Nobel Prize in Literature Alexievich. Nobel speech by Svetlana Alexievich. About the Ukrainian conflict
32 years have passed since the writing of the first book and the awarding of the Nobel Prize... What is Svetlana Alexievich working on now? And also, especially for you, the opportunity to look at the rare autograph of the writer.
Photo scoopnest.com
Somehow Alexander Lukashenko complained that among Belarusian writers there are no creators of the level of Leo Tolstoy, and at a meeting with the heads of leading Belarusian media on January 21, he stated that the state would provide serious support to the author of a world-class Belarusian work:
I said, give me at least one, for example, “War and Peace,” and I will provide you with enormous support.
It turns out that our President’s literary sense failed us; we have authors who have confirmed their world class even without his “gigantic” support. This happens, because even in the Bible it was said: “ The prophet is not in his own country».
So we “didn’t notice” the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich , which on October 8, 2015, the Nobel committee of 198 nominees unanimously awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the entire history of this prize, out of 112 winners, Alexievich became the fourteenth woman to receive the prize in the field of literature and the first Belarusian laureate.
Svetlana Alexievich was born in 1948 in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk (Ukraine). In 1972 she graduated from the journalism department of the Belarusian State University. Lenin. She worked as a teacher at a boarding school. Since 1966 - in the editorial offices of the regional newspapers "Prypyatskaya Prauda" and "Mayak Communism", in the republican "Rural Newspaper", since 1976 - in the magazine "Neman".
In 1983, Alexievich wrote her first book, “War Has No woman's face”, which lay in the publishing house for two years, then was published in a magazine, and then separately in a large circulation. In addition to this, Alexievich published 5 more books: “The Last Witnesses”, “Enchanted by Death”, “Zinc Boys”, “Chernobyl Prayer” and “Second Hand Time”.
The writer's books were published in 19 countries, including the USA, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Sweden, France, China, Vietnam, Bulgaria, and India. Literary creativity Svetlana Alexievich was awarded no less than 20 prizes: 3 prizes from the USSR, 3 from Russia, as well as prizes from several Western European countries and the USA.
How did people in Belarus react to Alexievich’s work? Her circle of readers dates back to Soviet times; until the early 1990s, her books were published in our country and translated into Belarusian (Aleksievich is a Russian-speaking writer). But due to the fact that she criticized the current government in her interviews, this government stopped “noticing” her and, as Alexievich herself put it, “ the state pretends that I don’t exist " For the last 20 years, her books have been published only abroad, where films and plays were made based on her scripts, where she received awards, often and for long periods of time abroad.
It turned out that foreign readers got to know and appreciate Alexievich’s work better. On October 8, immediately after the announcement of the laureate's name, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sarah Danius expressed her opinion to Swedish television SVT about Alexievich’s work:
Describing people of the Soviet era, post-Soviet, she stepped over the boundaries of journalism, creating a completely new literary genre. She is simply a wonderful writer! The Literature Prize was awarded to the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich for her polyphonic works - a monument to suffering and courage in our time.
Photo: belsat.eu
For decades, Alexievich dated different people, recorded on a tape recorder and then transferred their confessions to paper. Through Alexievich’s books we can feel how many people were touched by facts and events, how they experienced them, let them pass through their souls. This is living oral history, embodied in the genre of artistic and documentary prose. Alexievich says about himself that he is captive of journalism, but does not want to call his works journalism. And he calls them a “novel of voices.” To be precise, even before Svetlana Alexievich, Soviet writers created their books “I am from the village of fire” and “The Blockade Book” in this genre Ales Adamovich And Daniil Granin . Alexievich mastered and developed this genre to worldwide recognition. In the preface to Alexievich’s books “War Has Not a Woman’s Face” and “The Last Witnesses,” 1988 edition, the famous Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich described the techniques of this genre as follows:
... to turn not just to experienced people, their memory, their experiences, but to those whose fate and memory are one of the painful points of our time. A painful, painful memory of events that touched the nerve itself folk life. ...A person who undertakes such work must have a special gift of empathy, which is an essential part of the talent of a writer and artist. Without this, if anything happens, it will be in a different capacity, the genre will not be formulated, it will not work. Well, the third condition is really strong, developed sense aesthetic evaluation, so necessary for the selection and assembly of raw material into a literary work... Yes, such literature is not for easy, idle reading. And it’s not our author’s willfulness to torment the poor reader for some reason. Modern life itself suggested, one might say, imposes such material, and this path, and this genre. If anyone is “guilty,” then she is: there are claims against her, and demand from her!.. Having at hand ... whole mountains of deep material of people’s life, human psychology - here even ordinary literary talent can do a lot, is able to shake the reader’s consciousness so , as only the great managed before... I don’t see, I don’t know of another genre that would be so fruitful and beneficial, so enriching and strengthening young literary talent, than this - living for years in memory, the destinies of hundreds and hundreds of people, writing, creating in collaboration with the people themselves.
Back in the early 1980s, Ales Adamovich insightfully discerned the talent and great future of Svetlana Alexievich’s books:
What Svetlana loaded her soul with will last her entire life. But let's not feel sorry for her. Carrying someone else's burden, the burden of one's entire life, is the duty of a writer. This is his profession. If we take her seriously... I am more than confident in the writing future of a person with such a beginning of a literary path as Svetlana Alexievich.
