Svetlana Alexievich wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksievich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Previously, it was her.
Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksievich became the 14th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (a total of 106 awards).
The Nobel Committee awarded her the prize with the wording "for her polyphonic compositions - a monument of suffering and courage in our time."
In 2013, Svetlana Aleksievich was also the main contender for the Nobel Prize, Swedish journalists have already called her literary agent and Russian publisher, blocking time for an interview ... But it didn’t work out.
The main work of Aleksievich is the chronicle "Red Man. Voices of Utopia", consisting of five books: "War has no woman's face", "Last Witnesses", "Zinc Boys", "Chernobyl Prayer" and "Second Hand Time". The last book came out two years ago. The heroes of the books talk about Russia.
In a commentary to KP, the newly-minted Nobel laureate said that she was not yet fully aware of what had happened.
“This news will always be unexpected, such great shadows around: Sholokhov, Brodsky. So that I sit and know that I am so great and will definitely get it - no, there were no such thoughts. No, I treat these things as natural phenomena : I can’t influence it, these things should happen on their own. I didn’t think about it much ... This bar, this level will be present all my life. I couldn’t think so well. This is the biggest literary award in world," Aleksievich said.
Journalists asked where she would spend the million dollar bonus.
“You know, there are a lot of people in Minsk who have several million dollars. Why did everyone get so excited about a million (laughs)? I only buy freedom with money, I write each book for a very many years: from 5 to 10 years, can you imagine how much money is needed? Live 10 years: travel, meet people, specialists, computer scientists. This is a huge amount of money! And I am glad that now I have something to buy freedom for. Now I will sit and work, and not think about where to get the money to calmly write,” explained the Nobel Prize winner.
Yury Polyakov, editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta, said that the political component prevails in the Nobel Prize in Literature.
"This is a purely political action. The Nobel Prize in Literature has nothing to do with literature, it exists as a prize for supporting opposition writers, the political component is increasingly prevalent," Yury Polyakov told RIA Novosti.
He also believes that Aleksievich's books, written in the genre of "publicism-journalism, never became great literature." "This is such immanent frondism," Polyakov added.
Writer Eduard Limonov believes that the Nobel Prize cannot currently be considered an authoritative award in the field of literature.
"The Nobel Prize is of little interest from the point of view of literature. It was interesting to me when it was given in defiance of the Soviets to Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov. Now it's like the Miss Universe contest - the king, queen, tailcoats and third-rate authors - political vulgarity," Limonov said.
Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich was born on May 31, 1948 in Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). Father is Belarusian, mother is Ukrainian. The family moved to Belarus.
In 1965 she graduated from high school in Kopatkevichy, Petrikovsky district, Gomel region. She worked as an educator, a teacher of history and German in the schools of the Mozyr district, a journalist for the newspaper Prypyatskaya Pravda (Pripyatskaya Pravda) in Narovlya.
In 1972 she graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of the Belarusian State University, and began working at Mayak Kommunizma, a regional newspaper in Bereza, Brest region.
In 1973-1976 she worked at the Selskaya Gazeta, in 1976-1984 she was the head of the essay and journalism department of the Neman magazine.
In 1983 she was admitted to the Writers' Union of the USSR.
Since the early 2000s, he has been living in Italy, France, and Germany.
In 2013, she was already considered one of the contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the award was received by writer Alice Munro from Canada.
Aleksievich is called "a brilliant master of fiction and documentary prose."
Bibliography of Svetlana Aleksievich:
1985 - "The war does not have a woman's face"
1985 - "Last Witnesses"
1989 - "Zinc Boys"
1993 - "Charmed by Death"
1997 - "Chernobyl Prayer"
2004 - “The last witnesses. Solo for children's voice»
2013 - Second Hand Time
Recall. The 114th Nobel Week started in the Swedish capital on October 5th. Earlier, the names of laureates in the fields of medicine, physics and chemistry became known. On October 9, the winner of the Peace Prize will be announced in Oslo. The winner of the "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics", established by the State Bank of Sweden in 1968, will be determined on October 12.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded since 1901. Last year it was won by French writer Patrick Modiano, author of The Cafe of Lost Youth, Horizon and Street of Dark Shops.
According to tradition, the award ceremony itself will take place on December 10, the day of the death of Alfred Nobel. The size of the Nobel Prize this year for the first time in 15 years will be less than one million dollars.
Almost unknown in Russia, Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, October 8, becoming the first Russian-speaking writer in 28 years to receive such an honorary award. Thus Aleksievich stood on a par with Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Sholokhov, Boris Pasternak and Ivan Bunin.
The selection of applicants, as always, was held in the strictest confidence, but it is assumed that among the possible candidates for the award were the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami - he has not left the top lines in the betting lists for many years, as well as the Kenyan playwright Ngugi Wa Thiongo.
“We welcome the decision of the Nobel Committee to award the Literature Prize for 2015 to our compatriot, Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksievich. This first award, received by a citizen of our sovereign country, will go down in the history of the formation of the Belarusian nation, society and state,” the Belarusian Foreign Ministry said in an official statement.
When presenting the prize, the Nobel Committee called Aleksievich's books "a monument to the courage and suffering of our time." "This is an outstanding writer, a great writer who created a new literary genre, going beyond ordinary journalism," Sarah Danius, secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, commented on the decision of the Nobel Committee. Aleksievich herself formulates the main idea of her books as follows: “I always want to understand how many people there are in a person. And how to protect this person in a person.
