I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, "If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You'd have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon." When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, "Is this something I should say?" I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat.
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl
Svetlana Alexievich
has been awarded the Nobel prize for literature, "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time." The awarding of the literature prize to a nonfiction writer is unusual.
The Nobel committee rarely chooses nonfiction writers for the literature prize.
Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Prize in literature, Ron Charles, Washington Post
Her writings, characterized by plain language and detail so visceral it's sometimes painful to read, won her this year's Nobel literature prize.
She is an unusual choice. The Swedish Academy, which picks the prestigious literature laureates, has only twice before bestowed the award on non-fiction — to Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell — and had never honored journalistic work with a Nobel.
New Nobel literature prize winner transcends easy categories, Yuras Karmanau, Associated Press
Fiction might aim at truth beyond literal fact. Nonfiction at a truth grounded in fact. And literary nonfiction to adopt techniques from fiction writing, to get at a truth grounded in fact.
"Svetlana adopts a very colloquial style that makes her work quite accessible," [U.S. publisher John] O'Brien said. "Her method is to make these non-fiction pieces into what might almost pass as short stories, while still remaining completely faithful to the facts and tone of the people being interviewed."
The Artistic Triumph of Svetlana Alexiyevich, Michele A. Berdy, Moscow Times
Zinky Boys (
Cinkovye mal’čiki in the original), is an oral history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. An oral history of the effects of the war on people. It is a collection of accounts from women and men, their voices, without, except strictly speaking, the voice of a writer. The words come from others. The literary vision is her own.
I want to evoke a world not bound by the laws of ordinary verisimilitude but fashioned in my own image. My aim is to describe feelings about the war, rather than the war itself.
Notes from My Diary, Svetlana Alexievich
The title comes from the zinc coffins used to ship home soldiers killed in the war. In a literary way, this symbol, this metaphor, this fact, is deeply woven into the nonfiction work.
As, for example, from the intro quote here, that there might not be much left to ship home. That you would have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon. Can a writer say that within the conventions of fiction? Can it be said within the conventions of nonfiction? Can you say that, can it be said, within a political system wanting to both glorify the war, and hide the truth of it?
"This wasn't what they wrote about in books," Alexiyevich said in an interview after a speaking engagement two weeks ago in Moscow. "This was a completely different war."
True Stories, Alexander Osipovich, Moscow Times
The Soviet war in Afghanistan described in
Zinky Boys comes across to me as different from our own, but not completely different. The brutality of the Soviet war is unrelenting on all sides. The alienation and distance of the people from their society is complete.
As we listen to them, however, we need to bear in mind certain aspects of Soviet life with no immediate parallel in the West.
To begin with, we may find it difficult to envisage the almost complete ignorance in which the Soviet public was kept about the war
Translators' preface, Julia and Robin Whitby
We have an ignorance about the war, and we are kept that way, but our ignorance is not complete. In our press, we can read about
our trade deficit and
our imperial interests and
our southern borders.
What are they writing about in the press? About our trade deficit and such geopolitical issues as our imperial interests and our southern borders.
Notes from My Diary, Svetlana Alexievich
But we can also read
accounts of the devastation of the war on people who have served there, and can expect that as a matter of course.
To my reading, the voices in Zinky Boys have a desire for truth, many of them. Truth in the work is presented as multifaceted, contradictory, and also coherent. This is the literary vision. And the voices in Zinky Boys, to my reading, have little expectation of truth from their society, whatever the desire.
I read the work as a stance against having no expectation of truth. Or as a portrait of what happens when the expectation of truth disappears, the devastation in individual lives that brings, and as a warning to us against it.
A week ago, United States warplanes struck a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz. Médecins Sans Frontières is calling for a transparent and independent investigation. This is an expectation for truth.
The United States edition of Zinky Boys, published in 1992, comes with a preface drawing parallels to the war in Vietnam. For the current United States war in Afghanistan, the Soviet war there is at a level beyond parallel. The Soviet war in Afghanistan and our war in Afghanistan, are in some ways the very same war. The present war is a continuation of the old one. There have just been different stages of that war.
For understanding the current war, works like Zinky Boys, the voices in it, are vital.