understood. 
 
 AL: What are the most frequent reactions people have to Voices of Chernobyl? 
 
 SA: The most frequent reaction is that it’s a revelation: “I had no idea how things were in reality, especially on the personal level.” This book is not about the Chernobyl disaster as such—why it exploded and how—but about the world after Chernobyl, about how people reacted to it and lived through it individually. It is not only about the damage Chernobyl did to nature and to human genetics but how those experiences affected our lives and our consciousness. 
 
 While Chernobyl created new fears and sensibilities, it obliterated some of the old ones. Fear of Communist authorities eroded when many—faced with the choice of fleeing, removing their families from danger, or staying in Chernobyl and staying loyal to the Party—left. Fear of radiation did, in this way, relieve, or at least lessen, their fear of Party bosses and Party authority. That the authorities were willing to put down their party cards in order to escape really emphasized, amidst a climate of government denial, the seriousness of the Chernobyl disaster. 
 
 Most people knew nothing about this side of Chernobyl. The book inspired precisely the reactions I had in mind when I was writing it: people beginning to think about the meaning of their lives and life in general; feeling the need for a new worldview, one that may save us all. How can we save ourselves? 
 
 AL: How long did you work collecting the data and interviewing the witnesses? How much time did you spend working on the book? How much of the material collected went into the book? 
 
 SA: All of my books consist of witnesses’ evidence, people’s living voices. I usually spend three to four years writing a book but this time it took me more than ten years. The first few months I spent in Chernobyl, it was teeming with journalists and writers from many countries, all asking hundred of questions. I became convinced that we were confronted with a completely unknown and mysterious phenomenon while we all tried to put it in ordinary words, in habitual terms. We were talking about the faults of the Communist system and about people being deceived, that they were not told what to do in such circumstances, that they were not supplied with iodine preparations, etc. And it was all very true, of course. There were strong nationalistic, anti-Russian sentiments in Belorussia and the Ukraine because it was a Russian nuclear station that exploded: Russians have contaminated us with radiation, people said. But those sorts of questions seemed a bit superficial to me. Purely political or purely scientific answers were not enough—no one tried to look deeper into the problem. I realized that I could quickly write the same type of book as the other journalists I met there. There were, indeed, hundreds of them. So I chose a different approach. I started interviewing witnesses, more than 500 of them, which took me more than ten years. Since we were suddenly confronted with a new reality, I was on the lookout for people who had been shattered by that experience, setting them thinking about what had really happened, what was going on in a new world that they were trying to confront with old methods. For instance, I recall military helicopters, piloted by the Soviet-Afghan war pilots, flying over the burning reactor; they had no idea what they were supposed to do with their machine-guns. That was how the army system worked: they believed that massive military personnel and war technology would solve any problem. And there they had to deal with high-energy physics, nuclear particles, radiation doses—no one really understood what was going on. 
 
 I was collecting material to the very last. Out of 500 or more interviews 107 were included in the final version; that is, approximately one in five. That is basically what happens with my other books as well—I select one out of five interviews, and that one makes it into the published book. For each person I record four tapes or more, making 100-150 printed pages, depending on the voice timbre and the pace of the oral story, and then only about ten pages remain. 
 
 AL: How did you decide to write Voices of Chernobyl? Where did the main motivation come from? 
 
 SA: Chernobyl showed us how dangerous is modern civilization’s “cult of force.” How glaring are the imperfections of this reliance on power and coercion above all else. How dangerous our modern worldviews are to us ourselves. How humanitarian man is lagging behind technological man. From the very first days that this disaster was hanging over our heads—and not just in the shape of a radiation cloud—it was not only the reactor’s roof that exploded: Chernobyl blew up our whole worldview, it undermined the very foundations of the Soviet system, which was first undermined by the Soviet-Afghan war. It was a powerful explosion that completely shattered our lives. I remember hundred-thousand-strong anti-government rallies in Belorussia, in defense of common people and children. I wanted to tell about that unique experience. It so happened that Belorussia with its patriarchal, traditional culture suddenly had to contend with the fears of the future. 
 
 AL: How different is the story that you heard from the people from the official version and the one in the media? 
 