She believes that the prize was awarded to her not for any particular book, but in general for all her creative activity. Aleksievich said at a press conference in Minsk that the award will allow her to continue working on books without being distracted by everyday problems. “I always buy freedom for prizes. I write books for a long time - 5-10 years.
Svetlana Aleksievich was born on May 31, 1948 in Ukrainian Ivano-Frankivsk, from where her family then moved to Belarus, where her parents taught at a rural school. There, the future writer entered the Faculty of Journalism of the Belarusian State University in Minsk. After graduation, she worked in local newspapers and in the literary magazine Neman.
At the same time, Aleksievich was preparing her first book - "War has no woman's face" about women front-line soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. This book, like all subsequent works of the Belarusian writer, is collected from numerous eyewitness interviews with a minimum of author's comments. For two years the book was refused to be published because of the unpleasant details of how the victory in the war was obtained. The author was accused of pacifism and debunking the heroic image of the Soviet woman. “This book was created from what they told me about: “Sveta, this should not be printed,” says the writer. Now the total circulation of the book has reached 2 million copies.
In the same year, Aleksievich's second book, The Last Witnesses, was published, dedicated to women and children in the war. Critics called both works "a new discovery of military prose." Four years later, Zinc Boys was published, a documentary book about the Afghan war, which collected memories of girlfriends, mothers and wives of Soviet soldiers who died during the conflict.
In the 2000s, the writer moved to Europe and lived in Italy, France, and Germany. Two years ago, Aleksievich returned to Belarus to prepare her new book Second Hand Time about perestroika and the 1990s. “The experience of those books that I wrote, the experience of my conversations with people shows that the layer of culture is very thin, it flies off very quickly. And if it happened only in the war, in the camp. This does not require an extreme situation, even in civilian life, once - and there is a kind of dehumanization, ”says Aleksievich.
28 years later, a Russian-speaking writer received the Nobel Prize. Svetlana Aleksievich wrote a lot about the war, and today this is especially important.
— Mikhail Khodorkovsky (@mich261213) October 8, 2015
Svetlana Aleksievich received the Nobel Prize. Alas, but for the hatred of Russia pic.twitter.com/tquL2KXXCe
And Gelman is right: the Russian world today received the Nobel Prize in Literature, but only the real one, and not all the trash in automatics.
— Kirill Martynov(@kmartynov)
Today in Stockholm, on the eve of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Svetlana Aleksievich read her Nobel lecture..
About a lost battle
I am not alone on this podium... There are voices around me, hundreds of voices, they are always with me. From my childhood. I lived in the countryside. We, children, loved to play in the street, but in the evening we, like a magnet, were drawn to the benches, on which tired women gathered near their houses or huts, as we say. None of them had husbands, fathers, brothers, I don’t remember men after the war in our village - during the Second World War in Belarus, every fourth Belarusian died at the front and in partisans. Our children's world after the war was the world of women. What I remember most of all was that the women were not talking about death, but about love. They told how they said goodbye to their loved ones on the last day, how they were waiting for them, how they are still waiting. Years have already passed, and they were waiting: “let him return without arms, without legs, I will carry him in my arms.” Without arms... without legs... It seems that since childhood I knew what love is...
Here are just a few sad melodies from the choir that I hear...
"Why do you need to know that? It `s so sad. I met my husband in the war. She was a tanker. Came to Berlin. I remember how we were standing, he was not my husband then, he was near the Reichstag, and he said to me: "Let's get married. I love you." And such an insult took me after these words - we have been in the whole war in mud, in dust, in blood, around one mat. I answer him: "First, make a woman out of me: give flowers, say kind words, so I'll demobilize and sew a dress for myself." I even wanted to hit him out of resentment. He felt it all, and one of his cheeks was burned, covered in scars, and I see tears on these scars. "Okay, I'll marry you." She said so ... she herself did not believe that she said it ... There was soot around, broken bricks, in a word, the war around ... "
“We lived near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I worked as a confectioner, sculpted pies. And my husband was a fireman. We just got married, even went to the store, holding hands. On the day the reactor exploded, my husband was on duty at the fire department. They went to the call in their shirts, home clothes, an explosion at a nuclear power plant, and they were not given any overalls. That's how we lived... You know... They put out the fire all night and received radio doses incompatible with life. In the morning they were immediately taken by plane to Moscow. Acute radiation sickness ... a person lives only a few weeks ... I was strong, an athlete, the last to die. When I arrived, I was told that he was in a special box, no one was allowed in there. "I love him," I asked. Soldiers serve them there. Where are you going? - "I love". - I was persuaded: "This is no longer a loved one, but an object to be decontaminated. Do you understand?" And I kept repeating to myself: I love, I love ... At night I went up the fire escape to him ... Or at night I asked the watchmen, paid them money to let me through ... I did not leave him, I was with him to the end ... After his death... a few months later she gave birth to a girl, she lived only a few days. She... We were waiting for her so much, and I killed her... She saved me, she took over the entire radio attack. So small... Tiny... But I loved the two of them. Can love kill? Why is it close - love and death? They are always together. Who will explain to me? I crawl at the grave on my knees ... "
“The first time I killed a German... I was ten years old, the partisans were already taking me with them on missions. This German lay wounded... I was told to take the pistol away from him, I ran up, and the German grabbed the pistol with both hands and drove it in front of my face. But he does not have time to shoot first, I have time ...
