Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Svetlana Alexievich (2013)
Cyrillic ( Belarusian )
Святлана Аляксандраўна Алексіевіч
Łacinka : Sviatłana Alaksandraŭna Aleksijevič
Transl. : Svjatlana Aljaksandraŭna Aleksievič
Transcr. : Svyatlana Aljaksandrauna Aleksievich
Cyrillic ( Russian )
Светлана Александровна Алексиевич
Transl .: Svetlana Aleksandrovna Aleksievič
Transcr .: Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich
Cyrillic ( Ukrainian )
Світлана Олександрівна Алексієвич
Transl. : Svitlana Oleksandrivna Aleksijevyč
Transcr. : Switlana Oleksandriwna Aleksievych

Svetlana Alexievich (* 31 May 1948 in Stanislaw , Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic , now Ivano-Frankivsk , Belarusian : Святлана Аляксандраўна Алексіевіч; Russian : Светлана Александровна Алексиевич; emphasis : Svetlana Alexievich) is a Belarusian writer. In 2015 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for her polyphonic work that is a monument to the suffering and courage of our time” . She writes in Russian . According to her own statement, her knowledge of the Belarusian language is insufficient to write in it.

Alexijewitsch deals with different literary genres such as short stories , essays and reportages and has developed a method with which the greatest possible literary approximation to real life is achieved, in the form of a summary of individual voices as a collage of everyday life.

Live and act

Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich was born in 1948 in the west of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. Her mother was Ukrainian, her father was Belarusian, at the time of her birth he was serving in the Soviet Army . After the end of his service the family moved to the Soviet Republic of Belarus . There the parents worked as teachers in a village where Swetlana also spent her childhood. She studied journalism at the Lenin University in Minsk (today: Belarusian State University ) until 1972. She then worked for a local newspaper and as a teacher. A year later she worked for the Land newspaper in Minsk. In 1976 she switched to the literary magazine Neman as a correspondent .

In the book The War Has No Female Face , which she completed in 1983, Alexievich applied her particular approach for the first time: a collage of individual voices based on their interviews about the fate of Soviet women soldiers in World War II . The Soviet censorship authority Glawlit accused them as a result of having defiled the "honor of the Great Patriotic War"; she has an "anti-communist attitude". Then she lost her job. The war has no female face was published as a book only in 1985 (German 1987) with the beginning of perestroika in the Soviet Union . The Belarusian director Wiktar Daschuk made the seven-part documentary The War Has No Female Face on the basis of Svetlana Alexievich's collection of material (approx. 500 tape recordings) . One of the parts of the film received one of the main prizes ( Silver Dove ) and the Foundling Prize at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival in 1983 . In 1985 the director was awarded the State Prize of the USSR for the film .

At the same time as the book The War Has No Female Face , Svetlana Alexijewitsch's next work was published, The Last Witnesses (1985, German 1989). In it, she addresses, among other things, the experiences of her own family during the war and under Stalin's rule .

For zinc boys (1989, German 1992), she interviewed more than five hundred veterans from the Soviet Afghan war and mothers of fallen soldiers. The title zinc boy refers to the dead soldiers whose bodies were placed in zinc coffins . From 1992 she had to answer for this book before a court in Minsk several times; but there was no conviction. After In the Spell of Death (1993, German 1994) followed (1997, German 2001) her work on the nuclear disaster in Ukraine under the title Chernobyl. A chronicle of the future with shocking reports from the people affected by the nuclear disaster.

Alexievich has received several awards for her committed documentary prose. Her play Conversations with the Living and the Dead, for which she had spoken for several years with people for whom the Chernobyl catastrophe of April 26, 1986 was the central event in their lives, was voted radio play of the year in 1999 and the following year with Robert Geisendörfer Prize awarded. Her works have been translated into over 30 languages. From 2003 to 2005 Alexievich was a member of the international jury of the Lettre Ulysses Award for literary reportage.

Despite her opposition to the dictatorial system under President Aljaksandr Lukashenka in Belarus - her phone was tapped, public appearances were banned - she returned to Minsk in 2011 after stays in Paris, Stockholm and Berlin.