On global recognition Alexievich’s creativity, the authorities are forced to react. She received congratulations from our President, from Russian minister culture, from the President of Ukraine.
Favored by the authorities, awarded 10 orders and 40 medals, retired police general, senator, author of about 50 detective and adventure books, honored cultural figure and chairman of the Writers' Union of the Republic of Belarus Nikolay Cherginets told RIA Novosti on Thursday:
This Nobel Prize is a confirmation of the merits of all Belarusian literature. Svetlana crowned these achievements. We (in the Union of Writers of Belarus - ed.) are glad that Belarusian literature is being talked about in the world. I think that this positive event will generate interest in Belarusian literature, especially since many interesting works have appeared over the last decade.
Cherginets also dispelled the opinion that only a Belarusian-speaking writer can truly be called Belarusian:
Every writer who lives in Belarus and writes is a Belarusian writer, especially since he raises the authority of the entire country with his creativity. Of course, in any situation, Alexievich is a Belarusian writer.
Let's hope that soon Alexievich's books will be freely available for purchase in our bookstores and borrow from our libraries. Or maybe it will even be recognized as a classic in the CIS and included in school programs? If only Alexievich’s creative talent did not dry up after being awarded the world prize, as happened with some famous writers. For about 10 years now, Alexievich has been collecting material for a book about love and happiness, which readers are eagerly awaiting.
On November 20, 2002, I was lucky enough to attend a meeting of readers with Belarusian writers Vladimir Orlov, Svetlana Alexievich and Levon Borshchevsky in Vitebsk regional library. After the meeting, I approached Alexievich with all the 4 books I had written by her, and she autographed them. I'm glad that these are now autographs of a Nobel laureate. But for last work Alexievich “Second Hand Time” two years ago I had to make a special trip to Smolensk.
Autograph of a Nobel laureate
Until the books of Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich are published in affordable editions, they can be read and downloaded on the Internet. If only our people did not forget how to read, understand and become smarter.
This Sunday, December 10th, in Stockholm there will be a ceremony presentation of the annual Nobel Prize. Among the laureates is an American scientist with Belarusian roots, Barry Barish. He was awarded a prize in physics for proving the existence of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein. Barry Barish's ancestors are Jewish emigrants from Western Belarus, who left for the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Few people know that throughout the history of the Nobel Prize, 17 of our fellow countrymen, as well as the sons and grandsons of those who once lived on Belarusian soil, have become its laureates.
Simon Kuznets
Born on April 30, 1901 in Pinsk, he was the middle of three children of fur trader Abram and his wife Polina (née Friedman). After graduating from real school, Semyon Kuznets entered the Faculty of Law at Kharkov University, where he also studied economic disciplines. In 1922, Semyon and his older brother Solomon emigrated to the USA, to New York, where their father already lived. By that time, Abram Kuznets had changed his last name to Smith (translated as “blacksmith”). And Semyon retained his original surname abroad. As for his name, in the American manner he began to call himself Simon. In 1924, Simon Kuznets graduated from Columbia University with a master's degree in economics. At the age of 25, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic “Cyclic fluctuations: retail and wholesale in the United States in 1919-1925.” and received his Ph.D. He has taught at the most prestigious universities in the United States.
In 1971 for an empirically based interpretation economic growth, which led to a deeper understanding of the development process, Simon Kuznets was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. In September 2007, the Beis Aharon boarding school in Pinsk was named after Semyon (Simon) Kuznets.
Zhores Alferov
Born on March 15, 1930 in Vitebsk in the family of a timber raftsman. In 1945, the family moved to Minsk, where Zhores graduated from secondary school No. 42. He assembled his first detector receiver at the age of 10.
After school, Zhores Alferov entered the first year of the energy faculty of the Belarusian Polytechnic Institute and, due to the relocation of his family, continued his studies at the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute. Having started working as a research assistant in the laboratory of the world-famous Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Zhores Alferov became the head of this university in 1987.
In 2000, Zhores Alferov, together with American scientists Herbert Kremer and Jack Kilby, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for developments in the field of modern information technology. They discovered fast opto- and microelectronic components based on multilayer semiconductor structures.
Svetlana Alexievich
On October 8, 2015, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and writer, “for her polyphonic composition - a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” The first Nobel Prize in Literature in the history of Belarus was given to a writer not even for one specific work, but in fact for all books written before 2015. First of all we're talking about about the books “War Doesn’t Have a Woman’s Face”, “The Last Witnesses”, “Zinc Boys”, “Chernobyl Prayer”, “Second Hand Time”.
Svetlana Alexievich became the first in the history of Belarus and the first Russian-speaking writer in the last 30 years to receive Nobel Prize.
Born in Ivano-Frankivsk (Ukraine). Soon she and her parents moved to her father’s homeland - Belarus. In 1965 she graduated from the Kopatkevich secondary school in the Petrikovsky district of the Gomel region. She worked as a teacher at the Osovets boarding school, a history teacher and German language at the Belyazhevichi seven-year school in the Mozyr region, as a journalist in various publications. She lived in countries for more than ten years Western Europe, but returned to Belarus in 2013. It is symbolic that your Nobel lecture Svetlana Alexievich ended with these words: “I have three houses - my Belarusian land, the homeland of my father, where I lived all my life, Ukraine, the homeland of my mother, where I was born, and the great Russian culture, without which I cannot imagine myself. They are all dear to me.”