 SA: The stories are completely different. We’ve always had this situation in Belorussia, and partly in Russia too, that the official version has little to do with how ordinary people see things. What is the main aim of the authorities? They always try hard to protect themselves. The totalitarian authorities of those days demonstrated it vividly: they were afraid of panic, they were afraid of the truth. Most people had little understanding of what was going on. In their attempts at self-preservation the authorities deceived the population. They assured the people that everything was under control, that there was no danger. Children were playing football in the yard, they ate ice cream in the street, toddlers played in sand boxes, and many people even sunbathed on the beach. Today hundreds of thousands of those children are invalids and many of them have died. Faced with the nuclear disaster at the time, people found themselves alone with the problem. People saw that the truth was hidden from them, that no one could help, neither scientists nor doctors. That situation was completely new for them. Take for example the firemen—they had themselves become like little reactors. Doctors undressed and examined them manually. Those doctors caught lethal radiation doses from them. Many of the firemen and doctors died later. The firemen did not even have special protection suits. They simply did not exist at the time. They arrived as if it were a usual fire. No one was prepared for this sort of thing. My interviewees told me real-life stories. For instance, in the few multistory houses in the town of Pripyat, before the evacuation started, people stood on their balconies watching the fire. They recall what a splendid sight it was, all crimson fluorescence. “It was the sight of death. But we never thought that death could look so beautiful.” They even called their children to admire the sight: “Come have a look. You’ll remember it to the end of your life.” They admired the sight of their own death. Those people were teachers and engineers from the nuclear station. People I talked to provided many such details about the scene of the disaster. 
 
 I remember two years later one helicopter pilot phoned me: “Please come and see me as soon as you can. I have little time left. I want to tell you what I know.” He was a doomed man when he was telling me his story. He said: “I’m glad you’ve come. I can talk to you about it. Please write it all down. We did not quite understand what was going on, and even today they still don’t understand.” I lived with the feeling that I must write it all down. Maybe people still don’t quite understand what happened then and that’s why it’s so important to record the actual evidence, the real history of Chernobyl, a history that hasn’t quite sunk in to this day. 
 
 AL: You are a Belorussian writer living in Paris. Do you feel like you belong to a literary scene in a particular country or you see yourself as quite independent of any country or region? 
 
 SA: I would say I’m an independent writer. I can’t call myself a Soviet writer, or even a Russian writer. By “Soviet” I mean the territory of the former Soviet empire, naturally, the realm of the Soviet utopia. Neither do consider myself a Belorussian writer. I would say I’m a writer of that epoch, the Soviet utopia, writing the history of that utopia in each of my books. I’m only temporarily in Paris; my stay here is connected with the political situation in Belorussia and my opposition to the current authorities. My books have been published in many countries, but not in Belorussia: in the past ten years of Lukashenko’s rule none of my books were published there. But I continue writing about the little man versus the great utopia. I describe the disappearance of this utopia and how it affects the common person. 
 
 AL: Your books combine interviews with fictional techniques. This seems to me to be a unique genre. Are there any writers who are doing something similar? 
 
 SA: The tradition of telling a story in this way, recording oral stories, living voices, has been laid down in Russian literature before me. I mean the books by Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich about the Leningrad Siege. For instance, I Came from the Fiery Village. Those books inspired me to write my own books. It occurred to me that life offers so many versions and interpretations of the same events that neither fiction nor document alone can keep up with its variety; I felt compelled to find a different narrative strategy. I decided to collect the voices from the street, the material lying about around me. Each person offers a text of his or her own. And realized I could make a book out of them. Life moves on much too fast—only collectively can we create a single, many-sided picture. I wrote all five of my books in this way. The heroes, feelings, and events in my books are all real. From each person’s 100-page story, not more than five pages are left and sometimes maybe just half a page. I ask many questions, I select episodes, and, thus, I participate in the creation of each book. My role is not just that of an ear eavesdropping in the street, but also that of an observer and thinker. To an outsider it may seem a simple process: people just told me their stories. But it’s not really so simple. It’s important what you ask and how you ask it and what you hear and what you select from the interview. I think you can’t really reflect life’s broad scope without the documentation, without the human evidence. The picture will not be complete. 
 
