Second-hand Time

‘In this spellbinding book, Svetlana Alexievich orchestrates a rich symphony of Russian voices telling their stories of love and death, joy and sorrow, as they try to make sense of the twentieth century, so tragic for their country.’
— J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature

‘The non-fiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Second-hand Time.’
— David Remnick, New Yorker

‘The goddess of ‘‘high journalism’’– that form without a name – is Svetlana Alexievich…. Her masterpiece, Second-hand Time, [is] a panorama of the lives of ordinary people who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. I’ve never read anything to touch her work – the tremendous scale of her inquiry, and yet the intimacy of the experiences she records. Her powers of compression fill me with awe.’
— Helen Garner, Australian

‘The force of her work, the source of its power and plausibility, is the choice of a generation (her own) as a major subject and the close attention to its major inflection point, which was the end of the Soviet Union.... Her non-fiction works as a kind of anti-fiction, and alternative to the alternative realities which, in both Russia and Belarus, arise behind the blindfold of a double nostalgia: of today’s ruling elite for the 1970s and 1980s, which were themselves a time of manufactured nostalgia for the Soviet 1930s and 1940s….Her Nobel Prize will expand the Russian world of letters, since her prose is accessible not only to those who share her background and concerns but to younger people who can learn from her what the Soviet Union was and what its legacy means.’
— Timothy Snyder, New York Review of Books

‘Absolutely fantastic.’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard

‘Second-Hand Time is [Alexievich’s] most ambitious work: many women and a few men talk about the loss of the Soviet idea, the post-Soviet ethnic wars, the legacy of the Gulag, and other aspects of the Soviet experience.... Through her books and her life itself, Alexievich has gained probably the world’s deepest, most eloquent understanding of the post-Soviet condition.’
— Masha Gessen, New Yorker

‘A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people talking in their kitchens.’
— Rachel Donadio, New York Times

‘Alexievich’s work follows the strands of thought and emotion wherever her voices take her – through nightmares, but also flashes of joy … The work is unique in the intimacy of the experience transmitted through the writing: which is, after all, only the ability to have a human ear, to listen, and to publish.’
— John Lloyd, Financial Times

‘I am engrossed in Svetlana Alexievich’s extraordinary Second-hand Time, an oral tapestry of post-Soviet Russia.’
— Julian Barnes, Guardian