
Unofficial Stories: Conversation with Svetlana Alexievich - lermontov
http://harpers.org/blog/2016/10/unofficial-stories/
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vonnik
For those who don't know, Alexievich won last year's Pulitzer Prize for books
such as "Voices from Chernobyl" and "Zinky Boys", an account of Russia's war
in Afghanistan. She writes something close to non-fiction -- heavily edited
oral histories of people who have survived disaster and war. The books are
incredibly moving, and as well written as any work by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.
You won't waste your time reading her.

~~~
kirkdouglas
> Pulitzer Prize

Nobel prize

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guard-of-terra
“Which country do you want to live in, a great country or a normal country?”

The problem is, neither one is offered anywhere to anybody. You end up living
in a depressed shard of Russian State with fake history, be it Russia, Belarus
or Ukraine.

Russia a bit richer, Belarus a little bit more "normal", Ukraine the third
one.

The concept of "normal country" is very Soviet and peculiar on its own. Every
country out there stems from its history. You can't really have a blank slate
"normal country" where you want it much like you could not have "a democracy"
in place of Iraq or Libya. It has to be about something.

~~~
guard-of-terra
There are these awesome SF writers, Maria and Sergey Dyachenko, and some of
their books' plots are placed in an unspecified "normal" eastern european
country. This is when you want to write a book with SF plot but do not want it
to be about poverty, banditism and misery, which are the only plot devices
offered by real, non-normal ex-USSR republics.

Same way, a lot of Soviet writers wrote e.g. detective stories placed
somewhere unspecified in the West, because for proper detective you want bars,
whiskey, coated detectives, not Komsomol activists offered by USSR
peoplescape.