Menachem Begin
August 16, 1913 in the city of Brest-Litovsk in the family of the leader Jewish community Menachem Begin, a prominent Israeli politician and the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel, was born in the city of Dov Begin and his wife Khasi Kossovskaya. In Brest, he graduated from the Mizrahi Jewish school and the Polish high school. He entered the law department of the University of Warsaw, after which he received a doctorate in law. In 1948, Begin founded and headed the Israeli political party Herut (“Freedom Movement”) was the leader of the national Likud bloc, which won the elections in 1977. As prime minister of Israel, he and Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 for their work promoting understanding and human contacts between Egypt and Israel. As a result of the Camp David Accords, a major military conflict was avoided and the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt.
Throughout his extraordinary career, Menachem Begin, who spoke nine languages, was considered a subtle, insightful politician and an outstanding orator.
Shimon Peres
It is interesting that our second fellow countryman, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres was born on the same day as Menachem Begin, only ten years later - in 1923. This happened in the town of Vishnevo, Volozhin district, Novogrudok voivodeship (today it is the Volozhin district of the Minsk region). The real name and surname of Shimon Peres is Semyon Persky.
In 1931, Semyon's father moved to Palestine. Three years later, having become rich in the grain trade and feeling that he was firmly on his feet, he moved his wife and children to live with him. At the age of 25, Shimon Peres was appointed assistant secretary general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Thus began the dizzying career of this politician, who held almost all responsible posts, including the posts of president and prime minister.
As foreign minister in the Rabin government, he became one of the authors of the Arab-Israeli peace agreements in the first half of the 1990s. Behind-the-scenes negotiations over several months in Oslo between representatives of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization led to the signing of a Declaration of Principles, general outline articulating the basis for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, as well as PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. By the way, Yitzhak Rabin, born in March 1922 in Jerusalem, was the son of a Mogilev Jew, Rosa Cohen.
BY THE WAY
Among the laureates with Belarusian roots is one of the creators of the American atomic bomb, American physicist Richard Phillips Feynman. He was born in 1918 in New York in the family of former Melville Minsk resident Arthur Feynman and Lucille Feynman, née Phillips, the daughter of an emigrant from Poland. Together with Schwinger and Tomonaga, Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize for his fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, which had profound consequences for particle physics.
In 1975, the Soviet mathematician and economist, academician Leonid Kantorovich, who by that time was a laureate of the Stalin and Lenin Prizes, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contribution to the theory of optimal resource allocation. He was born in 1912 in St. Petersburg, but his father was from the village of Nadneman, Minsk region, and his mother was a native Minsk resident.
Belgian scientist Ilya Prigogine is called “the second Einstein.” He was born on January 25, 1917 in Moscow. His father Roman, a chemical engineer, was from the Mogilev region, and his mother, musician Yulia Vikhman, was from Lithuania. In 1977, Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the thermodynamics of irreversible processes, especially for the theory of dissipative structures.
For almost four decades, the whole world has known the name of the American physicist, Professor Sheldon Lee Glashow. But his real name is Glukhovsky. He was born in New York in 1932 and was the youngest of three sons of emigrants from Bobruisk. When Sheldon's father moved to the United States and founded a thriving plumbing repair business in New York, he changed his last name from Glukhovsky to Glashow. In 1979, Glashow, Salam and Weinberg were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions between elementary particles, including the prediction of weak neutral currents.
An outstanding scientist, American physicist Jerome Isaac Friedman was born on March 28, 1930 in Chicago, but his parents are from Belarus. Friedman was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for his seminal research confirming the existence of quarks, “for breakthroughs in our understanding of matter.”
In 1995, the Nobel Prize in Physics “for the experimental detection of neutrinos” was awarded to two American physicists with Belarusian roots - Martin Pearl and Frederic Reines. Martin's father, Oscar Perl, was born in Pruzhany, and Raines' parents are from the Grodno province.
The American neurologist and biochemist Stanley Ben Prusiner, who became famous for his research into complex brain diseases, also has Belarusian roots.
The father of one of the most talented American chemists, Alan Jay Heeger, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery in the field of electrically conductive polymers, is from Vitebsk.
Princeton University professor Paul Krugman is a descendant of Jews from Brest-Litovsk. In 2008, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis of trade patterns and problems in economic geography.
Photo: Zhores Alferov, Nobel Prize laureate in physics
The Belarusian land has given the world many outstanding scientists. Some spent their childhood in Sineokaya, others were born into immigrant families.
Zhores Alferov, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2000
The strength of Belarus lies in its people, who create the future with their labor. And the first feeling when you arrive in Belarus: you are in a well-groomed, modern, civilized European country, - Alferov said recently during his visit to the country.