 AL: You mention in what you call “In Place of an Epilogue” that you felt you were writing for the future. Could you comment on this? 
 
 SA: During the ten years I was visiting the Chernobyl zone, I had the impression that I was recording the future. People kept repeating as a refrain: “I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve never read about it anywhere. I’ve never seen it in any film or heard it described by anyone.” Chernobyl created new feelings, such as the fear of loving; people were afraid to have children; new senses of responsibility were created; new questions were asked. What, for example, if our children are born with abnormalities? How can we fathom such notions as the disintegration period of nuclear particles, which ranges from three thousand to a hundred thousand years? That gives you a completely different perspective on life. Can you imagine how one felt abandoning one’s house and birthplace, one’s village or town knowing that he could never return, but that the house would continue to stand there? This was a completely new feeling for them. Or take, for instance, the problem of the contaminated villages. How to bury them? First they evacuate the people; then, around each house, still filled with their belongings, they make a deep ditch; they kill all the animals and bury them. In this way, man betrays his animals, his land, and his home. Now when you go there, all you see, apart from the old cemeteries, are burial mounds with houses and animals inside. It gives you the surreal feeling that it all belongs to another age. 
 
 AL: What kind of reception do you anticipate in the US? 
 
 SA: America is a remarkable country but I have a feeling that it’s a different country after 9/11. America now understands how fragile this world is and how we all depend on one another. If some atomic power station in Australia explodes a radioactive rain may kill people somewhere else. I think after 9/11 Americans may be more receptive to my books than before it. I feel I can find people there for whom this experience is important. In the modern world it is dangerous to neglect the experience of other peoples’ sufferings. We can describe Russia—and Belorussia, for that matter—as a civilization of ordeals and suffering. Very often we can hear people in the West speak of Russia’s plight with haughtiness: there is always something wrong with these Russians. In actual fact, the whole world today is at risk. Fear is a large part of our lives—more, even, than love. Thus, the Russian experience of suffering acquires particular value. We all need courage to live on. I hope we’ll have enough. 
 
 See Also: 
 
 Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich ||||| Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian writer whose oral histories have recorded thousands of individual voices to map the implosion of the Soviet Union, has won the Nobel prize for literature. 
 
 The Swedish Academy, announcing her win, praised Alexievich’s “polyphonic writings”, describing them as a “monument to suffering and courage in our time”. 
 
 Nobel prize in literature: Svetlana Alexievich wins "for her polyphonic writings" – live Read more 
 
 She becomes the 14th woman to win the prize since it was first awarded in 1901. The last woman to win, Canada’s Alice Munro, was handed the award in 2013. 
 
 Speaking by phone to the Swedish broadcaster SVT, Svetlana Alexievich said that the award left her with a “complicated” feeling. 
 
 “It immediately evokes such great names as [Ivan] Bunin, [Boris] Pasternak,” she said, referring to Russian writers who have won the prize. “On the one hand, it’s such a fantastic feeling, but it’s also a bit disturbing.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 The academy called while she was at home, “doing the ironing,” she said, adding that the 8m Swedish krona (£775,000) prize would “buy her freedom”. 
 
 “It takes me a long time to write my books, from five to 10 years. I have two ideas for new books so I’m pleased that I will now have the freedom to work on them.” 
 
 Alexievich was born on the 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into a family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilisation from the army the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both parents worked as schoolteachers. She left school to work as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl. 
 
 She has written short stories, essays and reportage but says she found her voice under the influence of the Belorusian writer Ales Adamovich, who developed a genre which he variously called the “collective novel”, “novel-oratorio”, “novel-evidence”, “people talking about themselves” and the “epic chorus”. 
 
 According to Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Alexeivich is an “extraordinary” writer. 
 
 “For the past 30 or 40 years she’s been busy mapping the Soviet and post soviet individual,” Danius said, “but it’s not really about a history of events. It’s a history of emotions – what she’s offering us is really an emotional world, so these historical events she’s covering in her various books, for example the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, these are in a way just pretexts for exploring the Soviet individual and the post-Soviet individual.” 
 
 “She’s conducted thousands and thousands of interviews with children, with women and with men, and in this way she’s offering us a history of human beings about whom we didn’t know that much ... and at the same time she’s offering us a history of emotions, a history of the soul.” 
 