I was not afraid that I killed ... And I did not remember him during the war. There were many dead around, we lived among the dead. I was surprised when, after many years, a dream about this German suddenly appeared. It was unexpected ... The dream came and came to me ... Then I'm flying, and he won't let me. Here you rise ... You fly ... you fly ... He catches up, and I fall with him. I fall into a hole. Then I want to get up ... get up ... But he won't let me ... Because of him I can't fly away ...
The same dream... It haunted me for decades...
I can't tell my son about this dream. The son was small - I could not read fairy tales to him. My son has already grown up - I still can’t ... "
Flaubert said about himself that he is a man - a pen, I can say about myself that I am a man - an ear. When I walk down the street, and some words, phrases, exclamations break through to me, I always think: how many novels disappear without a trace in time. In the dark. There is that part of human life - colloquial, which we fail to win back for literature. We have not yet appreciated it, we are not surprised and we are not delighted with it. She fascinated me and made me her prisoner. I love the way a person speaks... I love a lonely human voice. This is my biggest love and passion.
My path to this podium was almost forty years long. - from person to person, from voice to voice. I can’t say that this path was always within my power - many times I was shocked and frightened by a person, experienced delight and disgust, I wanted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I was still in the dark. I also wanted to cry with joy that I saw a beautiful person, more than once.
I lived in a country where we were taught to die from childhood. They taught death. We were told that man exists in order to give himself, in order to burn, in order to sacrifice himself. Taught to love a man with a gun. If I had grown up in another country, I would not have been able to go this way. Evil is merciless, you need to be vaccinated against it. But we grew up among executioners and victims. Even if our parents lived in fear and did not tell us everything, but more often they did not tell us anything, but the very air of our life was poisoned by this. Evil has been spying on us all the time.
I have written five books, but it seems to me that it is all one book. A book about the history of a utopia...
Varlam Shalamov wrote: "I was a participant in a huge lost battle for the real renewal of mankind." I am restoring the history of this battle, its victories and its defeat. How they wanted to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Paradise! City of Sun! And it ended with the fact that there was a sea of blood, millions of ruined human lives. But there was a time when not a single political idea of the 20th century was comparable to communism (and with the October Revolution as its symbol), did not attract Western intellectuals and people around the world stronger and brighter. Raymond Aron called the Russian Revolution "the opium of intellectuals". The idea of communism is at least two thousand years old. Let's find it in Plato - in the teachings of an ideal and correct state, in Aristophanes - in dreams of a time when "everything will become common" ... In Thomas More and Tammaso Campanella ... Later in Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen. There is something in the Russian spirit that made me try to make these dreams a reality.
Twenty years ago we spent the "red" empire with curses and tears. Today we can already look at recent history calmly, as a historical experience. This is important because the debate about socialism has not subsided to this day. A new generation has grown up with a different picture of the world, but many young people are again reading Marx and Lenin. Museums of Stalin are opened in Russian cities, monuments are erected to him.
There is no "red" empire, but the "red" man remains. Continues.
My father, who recently died, was a believing communist to the end. He kept his party card. I can never pronounce the word "scoop", then I would have to call my father, "relatives", acquaintances like that. Friends. They are all from there - from socialism. There are many idealists among them. Romantikov. Today they are called differently - the romance of slavery. Slaves of utopia. I think that all of them could have lived a different life, but they lived the Soviet one. Why? I have been looking for an answer to this question for a long time - I traveled a huge country, which was recently called the USSR, recorded thousands of films. That was socialism and that was just our life. Bit by bit, bit by bit, I collected the history of "domestic", "internal" socialism. The way he lived in the human soul. I was attracted by this small space - a person ... one person. In fact, everything happens there.
Immediately after the war, Theodor Adorno was shocked: "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." My teacher Ales Adamovich, whose name I want to name today with gratitude, also believed that writing prose about the nightmares of the 20th century was blasphemous. You can't imagine here. The truth must be given as it is. Requires "superliterature". The witness must speak. We can also recall Nietzsche with his words that no artist can withstand reality. Won't lift it.
It always tormented me that the truth does not fit in one heart, one mind. That it is somehow fragmented, there are many of it, it is different, and scattered in the world. Dostoevsky has the idea that humanity knows more about itself, much more than it has managed to record in literature. What am I doing? I collect everyday feelings, thoughts, words. Collecting the life of my time I'm interested in the history of the soul. Life of the soul. What a great story usually misses is what it is arrogant to. Dealing with missing history. I have heard more than once and now I hear that this is not literature, this is a document. What is literature today? Who will answer this question? We are living faster than before. The content breaks the mold. Breaks and changes it. Everything overflows its banks: both music and painting, and in a document the word breaks out of the document. There are no boundaries between fact and fiction, one flows into the other. Even the witness is not impartial. Telling, a person creates, he struggles with time, like a sculptor with marble. He is an actor and creator.
I'm interested in the little man. Little big man, so I would say, because suffering increases him. He himself tells his little story in my books, and along with his story, a big one. What has happened and is happening to us is not yet meaningful, we must pronounce it. For starters, at least speak up. We are afraid of this until we are able to cope with our past. In Dostoevsky's Possessed, Shatov says to Stavrogin before the conversation begins: “We two creatures have come together in infinity ... for the last time in the world. Leave your tone and take the human one! Speak for once in a human voice.
This is how my conversations with my characters begin. Of course, a man speaks from his own time, he cannot speak from nowhere! But it is difficult to break through to the human soul, it is littered with the superstitions of the age, its addictions and deceptions. TV and newspapers.
I would like to take a few pages from my diaries to show how time moved... how an idea died... how I followed in its footsteps...
