I frowned at his weird display of lack of compassion and empathy, knowing he documented thoroughly the suffering of the Russian people in the 20th century, both in A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 and in The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. their meek Soviet nostalgia in the epilogue of the book left me somewhat fidgety. Having finished the book, Figes’s inappropriately denigratory, almost mocking undertone towards the common Russian people and. Last year I read Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History, in which Orlando Figes outlines the history of the Soviet Union as ‘a hundred-year cycle of violence in pursuit of utopian dreams’ - a fluently written, very concise synthesis, predominantly political and narrative in structure. In 2015 Ms Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Svetlana Alexievich's books criticize political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus. Her major works are her grand cycle Voices of Utopia, which consists of five parts. With her 'documentary novels', Svetlana Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. In her books she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. Svetlana Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In Minsk she has worked at the newspaper Sel'skaja Gazeta, Alexievich's criticism of the political regimes in the Soviet Union and thereafter Belarus has periodically forced her to live abroad, for example in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden. She studied to be a journalist at the University of Minsk and worked a teacher, journalist and editor. Alexievich grew up in Belarus, where both her parents were teachers.

Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano Frankivsk, Ukraine.

Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich