Secondhand time
Secondhand time. Life on the Ruins of Socialism is a Russian report volume by the Belarusian author Swetlana Alexijewitsch , which was published in 2013 by Vremja in Moscow under the title "Vremja second-hand. Konec krasnogo čeloveka"and in the same year under the title "Second-hand time. Life on the rubble of socialism "was published by Hanser in German. Ganna-Maria Braungardt is the translator.
In this work, Alexievich describes people who were born in the Soviet Union and no longer live in the Soviet Union - partly because they emigrated, but mainly because the Soviet Union no longer exists. The work has been translated into numerous languages.
content
Secondhand-Zeit is a volume of reports that some reviews also refer to as a “documentary novel”. These are (almost) all interviews that are edited and presented as monologues by the interlocutors without additional comment by the author.
- Part one :
- Solace through apocalypse
From street noise and kitchen conversations (1991 - 2001)
- Ten stories in a red interior
About the beauty of dictatorship and butterflies in cement
Of brothers and sisters, executioners and victims ... and the electorate
Of whispers and screams ... and of enthusiasm
About a lonely red marshal and three days of a forgotten revolution
From the alms of memory and the greed for meaning
From another Bible and other believers
Of the cruelty of the flames and the rescue from above
From the sweet suffering and focus of the Russian mind
From a time when everyone who kills believes they are serving God
About a little red flag and the smirk of the hatchet
- Part two :
- The charm of emptiness
From street noise and kitchen talks (2002 - 2012)
- Ten stories without an interior
From Romeo and Juliet ... only they were called Margarita and Abulfas
From people who "after communism" immediately became different
Of loneliness that almost looks like happiness
About the desire to kill them all and the horror of wanting it
About an old woman with a scythe and a pretty young girl
From the suffering of others that God has placed for you on the threshold of your house
From common life and a hundred grams of light sand in a small white vase
About the insensitivity of the dead and the silence of the dust
Of deceptive darkness and a "different life that one can make out of this"
From courage and afterwards
- Comments from an ordinary woman
- Notes from the translator
The publisher describes the book as follows:
“The Cold War has been over for over twenty years, but post-Soviet Russia is still looking for a new identity. While people in the West still rave about the Gorbachev era, in Russia they want to forget about them. In the meantime, many people there, including the younger ones, are once again regarded as a great statesman, just as the socialist past is more and more often nostalgically glorified. For Swetlana Alexijewitsch, the Russians live in a time of "secondhand", of used ideas and words. Like a polyphonic choir, the people in their new book tell of the radical social upheaval in recent years. "
Reviews
The work was well discussed throughout.
“Alexievich gathers individuals who at times seem like figures from great Russian literature; Members of a closed society, the erosion of which no utopia of the new, better person could stop, no matter how much they were invoked again and again and every doubter was cruelly persecuted. Only rarely do you read brief comments by the collector of people between the portraits, then she tells the reader, for example, that the conversation was actually over at this point, but she was asked to stay and listen. Probably also because nobody before her could ask and listen like that. "
literature
German edition
- Secondhand time. Living on the ruins of socialism . Hanser Berlin, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24150-3
References and footnotes
- ↑ https://www.hanser-literaturverlage.de/buch/secondhand-zeit/978-3-446-24150-3/ Hanser Verlag accessed on May 14, 2020
- ↑ https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensions/sachbuch/swetlana-alexijewitsch-secondhand-zeit-kuechendissidents-besiegt-vom-kapitalismus-12548620.html FAZ accessed on May 14, 2020
The war has no female face (1985) | The last witnesses. Children in World War II (1985) | Zinc Boys (1989) | Chernobyl. A Chronicle of the Future (1997) | Secondhand time (2013)