The parents of the Nobel laureate were born here; he himself was born in Vitebsk in 1930, and lived here for several years. Then there were numerous moves - before the war and during it, and after the family moved to Minsk, where Alferov graduated from the local school with a gold medal and studied at the Polytechnic for several semesters. And then there was a transfer to the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute and a brilliant scientific career. Candidate's, doctor's, title of professor, post of vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, half a thousand (!) scientific works, fifty inventions, a mandate as a State Duma deputy and, finally, a Nobel Prize for the development of semiconductor heterostructures.
The modern development of nanotechnology is based on the developments of Alferov and his followers and would be impossible without his research. Even many ordinary things in our lives became possible only thanks to him. "Alferov laser" is used in CD players and mobile phones, other inventions - in car headlights, traffic lights and cash registers in stores all over the world.
Alferov does not forget his homeland - he takes an active part in the life of the Belarusian scientific community, in the 90s he became a foreign member of the local Academy of Sciences.
Belarus is my homeland. My parents lived here permanently until 1963, and I always came home on holidays and on vacation. And now I want to come to the Vitebsk region, to my land, to bow to my native places.
Simon Kuznets, Nobel Prize in Economics, 1971
One of the most outstanding economists of the 20th century was born in Pinsk in 1901, but connected his life with another country - the USA, and even changed his name to the American way. Before emigrating, his name was Semyon, and he managed to graduate from the 4th grade of the city real school before moving to Ukraine with his mother and brothers. There the future genius studied at the Kharkov Commercial Institute. Kuznets came to the USA in the 20s, completed his studies at Columbia University, and taught for many years at Hopkins University and Harvard.
He was reluctant to talk about his early years, - the scientist’s son Paul told the researchers in response to a question about what he said about Pinsk. - When I was still a child I asked him about early period life, he discovered that he did not want to talk about it. I suspect that the hardships associated with the First World War and the Revolution were the reason.
Simon Kuznets is the man who made economics a science. It was he who coined and coined the term “gross national product.” It was Kuznets who proved the now-considered truism that income inequality is greater in poor countries than in rich ones. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his “empirically grounded interpretation of economic growth, which led to a new, deeper understanding of economic and social structure and the development process as a whole."
Menachem Begin, Nobel Peace Prize, 1978
It is curious that in the same Pinsk city real school, a decade and a half before Kuznets, another great scientist, Chaim Weizmann, studied very successfully. He, like several other people from these places, will head the state of Israel decades later and become its first president.
He was born in Brest-Litovsk (now simply Brest), graduated from Jewish religious school and a state gymnasium. In total, Begin lived in Brest for 18 years.
Later there were radical views, arrests, prisons, underground struggle and completely open struggle, participation in the Israeli War of Independence, victory in it, years in opposition and, finally, victory in the elections at the head of the Likud movement.
A radical oppositionist became prime minister. He turned the country's history around by carrying out the most ambitious economic reform. He prevented a major military conflict by signing the Camp David Accords and returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt (Egypt responded by recognizing Israel's right to a state). For Camp David, Begin received the Nobel Prize together with Egyptian President Sadat.
He recalled his native places rather with bitterness - so many trials befell him and his family in Brest. But the city itself is proud of such an outstanding native. A few years ago, a monument to Menachem Begin was erected in Brest.
Richard Phillips Feynman, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1965
His paternal grandparents - Jacob and Anna - lived in Minsk, from where they left for the USA in late XIX century, Richard's dad was only five years old at the time. He did not remember life in Minsk, and history did not preserve the memories of his grandfather himself.
Feynman himself, in his half-joking memoirs, does not talk about the homeland of his ancestors, but pays tribute to his grandfather: thanks to him, even during the years of the Great Depression, they lived better than many:
"We lived in big house; My grandfather left it to his children, but apart from this house we didn’t have too much money. It was huge wooden house, which I braided the outside with wires, I had plugs in all the rooms, so I could listen to my radios everywhere, which were upstairs in my laboratory.”
Feynman devoted a significant part of his life to theoretical physics; he is the creator of quantum electrodynamics. It was this direction that formed the basis of elementary particle physics. For this research he received the Nobel Prize in 1965 (together with two other scientists), but Feyman had something to brag about both before and after this award. He was often called a “Renaissance man” - for his total interest in everything that surrounds a person. The authoritative magazine Physics World included the scientist in the top 10 most outstanding physicists of all time, putting him on a par with Newton, Galileo and Einstein.
Feynman, by the way, worked with the latter as part of the Manhattan Project: from 1943 to 1945, a group of outstanding physicists created nuclear weapons in an atmosphere of special secrecy. The work led by Robert Oppenheimer resulted in three atomic bombs. The explosion of "Thing" at a test site in New Mexico ushered in the nuclear age, "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima, and "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki.
Interestingly, while working in the Manhattan Project, Feynman liked to... break into the safes of his colleagues with secret documentation. He did this out of boredom, but he still irritated America’s top military leadership.
Shimon Peres, Nobel Peace Prize 1994
In the village of Vishnevo, in the Minsk region, no more than five thousand people now live. In 1941, a terrible tragedy took place here. The Nazis herded the village residents into the local synagogue and set it on fire. Hundreds of Jews died in the fire, including all the relatives of Shimon Peres who remained in Belarus.
One of the most prominent Israeli politicians has many memories of these places. His family repatriated with him to Palestine 7 years before that fire - Shimon was already 11.