1980–1985
I am writing a book about the war... Why about the war? Because we are military people - we either fought or prepared for war. If you look closely, we all think in a military way. At home, on the street. That is why human life is so cheap here. Everything is like in a war.
I started with doubts. Well, another book about the war... Why?
On one of the journalistic trips I met a woman, she was a medical instructor in the war. She said: they went in winter through Lake Ladoga, the enemy noticed the movement and began to fire. Horses, people went under the ice. Everything happened at night, and she, as it seemed to her, grabbed and began to drag the wounded man to the shore. “I drag him wet, naked, I thought his clothes were torn off,” she said. - And on the shore I found that I had dragged a huge wounded beluga. And she turned down such a three-story mat - people suffer, but animals, birds, fish - for what? On another trip, I heard the story of a cavalry squadron medical instructor, how during the battle she dragged a wounded German into the funnel, but that the German had already discovered in the funnel, his leg was broken, he was bleeding. This is the enemy! What to do? Up there, their guys are dying! But she bandages this German and crawls on. He drags a Russian soldier, he is unconscious, when he regains consciousness, he wants to kill the German, and when he regains consciousness, he grabs his machine gun and wants to kill the Russian. “First one in the muzzle of the ladies, then the other. Our legs,” she recalled, “are all in the blood. The blood is mixed.”
It was a war that I did not know. Women's War. Not about heroes. Not about how some people heroically killed other people. I remember a woman's lament: “You walk across the field after the battle. And they lie... All young, so beautiful. They lie and look at the sky. I feel sorry for both of them." It was this “both and others” that told me what my book would be about. That war is murder. So it remained in the female memory. A man has just smiled, smoked - and already he is gone. Most of all, women talk about disappearance, about how quickly everything turns into nothing in a war. Both man and human time. Yes, they themselves asked to go to the front, at the age of 17-18, but they did not want to kill. And they were ready to die. Die for the Motherland. You can’t erase words from the history - for Stalin too.
The book was not published for two years, it was not published until perestroika. to Gorbachev. “After your book, no one will go to war,” the censor taught me. - Your war is terrible. Why don't you have heroes? I wasn't looking for heroes. I wrote history through the story of an unnoticed witness and participant. Nobody ever questioned him. What people think, just people about great ideas, we do not know. Immediately after the war, a person would tell one war, after tens of years another, of course, something changes with him, because he puts his whole life into memories. All of myself. The way he lived these years, what he read, saw, whom he met. What he believes. Finally, whether he is happy or not happy. Documents are living beings, they change with us...
But I am absolutely sure that there will never be girls like the military girls of 1941 again. It was the highest time of the "red" idea, even higher than the revolution and Lenin. Their Victory still obscures the Gulag. I love these girls endlessly. But it was impossible to talk with them about Stalin, about how, after the war, the trains with the winners went to Siberia, with those who were braver. The rest returned and remained silent. Once I heard: “We were free only during the war. At the forefront." Our main capital is suffering. Not oil, not gas - suffering. This is the only thing we are constantly mining. I'm always looking for an answer: why isn't our suffering converted into freedom? Are they in vain? Chaadaev was right: Russia is a country without memory, a space of total amnesia, a virgin consciousness for criticism and reflection.
Great books are lying underfoot...
1989
I am in Kabul. I didn't want to write about the war anymore. But here I am in a real war. From the Pravda newspaper: "We are helping the fraternal Afghan people to build socialism." Everywhere people of war, things of war. War time.
They didn’t take me into battle yesterday: “Stay at the hotel, young lady. Answer for you later." I sit in a hotel and think: there is something immoral in looking at someone else's courage and risk. The second week I'm already here and I can not get rid of the feeling that the war is a product of male nature, incomprehensible to me. But the routine of war is grandiose. I discovered that weapons are beautiful: machine guns, mines, tanks. The man thought a lot about how best to kill another person. The eternal dispute between truth and beauty. They showed me a new Italian mine, my “feminine” reaction: “Beautiful. Why is she beautiful? In a military way, they explained to me exactly that if this mine was run over or stepped on like this ... at such and such an angle ... half a bucket of meat would remain from a person. The abnormal here is spoken of as normal, taken for granted. Like, war... No one goes crazy, from these pictures that a man is lying on the ground, killed not by the elements, not by fate, but by another person.
I saw the loading of the “black tulip” (an airplane that takes zinc coffins with the dead to their homeland). The dead are often dressed in old military uniforms from the forties, with riding breeches, it happens that even this uniform is not enough. The soldiers were talking among themselves: “They brought new dead to the refrigerator. It smells like stale boar." I will write about it. I'm afraid they won't believe me at home. Our newspapers write about friendship alleys planted by Soviet soldiers.
I talk to the guys, many came voluntarily. Fawned over here. I noticed that most of the families of the intelligentsia - teachers, doctors, librarians - in a word, bookish people. They sincerely dreamed of helping the Afghan people build socialism. Now they are laughing at themselves. They showed me a place at the airport where hundreds of zinc coffins lay, mysteriously shining in the sun. The officer who accompanied me could not restrain himself: “Maybe my coffin is here too ... They will put it in there ... And why am I fighting here?” He was immediately afraid of his words: “You don’t write it down.”
At night I dreamed of the dead, everyone had surprised faces: how am I killed? Am I killed?
