Nostalgia and nihilism

‘Gilded doorknobs,’ spits a Party diehard as she contemplates the blessings of the Soviet Union’s collapse. ‘Is this freedom?’ Dozens of witnesses from the ‘lost generation’ in Russia who had ‘a communist upbringing and a capitalist life’ share Elena S’s disgust and bewilderment as they contribute to this epic fresco of an empire’s bitter aftermath. Some adjust smartly to the post-Soviet disorder, although a 35-year-old advertising manager reflects that ‘I never dreamed of being fucked in stairwells or saunas in exchange for expensive dinners.’ The few winners and many losers agree: ‘You can’t buy democracy with oil and gas… You need free people, and we didn’t have them.’

Since the millennium, the Swedish Academy has rewarded two great reporters with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Both show how empires end in minds as well as on maps. In his travelogues, V.S. Naipaul has chronicled not only the British imperial twilight but the longer rhythms of Islamic ascendancy and fragmentation. Svetlana Alexievich, born to a mother from Ukraine and a father from Belarus, has turned her own Naipaul-like marginality into a vantage point that lends a panoramic view of a culture in ruins.

Last year, she took the Nobel for five interview-led works that trace the downfall and afterlife of sovok — Soviet man —and build into a single ‘history of utopia’. True, Naipaul puts his own journey centre-stage while Alexievich retreats into the wings to let her subjects speak. But this is the art that conceals art. Her editor’s flair for selection, contrast and emphasis, her almost cinematic touch with cuts, pans and close-ups, make her a documentary virtuoso and not a transcription machine.

Prefaced by a jostling collage of voices from kitchen and street, each half of Second-hand Time traces the experience of ten individuals and their families in the years after the USSR crumbled in 1991.