 In Voices From Chernobyl, Alexievich interviews hundreds of those affected by the nuclear disaster, from a woman holding her dying husband despite being told by nurses that “that’s not a person anymore, that’s a nuclear reactor” to the soldiers sent in to help, angry at being “flung ... there, like sand on the reactor”. In Zinky Boys, she gathers voices from the Afghan war: soldiers, doctors, widows and mothers. 
 
 
 
 “I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age,” Alexievich writes in the introduction to Second-hand Time, which is due from independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2016. “Music, dances, hairstyles. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story. 
 
 “It never ceases to amaze me how interesting ordinary, everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths … History is only interested in facts; emotions are excluded from its realm of interest. It’s considered improper to admit them into history. I look at the world as a writer, not strictly an historian. I am fascinated by people.” 
 
 Extract: Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich Read more 
 
 Danius pointed new readers towards her first book U vojny ne ženskoe lico (War’s Unwomanly Face), based on interviews with hundreds of women who participated in the second world war. 
 
 “It’s an exploration of the second world war from a perspective that was, before that book, almost completely unknown,” she said. “It tells the story of the hundreds and hundreds of women who were at the front in the second world war. Almost one million Soviet women participated in the war, and it’s a largely unknown history. It was a huge success in the Soviet Union union when published, and sold more than 2m copies. It’s a touching document and at the same time brings you very close to every individual, and in a few years they all will be gone.” 
 
 According to her close friend, the Belarusian opposition leader Andrei Sannikov, Alexeivich writes about “the history of the Red Man”. 
 
 “She claims he is not gone,” Sannikov said. “She argues that this man is inside us, inside every Soviet person. Her last book, Second-hand Time, is dedicated to this problem.” Alexeivich is “wonderful at interviewing” he continued. “She doesn’t avoid difficult issues or questions. Mostly she writes about human tragedy. She lets it go through her and writes with surgical precision about what’s going on within human nature.” 
 
 Bela Shayevich, who is currently translating Alexievich into English for Fitzcarraldo, also paid tribute to her skills as an interviewer which leave her work “resounding with nothing but the truth”. 
 
 “The truth of life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia is not an easy thing to swallow,” Shayevich said. “I’m thrilled that this win will mean that more readers will be exposed to the metaphysical dimensions of her subjects’ survival and despair through the tragedies of Soviet history. I hope that in reading her, more people see the ways that suffering – even suffering brought on by geopolitical circumstances foreign to many readers – is also something that can bring people closer to one another if they are willing to take a risk and listen.” 
 
 Although Alexievich is widely translated into German, French and Swedish, winning a range of major prizes for her work, English editions of her work are sparse. Fitzcarraldo editor Jacques Testard came across her work in French a few years ago. 
 
 “It’s an oral history, as are all her books, about nostalgia for the Soviet Union,” said Testard. “She went around Russia interviewing people after the fall of the Soviet Union, in an attempt to surmise what the collective post Soviet psyche is. As with all her books, it’s really harrowing – a story about loss of identity, about finding yourself in a country which you don’t recognise any more. It’s a micro-historical survey of Russia in the second half of the 20th century, and it goes up to the Putin years.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 “She’s been a big deal in Europe for a long time, but she’s never really been picked up in England,” he said. 
 
 
 
 “Her books are very unusual and difficult to categorise. They’re technically non-fiction, but English and American publishers are loath to take risks on a book just because it’s good, without something like a Nobel prize.” 
 
 Alexievich led the odds for the 2015 award, ahead of Japan’s Haruki Murakami, Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse. ||||| 
 