Together with the nurses, I went to the hospital for peaceful Afghans, we brought gifts to the children. Children's toys, sweets, cookies. I got about five teddy bears. We arrived at the hospital - a long hut, from bed and linen everyone had only blankets. A young Afghan woman came up to me with a child in her arms, she wanted to say something, for ten years everyone here learned to speak a little Russian, I gave the child a toy, he took it with his teeth. "Why teeth?" - I was surprised. The Afghan woman pulled the blanket off the little body, the boy was missing both arms. “It was your Russians who bombed.” Someone held me, I was falling...
I saw how our "Grad" turns villages into a plowed field. I was at an Afghan cemetery, as long as a village. Somewhere in the middle of the cemetery, an old Afghan woman was screaming. I remembered how in a village near Minsk they brought a zinc coffin into the house, and how my mother howled. It was not a human cry, and not an animal one ... Similar to the one I heard in the Kabul cemetery ...
I confess that I did not immediately become free. I was sincere with my characters and they trusted me. Each of us had our own path to freedom. Before Afghanistan, I believed in socialism with a human face. From there she returned free of all illusions. “Forgive me, father,” I said at the meeting, “you brought me up with faith in communist ideals, but it’s enough to see once how the recent Soviet schoolchildren whom you teach with your mother (my parents were rural teachers) kill unknown to them in a foreign land people so that all your words turn into dust. We are killers, daddy, you know!?” The father cried.
Many free people were returning from Afghanistan. But I also have another example. There, in Afghanistan, a guy shouted to me: “What can you, a woman, understand about war? Do people die in war like they do in books and movies? There they die beautifully, but my friend was killed yesterday, a bullet hit him in the head. He ran another ten meters and caught his brains ... "And seven years later, this same guy is now a successful businessman, he loves to talk about Afghanistan. - He called me: “What are your books for? They are too scary." It was already a different person, not the one whom I met in the middle of death, and who did not want to die at twenty ...
I asked myself what kind of book about the war I would like to write. I would like to write about a person who does not shoot, cannot shoot at another person, to whom the very thought of war brings suffering. Where is he? I didn't meet him.
1990–1997
Russian literature is interesting because it is the only one that can tell about the unique experience that once a huge country went through. People often ask me: why do you always write about the tragic? Because that's how we live. Although we now live in different countries, the “red” person lives everywhere. From that life, with those memories.
For a long time I did not want to write about Chernobyl. I did not know how to write about it, with what tool and where to approach? The name of my small country, lost in Europe, about which the world had heard almost nothing before, sounded in all languages, and we, Belarusians, became the peoples of Chernobyl. The first to touch the unknown. It became clear that in addition to communist, national and new religious challenges, more ferocious and total, but still hidden from view, await us ahead. Something has already been revealed after Chernobyl ...
I remember how the old taxi driver cursed desperately when the pigeon hit the windshield: “Two or three birds break in a day. And the newspapers say the situation is under control.”
In city parks, leaves were raked and taken outside the city, where the leaves were buried. They cut off the earth from the infected spots and also buried it - the earth was buried in the ground. They buried firewood, grass. They all had slightly crazy faces. An old beekeeper told: “I went out into the garden in the morning, something was missing, some familiar sound. Not a single bee... Not a single bee can be heard. None! What? What's happened? And on the second day they didn't fly out, and on the third... Then we were told that there was an accident at the nuclear power plant, and she was nearby. But for a long time we did not know anything. The bees knew, but we didn't." Chernobyl information in the newspapers was entirely military words: explosion, heroes, soldiers, evacuation... The KGB worked at the station itself. They were looking for spies and saboteurs, there were rumors that the accident was a planned action by Western intelligence agencies to undermine the camp of socialism. Military equipment was moving towards Chernobyl, soldiers were driving. The system worked, as usual, in a military way, but a soldier with a brand new machine gun in this new world was tragic. All he could do was take in large doses of radiation and die when he got home.
Before my eyes, a pre-Chernobyl man turned into a Chernobyl man.
Radiation could not be seen, touched, smelled... Such a familiar and unfamiliar world already surrounded us. When I went to the zone, they quickly explained to me: you can’t pick flowers, you can’t sit on the grass, you can’t drink water from a well ... Death lurked everywhere, but it was already some other kind of death. Under new masks. In an unfamiliar guise. Old people who survived the war were again evacuated - they looked at the sky: “The sun is shining ... There is no smoke, no gas. They don't shoot. Well, is this war? And you have to become refugees.”
In the morning everyone greedily grabbed newspapers and immediately put them aside with disappointment - no spies were found. They don't write about the enemies of the people. A world without spies and enemies of the people was also unfamiliar. Something new has begun. Chernobyl, following Afghanistan, made us free people.
For me, the world has expanded. In the zone, I did not feel like a Belarusian, Russian, or Ukrainian, but a representative of a biospecies that could be destroyed. Two catastrophes coincided: social - the socialist Atlantis went under water and space - Chernobyl. The fall of the empire worried everyone: people were preoccupied with day and life, what to buy with and how to survive? What to believe? Under what banners to rise again? Or should one learn to live without a big idea? The latter is unfamiliar to anyone, because they have never lived like this before. Before the "red" man stood hundreds of questions, he experienced them alone. He had never been so lonely as in the early days of freedom. There were shocked people around me. I listened to them...
I close my diary...
What happened to us when the empire fell? Previously, the world was divided: executioners and victims - this is the Gulag, brothers and sisters - this is war, the electorate - this is technology, the modern world. Previously, our world was still divided into those who sat and those who planted, today the division into Slavophiles and Westerners, into national traitors and patriots. And also on those who can buy and who cannot buy. The last, I would say, the most cruel test after socialism, because recently everyone was equal. The "red" man was never able to enter the realm of freedom that he dreamed about in the kitchen. Russia was divided without him, he was left with nothing. Humiliated and robbed. Aggressive and dangerous.