At home they spoke Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and Polish. It was here that, under the influence of his grandfather, he began to write poetry - at the age of four!
As I grew up, I studied the Talmud with my grandfather. He knew how to play the violin and read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to me in Russian,” Peres told me about the Belarusian period of his life, already being an accomplished politician.
Even the main milestones of his political career would take quite a long time to list. Shimon Peres was a member of 12 (!) governments and headed all key ministries - from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (three times) and the Ministry of Defense (twice) to the Ministry of Religious Affairs. He was prime minister twice and, from 2007 to 2014, president of the country. By the time he left this position, Perez was 90 years old, a record for world politics.
Perez has come to his native Vishnevo twice since the early 90s. He drank from the very well to which he once ran for water when he was very little. There was nothing left of the old house except this well and the foundation. It was built on it after the war new house, and its owners are now often disturbed by tourists.
Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his “efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East.” Interestingly, it was shared with him by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin (twice prime minister of the country, killed by a lone right-wing extremist a year after the award was presented). Rabin’s mother, Rosa Cohen, by the way, was born and lived a significant part of her life in Mogilev.
Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature 2015
“For her polyphonic work - a monument to suffering and courage in our time” - with this wording they awarded the Belarusian writer a prize in the field of literature. Aleksievich was born in Ivano-Frankovsk in 1948 in the family of a Belarusian serviceman. Then they moved to Minsk, and the BSU student went from teacher to journalist, and then from journalist to prose-documentary writer.
Your work has not left indifferent not only Belarusians, but also readers in many countries of the world,” President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko congratulated the laureate.
Alexievich responded by confessing her love for Russia and noting that this victory is not only hers, but that of the entire people and country.
The most famous artistic and documentary works of the Nobel Prize winner are “Chernobyl Prayer”, “War Has No Woman’s Face”, “Zinc Boys”.
WHO ELSE
Many Nobel Prize laureates have distant Belarusian roots. As a rule, these are children or grandchildren of people who left the Belarusian land in search of a better life in turn of the 19th century and XX centuries or during the First World War.
Sheldon Lee Glashow, Nobel Prize in Physics 1979
This scientist is, in fact, not Glashow, but Glukhovsky. He changed his last name following his father Lewis, who, together with his wife Bella, left for the United States from Bobruisk. Sheldon was born much later and devoted his life to the theory of elementary particles. He received the highest scientific award for his theory of the unification of electromagnetism and the predicted existence of weak neutral currents between elementary particles.
Alan Heeger, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000
Another son of emigrants from Russian Empire. His parents moved to Iowa from Vitebsk. Then there were many more moves in the life of the young scientist, but he never left America. The prize was awarded for the discovery of polymers, some of whose properties replicate the properties of metals.
Leonid Kantorovich, Nobel Prize in Economics - 1975
This outstanding scientist was born and lived almost his entire life in Russia. Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Moscow - in these cities he was engaged in developments that would bring him worldwide recognition. But his parents spent almost their entire lives on Belarusian soil. His father, Vitaly Moiseevich, came from Nadneman, and his mother, Pavlina Grigorievna, was a native Minsk resident.
Kantorovich was studying nuclear weapons, and before that he became the creator of linear programming. He was unusually strong in physics, chemistry and mathematics, but the prize was awarded to him for economic ideas - “for his contribution to the theory of optimal allocation of resources.”
Martin Lewis Perl and Frederic Reines, Nobel Prize in Physics 1995
An amazing case - two laureates with Belarusian roots received one prize between them! Martin’s father, Oscar Pearl, lived for many years in the town of Pruzhany, which now belongs to the Brest region. And his colleague Raines is the son of immigrants from another Belarusian city - Lida.
They shared the Nobel Prize for their discoveries of elementary particles - the tau lepton (Pearl) and the neutrino (Reines).
Stanley Prusiner, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine - 1997
His great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers lived in several cities of modern Belarus - Minsk, Pruzhany, Mogilev, Shklov and Mir. The Russian part of this family’s journey ended in Moscow, from where distant ancestor Prusinera left for the USA before the beginning of the 20th century.
The scientist made an outstanding discovery by discovering prions - harmless proteins found in the human body, which at a certain point become aggressive and cause brain death.
It is believed that Prusiner's discovery could lead to the creation of a cure for Alzheimer's disease.
Veniamin Lykov
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced today in Stockholm. Svetlana Alexievich! Belarusian writer, whose books are read all over the world in dozens of languages, received the world's most prestigious award.
This news has been awaited for the last three years: Alexievich was nominated back in 2013. Just like this year, bookmakers then named her among the leaders.
Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sarah Danius says today: Alexievich did not immediately understand that she was calling from the Nobel Committee
“I have already contacted Svetlana,” Sarah Danius, chairman of the jury for the Nobel Prize in Literature, said in an interview (it was she who announced that the award went to Alexievich). “When she finally realized who was calling her, she was crazy with joy. And she commented: “Fantastic!”
We reached Alexievich.
Svetlana Aleksandrovna, Komsomolskaya Pravda congratulates you and all Belarusians on your victory! The entire editorial staff screamed with delight and overwhelming emotions! Your first word was: “Fantastic!” We believed and knew that justice would triumph in the end. What, did you doubt it?