 THE CHRONICLER OF THE UTOPIAN LAND Says Alexievich: "I've been searching for a genre that would allow the closest possible approximation to how I see and hear the world. Finally I chose the genre of actual human voices and confessions. Today when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified, when we finally realized how mysterious and unfathomable man really is, a story of one life, or rather the documentary evidence of this story, brings us closest to reality." Svetlana Alexiyevich was born 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into the family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After Father's demobilization from the army the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both Father and Mother worked as schoolteachers. (The father's grandfather was also a rural schoolteacher.) After finishing school Alexiyevich worked as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl, Gomel Region. Already in her school days she wrote poetry and contributed articles to the school newspaper. At that time she needed two years work record (as was the rule in those days) in order to enroll in the Department of Journalism of Minsk University, entering it in 1967. During her university years she won several awards at the republican and all-Union competitions for scholarly and students' papers. Having received her degree she was sent to the town of Beresa, Brest Region, to work on the local paper. At the same time Alexiyevich taught at the local school. At that time she was torn between various career options: to continue the family tradition of school teaching, scholarly work, or journalism. But after a year she was invited to Minsk to work on the Rural Newspaper. Several years later she took the job of a correspondent for the literary magazine Neman and was soon promoted to the head of the section for non-fiction. She tried her voice in various genres, such as the short story, essay, and reportage. It was the famous Byelorussian writer Ales Adamovich who made a decisive influence on Svetlana's choice, particularly his books I'm from the Fiery Village and The Book of the Siege. He wrote them jointly with other authors but the idea and its development were entirely his, and it was a new genre for both Byelorussian and Russian literature. Adamovich was looking for the right definition of the genre, calling it "collective novel", "novel-oratorio", "novel-evidence", "people talking about themselves", "epic chorus", to name a few of his appellations. Alexiyevich has always named Adamovich as her main teacher. He helped her to find a path of her own. In one of her interviews she said: "I've been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world - as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher." In 1983 she completed her book The Unwomanly Face of the War. For two years it was sitting at a publishing house but was not published. Alexiyevich was accused of pacifism, naturalism, de-glorification of the heroic Soviet woman. Such accusations could have quite serious consequences in those days. All the more so since already after her first book I've Left My Village (monologues of people who abandoned their native parts) she has already had a reputation of a dissident journalist with anti-Soviet sentiments. On order of the Byelorussian Central Committee of the Communist Party Alexiyevich's already composed book was destroyed and she was accused of anti-Communist and anti-government views. She was threatened with losing her job. They told her: "How can you work on our magazine with such alien views? And why are you not yet a member of the Communist Party?" But new times came with Mikhail Gorbachev's coming to power and the start of the perestroika. 
 
 In 1985 The Unwomanly Face of the War came out simultaneously in Minsk and in Moscow. In subsequent years it was repeatedly reprinted; all in all more than two million copies were sold out. This novel, which the author calls "the novel-chorus", is made up of monologues of women in the war speaking about the unknown aspects of the Second World War that had never been related before. The book was hailed by the war writers as well as the public. 
 
 In the same year her second book came out: The Last Witnesses: 100 Unchildlike Stories, which has also languished unpublished for the same reasons (pacifism, failure to meet ideological standards). This book also ran into many reprints and was acclaimed by numerous critics, who called both books "a discovery in the genre of war prose". The war seen through women's and children's eyes opened up a whole new area of feelings and ideas. The 40th anniversary of the war was marked by the theatre production of The Unwomanly Face of the War at the renowned Taganka Theatre (staged by Anatoly Efros.) The Omsk Drama Theatre received the State Prize for their production of The Unwomanly Face of the War. The play based on this novel was running in many theatres around the country. A cycle of documentary films was produced on the basis of The Unwomanly Face of the War. The film cycle was awarded with the State Prize, and received the Silver Dove at the Leipzig Festival of Documentary Films. Alexiyevich also received many other prizes for this work. 1989 saw the publication of The Boys in Zinc, a book about the criminal Soviet-Afghan war that had been concealed from the Soviet people for ten years. To collect material for the book Alexiyevich was traveling around the country for four years to meet war victims' mothers and veterans of the Afghan war. She also visited the war zone in Afghanistan. The book was a bombshell and many people could not forgive the author for de-mythologizing the war. In the first place the military and Communist papers attacked Alexiyevich. In 1992, court proceedings have been opened against the author and her book in Minsk. The democratically minded public rose in defense of the book. The case was closed. (Photo: Kabul, 1988) Later several documentary films and plays were based on this book. In 1993, she published Enchanted with Death, a book about attempted suicides as a result of the downfall of their socialist mainland. They were people who felt inseparable from the socialist ideals, who were unable to accept the new order, the new country with its newly interpreted history. The book was adapted for the cinema (The Cross). 
 