What I heard when I traveled around Russia...
- Modernization is possible with us through sharashkas and executions.
- Russian people do not seem to want to be rich, they are even afraid. What does he want? And he always wants one thing: that someone else does not become rich. richer than him.
“You won’t find an honest person here, but there are saints.
- We can’t wait for generations that aren’t flogged; Russian man does not understand freedom, he needs a Cossack and a whip.
- Two main Russian words: war and prison. He stole, took a walk, sat down ... went out and sat down again ...
- Russian life should be evil, insignificant, then the soul rises, it realizes that it does not belong to this world ... The dirtier and bloodier, the more space for it ...
“For a new revolution, there is neither strength nor any kind of madness. There is no courage. A Russian person needs such an idea that frost on the skin ...
- So our life hangs out - between the mess and the barracks. Communism is not dead, the corpse is alive.
I take the liberty of saying that we missed our chance, which we had in the 90s. To the question: what kind of country should be - strong or worthy, where people live well, they chose the first one - strong. Now it's time for power again. Russians are fighting Ukrainians. With brothers. My father is Belarusian, my mother is Ukrainian. And so do many. Russian planes are bombing Syria...
The time of hope has been replaced by the time of fear. Time turned back... Second hand time...
Now I'm not sure that I finished writing the story of the "red" man...
I have three homes - my Belarusian land, my father's homeland, where I have lived all my life, Ukraine, my mother's homeland, where I was born, and the great Russian culture, without which I cannot imagine myself. They are all dear to me. But it's hard to talk about love these days.
This Sunday, December 10, the annual Nobel Prize ceremony will take place in Stockholm. Among the laureates is an American scientist with Belarusian roots Barry Barish. He was awarded the Prize in Physics for proving the existence of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein. The ancestors of Barry Barish are Jewish emigrants from Western Belarus, who left for the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Few people know that in the entire history of the Nobel Prize, 17 of our countrymen, as well as the sons and grandchildren of those who once lived on Belarusian soil, have become its laureates.
Simon Smith
Born April 30, 1901 in Pinsk, he was the middle of three children of the fur trader Abram and his wife Polina (née Fridman). After graduating from a real school, Semyon Kuznets entered the law faculty of Kharkov University, where he also studied economic disciplines. In 1922, Semyon and his elder brother Solomon emigrated to the USA, to New York, where their father already lived. By that time, Abram Kuznets changed his surname to Smith (translated as “blacksmith”). And Semyon and abroad retained his original surname. As for the name, in the American manner, he began to call himself Simon. Simon Kuznets graduated from Columbia University in 1924 with a master's degree in economics. At the age of 25, he completed his Ph.D. thesis on “Cyclical Fluctuations: Retail and Wholesale in the United States 1919-1925.” and received a Ph.D. He taught at the most prestigious universities in the United States.
In 1971, Simon Kuznets was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his empirically based interpretation of economic growth, which led to a deeper understanding of the development process. In September 2007, the Beis Aharon boarding school in Pinsk was named after Semyon (Simon) Kuznets.
Zhores Alferov
He was born on March 15, 1930 in Vitebsk in the family of a timber rafting man. In 1945, the family moved to Minsk, where Zhores graduated from high school No. 42. He assembled his first detector receiver at the age of 10.
After school, Zhores Alferov entered the first year of the energy department of the Belarusian Polytechnic Institute and, in connection with the family's move, continued his studies at the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute. Having begun work as a researcher in the laboratory of the world famous Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Zhores Alferov in 1987 became the head of this university.
In 2000, Zhores Alferov, together with American scientists Herbert Kremer and Jack Kilby, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for developments in the field of modern information technology. They discovered fast opto- and microelectronic components based on multilayer semiconductor structures.
Svetlana Aleksievich
On October 8, 2015, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Svetlana Aleksievich, a Belarusian journalist and writer, “for her polyphonic composition - a monument of suffering and courage in our time.” The first Nobel Prize in Literature in the history of Belarus was given to the writer not even for one specific work, but in fact for all books written before 2015. First of all, we are talking about the books “War does not have a woman's face”, “Last witnesses”, “Zinc boys”, “Chernobyl prayer”, “Second hand time”.
Svetlana Aleksievich became the first in the history of Belarus and the first Russian-speaking writer in the last 30 years to receive the Nobel Prize.
Born in Ivano-Frankivsk (Ukraine). Soon she, together with her parents, moved to her father's homeland - to Belarus. In 1965 she graduated from the Kopatkevich secondary school in the Petrikovsky district of the Gomel region. She worked as an educator at the Osovets boarding school, a teacher of history and German at the Belyazhevich seven-year school in the Mozyr district, and as a journalist in various publications. For more than ten years she lived in Western Europe, but in 2013 she returned to Belarus. It is symbolic that Svetlana Aleksievich ended her Nobel lecture with the following words: “I have three homes - my Belarusian land, my father’s homeland, where I lived all my life, Ukraine, my mother’s homeland, where I was born, and the great Russian culture, without which I I don't represent myself. They are all dear to me.”