You know, Einstein and Bunin waited 10 years - it’s noticeable that the writer is also overwhelmed with emotions and worried.
- That's what you've been waiting for!
But I only waited a couple of years. This news will always be unexpected, there are such great shadows around: Sholokhov, Brodsky. So that I would sit and know that I was so great and would definitely get it - no, there were no such thoughts.
- The bookmakers bet on your victory for the third time, was the hope stronger?
No, I treat these things as natural phenomena: I cannot influence them, these things must happen on their own. I didn't think about it much. ()
In an interview in Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2014, Svetlana Alexievich answered a question about the Nobel Prize:
Awards for me are a parallel life... I received in my life a large number of awards Just at the time when the Nobel Prize was awarded, I received International Prize world of German booksellers, this is a great award - the Peace Prize. And I was glad that the name of my little Belarus sounded. It was important for me to articulate at the award ceremony what I was doing. Formulate it in such a way that it is understandable in another world.
DOSSIER "KP"
Svetlana Aleksandrovna Alexievich was born on May 31, 1948 in Ivano-Frankovsk (Ukraine) in the family of a military man. The writer's father is Belarusian, her mother is Ukrainian. After his father’s demobilization from the army, the Alekseevich family moved to Belarus. Svetlana Alexievich graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of BSU in 1972.
Top 5 books by Alexievich
“War does not have a woman’s face”
"Chernobyl Prayer"
"Zinc Boys"
"The Wonderful Deer of the Eternal Hunt"
"Second hand time"
Today in Stockholm, on the eve of the Nobel Prize in Literature ceremony, Svetlana Alexievich gave her Nobel lecture..
About a lost battle
I am not standing on this podium alone... There are voices around me, hundreds of voices, they are always with me. Since my childhood. I lived in a village. We children loved to play on the street, but in the evening we were drawn like a magnet to the benches on which tired women gathered near their houses or huts, as we say. None of them had husbands, fathers, brothers, I don’t remember men after the war in our village - during the Second World War in Belarus, every fourth Belarusian died at the front and in the partisans. Our Child's world after the war it was a women's world. What I remember most is that the women talked not about death, but about love. They told how they said goodbye to their loved ones on the last day, how they waited for them, how they are still waiting for them. Years have already passed, and they waited: “let him come back without arms, without legs, I will carry him in my arms.” Without arms... without legs... It seems that since childhood I knew what love was...
Here are just a few sad melodies from the choir I hear...
"Why do you need to know that? It `s so sad. I met my husband in the war. She was a tanker. I reached Berlin. I remember how we were standing, he was not my husband yet, he was near the Reichstag, and he said to me: “Let’s get married. I love you.” And I was so offended after these words - we spent the entire war in dirt, dust, blood, and there was only one swear word around us. I answer him: “First, make a woman out of me: give flowers, say kind words, so I’ll demobilize and sew a dress for myself.” I even wanted to hit him out of resentment. He felt it all, but one of his cheeks was burned, scarred, and I see tears on these scars. "Okay, I'll marry you." She said so... she didn’t believe that she said it... There’s soot all around, broken bricks, in a word, there’s a war all around...”
“We lived near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I worked as a pastry chef, making pies. And my husband was a fireman. We just got married, we even went to the store holding hands. On the day the reactor exploded, my husband was on duty at the fire department. They went to the call in their shirts, home clothes, an explosion at a nuclear power plant, and they were not given any special clothing. This is how we lived... You know... They put out the fire all night and received radio doses incompatible with life. In the morning they were immediately taken by plane to Moscow. Acute radiation sickness... a person lives only a few weeks... Mine was strong, an athlete, but the last one died. When I arrived, they told me that he was in a special box and no one was allowed there. “I love him,” I asked. The soldiers serve them there. Where are you going? - "I love". “They tried to persuade me: “This is no longer a loved one, but an object to be decontaminated. Do you understand?” And I kept repeating one thing to myself: I love, I love... At night I climbed the fire escape to him... Or at night I asked the watchmen, paid them money to let me through... I didn’t leave him, I was with him to the end... After his death... a few months later she gave birth to a girl, she lived only a few days. She... We were waiting for her, and I killed her... She saved me, she took the entire radio attack upon herself. So small... Tiny... But I loved both of them. Is it possible to kill with love? Why is it so close - love and death? They are always together. Who will explain it to me? I crawl at the grave on my knees..."
“The first time I killed a German... I was ten years old, the partisans were already taking me with them on missions. This German was lying wounded... I was told to take the pistol from him, I ran up, and the German grabbed the pistol with both hands and was moving it in front of my face. But he doesn’t have time to shoot first, I have time...
I wasn’t afraid that I killed him... And I didn’t remember him during the war. There were many dead around, we lived among the dead. I was surprised when, many years later, a dream about this German suddenly appeared. It was unexpected... The dream came and came to me... Then I’m flying, and it won’t let me in. Now you rise... You fly... you fly... He catches up, and I fall with him. I fall into some kind of hole. Then I want to get up... rise... But he doesn’t let me... Because of him I can’t fly away...
The same dream... It haunted me for decades...
