Interesting Times

Svetlana Alexievich, 2016, Second-Hand Time, 

Juggernaut, pp. 570

“Our children aren’t like us. What are they like? Their own time, each other.”

Somewhere in the book is the Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’. This is the story of the lives and times of the erstwhile Soviet Union, its fall and the time that came after. What was one day politics became forbidden the next, what was once crime became business later. How did people live through the nation once envisioned, in the protracted kitchen spaces of democracy where there was dissent and disillusionment? Svetlana writes, ‘Freedom was materialised out of thin air: everyone was intoxicated by it, but no one had been really prepared. Where was this freedom? Only around kitchen tables where out of habit people bad mouthed their government….it is when you can live without having to think about freedom, Freedom is normal.’ That little patch of freedom was the kitchen talk.

How did these people normalise the war time spirit that flowed into their peace times, into generations of loyal dreamers? From the soldiers of a war, people had to transform themselves to its public servants. When the future determined by a great idea comes to a standstill with the fall of the idea, faith, beliefs, lives are lost not to death but to time that keeps flowing. Then time does come second hand. This space of black and white- of what once was and is lost- blurs your vision and ruins your spirit. It is a dangerous place to live because there is no time to enjoy life there. How did they negotiate belief, faith, joy, love and sorrow and above all the vicissitudes of everyday desires?

This is history written from below, sewing the voices of many as they retell their story as they experienced the rise and fall of the soviet. In a form that mixes reportage and oral history, Svetlana leaves a narrative documentation that brings voices and counter voices open to new interpretations of a lost time. Like an epic chorus or a collective novel, the gathering strength of many voices gives us truth through meandering prose of contradiction. Svetlana lets people speak for themselves with their jumbled memory, immediacy, proximity and nostalgia as well as the terrible efforts at erasing longing and arriving at closure. It is futile to draw ‘meaning’ or interpretation in the narrative; rather what is overwhelmingly rich is the context that one person is- it is in her vast miniature expanse that every event happens and every value shatters and is remade. What makes these voices poignant is the way in which each individual comes to terms with a great idea that was bestowed on them, the collective memory that is left unarchived and now the history that is hidden from everyone. It is a history that is washed with intimate feelings.