Menachem Begin
On August 16, 1913, in the city of Brest-Litovsk, a prominent Israeli politician, the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel, Menachem Begin, was born in the family of the head of the Jewish community of the city, Dov Begin, and his wife Khasi Kossovskaya. In Brest, he graduated from the Jewish school "Mizrahi" and the Polish high school. He entered the law department of Warsaw University, after which he received a doctorate in law. In 1948, Begin founded and led the Israeli political party Herut (Freedom Movement), was the leader of the Likud national bloc, which won the elections in 1977. As Prime Minister of Israel, in 1978, together with the leader of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work that contributed to understanding and human contacts between Egypt and Israel. As a result of the Camp David Accords, a major military conflict was avoided and the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt.
Throughout his distinguished career, Menachem Begin, who spoke nine languages, was considered a subtle, insightful politician and an outstanding orator.
Shimon Peres
Interestingly, our second countryman, Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres was born on the same day as Menachem Begin, only ten years later - in 1923. This happened in the town of Vishnevo, Volozhin district, Novogrudok province (today it is Volozhin district, Minsk region). The real name and surname of Shimon Peres is Semyon Persky.
In 1931 Semyon's father moved to Palestine. Three years later, having become rich in the grain trade and feeling that he was firmly on his feet, he moved his wife and children to him. At the age of 25, Shimon Peres was appointed Assistant Secretary General of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Thus began the dizzying career of this politician, who has been in almost all positions of responsibility, including the posts of president and prime minister.
As foreign minister in the Rabin government, he co-authored the Arab-Israeli peace agreements in the first half of the 1990s. Behind-the-scenes talks between representatives of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, held in Oslo for several months, led to the signing of the Declaration of Principles, which outlines the basis for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. By the way, Yitzhak Rabin, who was born in March 1922 in Jerusalem, was the son of a Mogilev Jewess, Rosa Cohen.
BY THE WAY
Among the laureates with Belarusian roots is one of the creators of the American atomic bomb, American physicist Richard Phillips Feynman. He was born in 1918 in New York in the family of former Minsker Melville Arthur Feynman and Lucille Feynman, née Phillips, the daughter of an emigrant from Poland. Together with Schwinger and Tomonaga, Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, which had profound implications for particle physics.
In 1975, for his contribution to the theory of optimal distribution of resources, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to the Soviet mathematician and economist, academician Leonid Kantorovich, who by that time was a laureate of the Stalin and Lenin Prizes. He was born in 1912 in St. Petersburg, but his father was from the village of Nadneman, Minsk region, and his mother was a native Minsker.
The Belgian scientist Ilya Prigogine is called the “second Einstein”. He was born on January 25, 1917 in Moscow. His father Roman, a chemical engineer, was from the Mogilev region, and his mother, musician Yulia Vikhman, was from Lithuania. In 1977, Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the thermodynamics of irreversible processes, especially for the theory of dissipative structures.
For almost four decades, the whole world has known the name of the American physicist, Professor Sheldon Lee Glashow. But his real name is Glukhovsky. He was born in New York in 1932 and was the youngest of three sons of emigrants from Bobruisk. When Sheldon's father moved to the US and set up a thriving plumbing repair business in New York, he changed his last name from Glukhovsky to Glashow. In 1979, Glashow, Salam and Weinberg were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions between elementary particles, including the prediction of weak neutral currents.
An outstanding scientist, American physicist Jerome Isaac Friedman was born on March 28, 1930 in Chicago, but his parents are from Belarus. Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 for groundbreaking research confirming the existence of quarks, "for a breakthrough in our understanding of matter."
In 1995, the Nobel Prize in Physics “for the experimental discovery of neutrinos” was given to two American physicists with Belarusian roots - Martin Pearl and Frederick Reines. Martin's father, Oscar Pearl, was born in Pruzhany, and Reines' parents are from the Grodno province.
The American neurologist and biochemist Stanley Ben Prusiner, who became famous for his research on complex brain diseases, also has Belarusian roots.
The father of one of the most talented American chemists, Alan Jay Heeger, awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery in the field of electrically conductive polymers, comes from Vitebsk.
Princeton University professor Paul Krugman is a descendant of Jews from Brest-Litovsk. In 2008 he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis of trade patterns and problems of economic geography.
Creativity Svetlana Aleksievich causes mixed reviews. Some of her books are used to make films and stage performances, while others consider the writer to be the mouthpiece of post-Soviet rubbish. She is credited with the invention of a new genre in literature - the confessional novel on behalf of a specific person. Aleksievich herself said in an interview that she dreams of collecting a hundred stories told by 50 women and 50 men in order to get a story about the emotional experiences of witnesses to the life and fall of the Soviet empire.
“The most interesting thing now is not politics, not the redistribution of the world, but this is the space of a small person. But at the same time, our culture and our history are illuminated through this space.”
Childhood and youth
Svetlana Aleksandrovna Aleksievich was born in the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk (then Stanislav) on May 31, 1948. The writer's family is international. Father was born in Belarus, mother in Ukraine. After demobilization, the head of the family moved his relatives to Belarus, to the Gomel region. There, Svetlana Aleksievich graduated from high school in 1965 and entered the university, choosing the faculty of journalism. In 1972, the future writer received a diploma from the Belarusian State University.
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Svetlana Aleksievich
The working biography of Svetlana Aleksievich began with work at school. At first she worked as a teacher at a boarding school, then she taught children history and German in the Mozyr region. Writing has long attracted Aleksievich, and she got a job as a correspondent in the regional newspaper Pripyatskaya Pravda. Then she switched to another publication - "Beacon of Communism" in one of the regional centers of the Brest region.
From 1973 to 1976, Svetlana Aleksievich worked in the regional Selskaya Gazeta. In 1976, she was offered a position as head of the essay and journalism department in the Neman magazine. Aleksievich worked there until 1984. In 1983 she was admitted to the Writers' Union of the USSR.