The Board of Trustees of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade elected Alexijewitsch to be the winner of the Peace Prize 2013. He is honoring "the Belarusian writer who traces the worlds of her fellow men from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and who humbly and generously expresses their suffering and passions", so the reasoning of the jury. Furthermore, "in her reports about Chernobyl, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the unfulfilled hopes for a liberal country after the breakup of the Soviet empire in the tragic chronicle of the people, a basic stream of existential disappointments can be felt." The award ceremony took place at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 13, 2013 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt .

Alexievich has repeatedly interfered in current political debates. She criticized the domestic political repression in Belarus under Lukashenka. As a result, the public prosecutor launched a politically motivated investigation against her publisher Ihar Lohwinau in 2014. It also names the resovietization and remilitarization of Russian society under Vladimir Putin . He lies to his compatriots and builds his power on their "slave mentality". In 2018, Alexijewitsch was among the first to sign an open letter to the German Chancellor and the Federal Foreign Minister, in which they were asked to campaign for the release of the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov , who was imprisoned in Russia .

On October 8, 2015, Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2015 “... for her polyphonic work that is a monument to the suffering and courage of our time”.

Alexievich lives in exile. After the 2020 presidential election in Belarus , she called on the dictatorial ruling Aljaksandr Lukashenka to resign and leave the country. During the protests in Belarus in 2020 she became a member of the coordination council of the former presidential candidate Svyatlana Zichanouskaya .

Awards

Scene from the performance Conversations with the Living and the Dead, Geneva, April 25, 2009
Scene from the performance Conversations with the Living and the Dead, Geneva, April 25, 2009

Works in German

Books

Speeches, interviews and discussions

Arrangements by others for radio play and theater (selection)

literature

Web links

Commons : Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Светлана Алексиевич - о своих корнях, русском мире и Нобелевской премии in tut.by (Russian)
  2. ↑ “I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves” , alexievich.info
  3. ↑ (ru / de) Swetlana Alexijewitsch / Christine Hamel: The tone of her prose. Swetlana Alexijewitsch about her writing technique of the voice collage ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Audio, 2 minutes, Bayerischer Rundfunk , October 8, 2015
  4. ↑ a b A voice of the speechless. dradio.de, June 20, 2013, accessed June 20, 2013.
  5. ↑ a b Swetlana Alexijewitsch ( Memento from May 31, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), boersenverein.de
  6. ↑ ЦЯЖКІЧАС ПРАЦЯГ - Канцэпцыя новага Беларускага Адраджэньня , kamunikat.org
  7. ^ Wieland Becker and Volker Petzold : Tarkowski meets King Kong - History of the film club movement in the GDR . VISTAS, Berlin 2001.
  8. ↑ Showered with toilet bowls. Excerpts from Swetlana Alexijewitsch: “Zinkjungen” , Spiegel Online, accessed on June 20, 2013.
  9. ↑ Swetlana Alexijewitsch receives the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2013. ( Memento from October 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, accessed on June 20, 2013.
  10. ↑ Lettre Ulysses Award website , accessed June 20, 2013.
  11. ↑ Felix Ackermann: Who is actually being honored here? This Thursday, Swetlana Alexijewitsch receives the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 10, 2015, p. 15.
  12. ↑ Andreas Breitenstein asked Swetlana Alexijewitsch Swetlana Alexijewitsch about Russia's eternal militarism. Relapse into unhappy times . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 14, 2015, accessed on October 9, 2015.
  13. ↑ Preventing Oleg Sentsov's Death! Heinrich Böll Foundation , May 29, 2018, accessed on February 18, 2019 .
  14. ↑ http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/press.html
  15. ↑ The Nobel Prize Winner on Monte Verità , SRF Kulturplatz, April 19, 2017
  16. ↑ "Get out before it's too late" (sueddeutsche.de August 13, 2020)
  17. ↑ tagesschau.de: Belarus: Opposition founds coordination council. Retrieved August 18, 2020 .
  18. ↑ List of award winners on Svenska PEN ( memento of November 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), last accessed on May 2, 2011 (Swedish)
  19. ^ Winner of the Peace Prize , accessed on June 20, 2013.
  20. ↑ Laudation and acceptance speech (pdf), friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de
  21. ↑ spiegel.de 1992: excerpt
  22. ↑ A voice of the speechless. dradio.de, June 20, 2013, accessed June 20, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Alexievich, Svetlana Alexandrovna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Alexievich, Svetlana
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belarusian writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 31, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Ivano-Frankivsk