I can't tell my son about this dream. My son was small - I couldn’t, I read fairy tales to him. My son has already grown up - I still can’t..."
Flaubert said about himself that he is a man - a pen, I can say about myself that I am a man - an ear. When I walk down the street and some words, phrases, exclamations break through to me, I always think: how many novels disappear without a trace in time. In the dark. There is that part of human life - the conversational one - that we cannot conquer for literature. We have not yet appreciated it, are not surprised or admired by it. She bewitched me and made me her captive. I love the way a person speaks... I love a lonely human voice. This is my greatest love and passion.
My path to this podium was almost forty years long. - from person to person, from voice to voice. I can’t say that I was always able to follow this path - many times I was shocked and frightened by a person, I felt delighted and disgusted, I wanted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I was still in the dark. More than once I also wanted to cry with joy that I saw a beautiful person.
I lived in a country where we were taught to die from childhood. They taught death. We were told that man exists to give himself, to burn, to sacrifice himself. We were taught to love a man with a gun. If I had grown up in another country, I would not have been able to go this route. Evil is merciless, you need to be vaccinated against it. But we grew up among executioners and victims. Even though our parents lived in fear and did not tell us everything, and more often they did not tell us anything, the very air of our life was poisoned by this. Evil was spying on us all the time.
I have written five books, but it seems to me that they are all one book. A book about the history of a utopia...
Varlam Shalamov wrote: “I was a participant in a huge lost battle for the real renewal of humanity.” I am reconstructing the history of this battle, its victories and its defeats. How they wanted to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Paradise! City of Sun! And it ended up being a sea of blood, millions of ruined human lives. But there was a time when no one political idea 20th century was not comparable to communism (and October Revolution, as its symbol), did not attract Western intellectuals and people around the world stronger and brighter. Raymond Aron called the Russian Revolution “the opium of intellectuals.” The idea of communism is at least two thousand years old. We will find it in Plato - in the teachings about the ideal and correct state, in Aristophanes - in dreams of the time when “everything will become common”... In Thomas More and Tammaso Campanella... Later in Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen. There is something in the Russian spirit that made us try to make these dreams a reality.
Twenty years ago we carried out the “red” empire with curses and tears. Today we can look at recent history calmly, as historical experience. This is important because the debate about socialism continues to this day. A new generation has grown up with a different picture of the world, but many young people are again reading Marx and Lenin. Stalin museums are being opened in Russian cities and monuments to him are being erected.
There is no “red” empire, but the “red” man remains. Ongoing.
My father, who recently died, was a believing communist to the end. I kept my party card. I can never pronounce the word “scoop”, then I would have to call my father, “relatives”, and acquaintances that way. Friends. They are all from there - from socialism. There are many idealists among them. Romantics. Today they are called differently - the romantics of slavery. Slaves of utopia. I think that they all could have lived a different life, but they lived the Soviet one. Why? I searched for an answer to this question for a long time - I traveled around a huge country, which was recently called the USSR, and recorded thousands of films. That was socialism and that was just our life. Bit by bit, bit by bit, I collected the history of “domestic”, “internal” socialism. The way he lived in human soul. I was attracted to this small space - a person... one person. In fact, that's where everything happens.
Immediately after the war, Theodor Adorno was shocked: “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” My teacher Ales Adamovich, whose name I would like to mention today with gratitude, also believed that writing prose about the nightmares of the 20th century was blasphemous. You can't make things up here. The truth must be given as it is. “Superliterature” is required. The witness must speak. One can also recall Nietzsche with his words that no artist can withstand reality. Won't lift her.
It has always tormented me that the truth does not fit into one heart, into one mind. That it is somehow fragmented, there is a lot of it, it is different, and scattered in the world. Dostoevsky has the idea that humanity knows more about itself, much more, than it has managed to record in literature. What am I doing? I collect everyday feelings, thoughts, words. Collecting the life of my time. I'm interested in the history of the soul. Life of the soul. What big story usually misses what she's being arrogant about. I'm working on the missing story. I have heard more than once and now I hear that this is not literature, this is a document. What is literature today? Who will answer this question? We live faster than before. The content breaks the form. Breaks and changes it. Everything overflows its banks: music, painting, and in a document the word breaks out beyond the boundaries of the document. There are no boundaries between fact and fiction, one flows into the other. Even the witness is not impartial. By telling a story, a person creates, he fights against time, like a sculptor with marble. He is an actor and creator.
I'm interested in small man. Small big man, so I would say, because suffering increases it. He himself tells his little story in my books, and along with his story, a big one. What happened and is happening to us has not yet made sense, we need to talk it out. For starters, at least talk it out. We are afraid of this until we are able to cope with our past. In Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” Shatov says to Stavrogin before the conversation begins: “We two beings have come together in infinity... in last time in the world. Leave your tone and take the human one! Speak with a human voice for once.”
This is roughly how my conversations with my heroes begin. Of course, a person speaks from his time, he cannot speak from nowhere! But it is difficult to get through to the human soul; it is littered with the superstitions of the age, its addictions and deceptions. TV and newspapers.
I would like to take a few pages from my diaries to show how time moved... how the idea died... How I followed in its footsteps...