Since the early 2000s, Svetlana Aleksievich lived abroad, first in Italy, then in France and Germany, and eventually returned to Belarus.
Books
Svetlana Alexandrovna Aleksievich says that each book took from 4 to 7 years of life. During the period of writing, she met and talked with hundreds of people who witnessed the events described in the works. These people, as a rule, had a very difficult fate behind them: they went through the Stalinist camps, revolutions, fought in various wars, or survived the Chernobyl disaster.
Writer Svetlana Aleksievich
The first book, which begins the creative biography of Svetlana Aleksievich - "I left the village", exposing the attitude of the state towards the villagers. The publication was prepared for publication in the mid-70s, but the book never reached the reader. The party leadership banned the typographical set, and later the author herself refused to publish it.
"War has no woman's face" is a book about women who fought on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. They were snipers, pilots, tankers, underground workers. Their vision and perception of war is completely different from that of men. They were more difficult to experience other people's deaths, blood, murders. And at the end of the war, women veterans began a second front: they had to adapt to civilian life, forget about the horrors of war and become women again: wear dresses, high-heeled shoes, give birth to children.
Svetlana Aleksievich - "War is not a woman's face"
The book "War has no woman's face" was not published for 2 years, having lain in the publishing house. Aleksievich was accused of distorting the heroic image of Soviet women, of pacifism and excessive naturalism. The work was published during the years of perestroika and was published in several "thick" magazines.
The fate of subsequent works was also difficult. The second book was called The Last Witnesses. It consisted of 100 children's stories about the horrors of war. There is even more naturalism and terrible details seen through the eyes of children from 7 to 12 years old.
In the third work, Svetlana Aleksievich told about the crimes of the Afghan war. The Zinc Boys book was published in 1989. Its release was accompanied by a wave of negative reviews and criticism. And also - the trial, stopped after Western human rights activists and the public came to the defense of the disgraced writer.
Svetlana Aleksievich signs books for fans
War occupies a central place in the works of Svetlana Aleksievich. The writer herself explains this by the fact that the entire Soviet history is connected with the war and is saturated with it. She claims that all the heroes and most of the ideals of the Soviet people are military.
A fourth book, titled Charmed by Death, was released in 1993 to mixed reviews as well. This is a work about suicides registered in the first 5 years after the disappearance of the USSR. In it, the author tries to understand the causes and "charm" of death, which claims the lives of thousands of people - ordinary communists, marshals, poets, officials who committed suicide after the collapse of a gigantic empire. According to Aleksievich herself, this is a reflection on how the country got out of the "anesthesia of the past" and "the hypnosis of the great Deception."
Svetlana Aleksievich - "Chernobyl Prayer"
The fifth work called "Chernobyl Prayer" about peace and life after the Chernobyl disaster. Svetlana Alexandrovna believes that after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, not only the gene code and blood formula of the population of a large country changed, but the entire socialist continent disappeared under water.
Through all of Aleksievich's books, the communist idea is debunked, or, as the writer claims, "the great and terrible Utopia - communism, the idea of \u200b\u200bwhich has not completely died not only in Russia, but throughout the world."
“The wonderful deer of the eternal hunt” is a work about love, but again from a specific point of view of Aleksievich. Previously, in the writings of Svetlana, the hero got into extreme situations. In the new story, love becomes such an environment in which human qualities are manifested with no less zeal and depth.
Svetlana Aleksievich - "Second Hand Time"
“Second Hand Time” (“The End of the Red Man”) is dedicated to the memories of 20 people about the time from the beginning of perestroika to the beginning of the 21st century. These people talk about the hopes that they associated with a change in the political system in the country, about how they survived in the “dashing 90s”, when everything that cost at least some money went on sale, about how loved ones died in no one unnecessary Chechen conflicts.
Svetlana Aleksievich has been a contender for the Nobel Prize in the Literature category since 2013. But then the award was given to the Canadian writer Alice Munro. In 2014, French writer Patrick Modiano received it.
Presentation of the Nobel Prize to Svetlana AleksievichIn 2015, Aleksievich was again among the candidates who, in addition to the award, could become the owner of a cash reward of 8 million Swedish kronor ($953,000). In addition to her, the candidacies of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, the Kenyan Ngui Wa Thiongo, the Norwegian Yun Fosse and the American Philip Roth were considered.
On October 8, in Stockholm, the Nobel Prize was nevertheless awarded to Svetlana Aleksievich. The news about the award of the prize to the Belarusian writer was received ambiguously both in Russia and in Belarus.
Many talk about the political choice of the applicant. Aleksievich is an ardent anti-Soviet, known for her criticism of the domestic and foreign policies of the presidents and. The writer is accused of speculative-tendentious journalism and anti-Russian position.
Personal life
To questions about his personal life, Aleksievich replies that he can’t be happy. Husband, as the media found out, Svetlana does not have, as well as her own children. The writer raised her niece Natalia, the daughter of her prematurely deceased sister. The girl has her own family, named mother, she gave her granddaughter Yana. Photos of relatives practically do not appear in the press, mostly pictures of Aleksievich are published.
Svetlana Aleksievich now
In 2018, Svetlana Aleksievich won the Name Award for "boldly speaking out about the injustice" that exists in the countries of the former USSR, "criticizing the Russian annexation of Crimea and human rights violations in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, as well as the growing nationalism and oligarchy in Ukraine" . The award was presented by the human rights organization Reach All Women in War.