 In 1997, Alexiyevich published her book The Chernobyl Prayer: the Chronicles of the Future. The book is not so much about the Chernobyl disaster as about the world after it: how are people adapting to the new reality, which has already happened but is not yet perceived. The post-Chernobyl people obtain new knowledge, which is of benefit for the whole mankind. They live as it were after the third world war, after a nuclear war. The book's subtitle is very significant in this respect. "If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath. An eternal dialogue of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the gulags, the Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan war hidden from the people, the downfall of the great empire, the downfall of the giant socialist land, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions - Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man." Alexiyevich's book have been published in many countries: USA, Germany, UK, Japan, Sweden, France, China, Vietnam, Bulgaria, India -- 19 countries in all. 
 
 She has to her name 21 scripts for documentary films and three plays, which were staged in France, Germany, and Bulgaria. Alexiyevich has been awarded with many international awards, including the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for the "Courage and Dignity in Writing" (the Swedish PEN), the Andrei Sinyavsky Prize "For the Nobility in Literature", the independent Russian prize "Triumph", the Leipzig Prize "For the European Mutual Understanding- 1998", the German prizes "For the Best Political Book" and the Herder Prize. 
 
 Alexiyevich has thus defined the main thrust of her life and her writings: "I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being, and how I can protect this humanity in a person." 
 
 These questions acquire a new implication in connection with the latest events in Beloruss where a military-socialist regime is being restored, a new post-Soviet dictatorship. And now Alexiyevich is again unwelcome to the authorities in her country because of her views and her independence. She belongs to the opposition which also includes the country's finest intellectuals. Her books add up to a literary chronicle of the emotional history of the Soviet and post-Soviet person. She continues to develop her original genre. In each new book it is employed in a new way. One can't help recalling Lev Tolstoy's maxim to the effect that it is more interesting to follow real life than to invent it. "Many things in man still remain a riddle for art," says Alexiyevich. For her 50th anniversary a two-volume collection of her works came out. In the introduction the critic Lev Anninsky says: "This is a unique work, which has probably been undertaken for the first time in Russian, or rather in Soviet and post-Soviet culture: the author has traced and recorded the lives of several generations of Soviet people, and the very reality of the 70 years of socialism: from the 1917 Revolution through the Civil War, the youth and hypnotism of the great utopia, Stalin's terror and the gulags, the Great Patriotic War, and the years of the downfall of the socialist mainland up to the present times. This is a living history told by the people themselves and recorded and selected by a talented and honest chronicler." Alexiyevich is currently finishing her book The Wonderful Deer of the Eternal Hunt made up of love stories. Men and women of different generations tell their personal stories. "It occurred to me that I've been writing books about how people kill one another, how they die. But this is not the whole of human life. Now I'm writing about how people love one another. And again I ask myself the same question, this time through the prism of love: who are we and what country we are living in. Love is what brings us into this world. I want to love people. Although it's increasingly hard to love them. And getting harder."
– A Belarus writer known for what Swedish Academy judges called "her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," won the Nobel Prize for Literature Thursday, the Guardian reports. Svetlana Alexievich, 67, has made her name by instilling a journalistic style heavy on eyewitness accounts into literature that focuses on the "great tragedies of the Soviet Union and its collapse," including Chernobyl and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, per the AP, as well as her own website. Her first novel, War's Unwomanly Face, which documented the untold stories of multitudes of women who fought against the Nazis, was published in 1985 and sold more than 2 million copies. Also under Alexievich's belt: three plays and the screenplays for nearly two dozen documentaries. Alexievich, born in 1948 to a Belarus father and Ukrainian mother in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankivsk, is the 14th woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, per the Guardian; Alice Munro was the last female to nab the honors in 2013. Alexievich explains her approach to writing on her site, noting that she'd been "searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. … Finally I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves." One of her books, Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, involved hundreds of interviews with people affected by the 1986 nuclear meltdown, NPR notes. "I usually spend three to four years writing a book, but this time it took me more than 10 years," Alexievich told the Dalkey Archive Press. The Nobels continue Friday with the Peace Prize.