Svetlana Aleksievich «Second Hand Time» is the final book of the famous cycle «Voices of Utopia» by the Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature.
“Communism had a crazy plan,” says the author, “to remake the ‘old’ man, the old Adam. And it worked … Maybe the only thing that happened. For more than seventy years in the laboratory of Marxism-Leninism, a separate human type has been developed — homo soveticus. Some believe that this is a tragic character, others call him a “scoop”. It seems to me that I know this man, he is well known to me, I have lived next to him, side by side for many years. He is me. These are my acquaintances, friends, parents. «
The monologues included in the book have been recorded for ten years on trips throughout the former Soviet Union.
Press about the book:
“Aleksievich has created a special genre — a polyphonic novel-confession, in which the history of the twentieth century is formed from small stories. In «Second Hand Time» Aleksievich says goodbye to Soviet times, «to that life of ours.»
Natalia Lomykina, Forbes.ru
“Paraphrasing Flaubert, who called himself ‘the man-pen’, the writer says of herself that she is ‘the man-ear’. However, «Second Hand Time» is not a verbatim fashionable today. <…> Aleksievich declares himself both as an interlocutor, leading with questions to the right conversation, and as an author in whose consciousness these disparate stories not only turn into evidence of time, but become a study of the character, consciousness of our contemporary, and of man in general. «
Tatiana Morozova, «Banner»
Attention! The phonogram contains obscene language
© Svetlana Aleksievich, 2013
© «Time», 2013
Recorded by Vimbo Production Center
© & ℗ «Vimbo» Production Center, 2019
Producers: Vadim Bukh, Mikhail Litvakov
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