1980–1985
I’m writing a book about war... Why about war? Because we are military people - we either fought or prepared for war. If you look closely, we all think like a military man. At home, on the street. That's why it's so cheap here human life. Everything is like in war.
I started with doubts. Well, another book about the war... Why?
On one of my journalistic trips I met a woman; she was a medical instructor in the war. She said: they were walking through Lake Ladoga in winter, the enemy noticed the movement and began to fire. Horses and people went under the ice. It all happened at night, and she, as it seemed to her, grabbed and began to drag the wounded man to the shore. “I was dragging him wet, naked, I thought his clothes had been torn off,” she said. “And on the shore I discovered that I had brought in a huge wounded beluga. And she pulled up such a three-story mat - people suffer, but animals, birds, fish - for what? On another trip, I heard the story of a medical instructor of a cavalry squadron, how during a battle she dragged a wounded German into a crater, but that the German found it already in the crater, his leg was broken and bleeding. This is the enemy! What to do? Their guys are dying up there! But she bandages this German and crawls on. He drags in a Russian soldier, he is unconscious, when he regains consciousness, he wants to kill the German, and when he regains consciousness, he grabs the machine gun and wants to kill the Russian. “I’ll hit one in the face, then the other. Our legs,” she recalled, “are all covered in blood. The blood is mixed.”
This was a war I didn't know. Women's War. Not about heroes. Not about how some people heroically killed other people. I remember a woman’s lament: “You’re walking across the field after a battle. And they lie there... All young, so beautiful. They lie and look at the sky. I feel sorry for both of them.” This “both” told me what my book would be about. That war is murder. So it remained in the women's memory. One moment the man was smiling and smoking - and he was no longer there. Most of all, women talk about disappearance, about how quickly in war everything turns into nothing. Both man and human time. Yes, they themselves asked to go to the front, at the age of 17-18, but they didn’t want to kill. And they were ready to die. Die for the Motherland. You can’t erase words from history - for Stalin either.
The book was not published for two years; it was not published until perestroika. Before Gorbachev. “After your book, no one will go to war,” the censor taught me. - Your war is terrible. Why don't you have heroes? I wasn't looking for heroes. I wrote the story through the story of an unnoticed witness and participant. Nobody ever questioned him. What people think, just people, we don’t know about great ideas. Immediately after the war, a person would tell one war, ten years later another, of course, something changes for him, because he puts his whole life into memories. All of yourself. The way he lived these years, what he read, saw, who he met. What he believes in. Finally, whether he is happy or not happy. Documents are living beings, they change with us...
But I am absolutely sure that there will never be girls like the military girls of ’41 again. This was the highest time of the “red” idea, even higher than the revolution and Lenin. Their Victory still obscures the Gulag. I love these girls endlessly. But it was impossible to talk to them about Stalin, about how after the war the trains with the victors went to Siberia, with those who were braver. The others returned and were silent. One day I heard: “We were free only during the war. On the front line." Our main capital is suffering. Not oil, not gas - suffering. This is the only thing we consistently produce. I am always looking for an answer: why is our suffering not converted into freedom? Are they in vain? Chaadaev was right: Russia is a country without memory, a space of total amnesia, a virgin consciousness for criticism and reflection.
Great books are lying under your feet...
1989
I'm in Kabul. I didn't want to write about the war anymore. But here I am real war. From the Pravda newspaper: “We are helping the fraternal Afghan people build socialism.” Everywhere there are people of war, things of war. Time of war.
Yesterday they didn’t take me into battle: “Stay at the hotel, young lady. Answer for you later.” I’m sitting in a hotel and thinking: there’s something immoral in looking at other people’s courage and risk. This is the second week I’ve been here and I can’t get rid of the feeling that war is a product of male nature, incomprehensible to me. But the everydayness of war is grandiose. I discovered that weapons are beautiful: machine guns, mines, tanks. A man thought a lot about how best to kill another person. The eternal debate between truth and beauty. They showed me a new Italian face, my “female” reaction: “Beautiful. Why is she beautiful? They explained to me exactly in military terms that if you run over this mine or step on it like this... at such and such an angle... a person will be left with half a bucket of meat. The abnormal is spoken about here as if it were normal, as a matter of course. Like, war... No one goes crazy from these pictures of a man lying on the ground, killed not by the elements, not by fate, but by another person.
I saw the loading of the “black tulip” (the plane that takes zinc coffins with the dead to their homeland). The dead are often dressed in old clothes military uniform Even in the forties, with riding breeches, it happens that this uniform is not enough. The soldiers were talking among themselves: “They brought new dead into the refrigerator. It smells like stale boar.” I will write about this. I'm afraid that people at home won't believe me. Our newspapers write about friendship avenues planted by Soviet soldiers.
I talk to the guys, many came voluntarily. Flocked here. I noticed that most of the families of the intelligentsia - teachers, doctors, librarians - in a word, bookish people. We sincerely dreamed of helping the Afghan people build socialism. Now they laugh at themselves. They showed me a place at the airport where hundreds of zinc coffins lay, mysteriously sparkling in the sun. The officer accompanying me could not restrain himself: “Maybe my coffin is here... They will put it there... Why am I fighting here?” Immediately I was afraid of my words: “Don’t write this down.”
At night I dreamed of the dead, everyone had surprised faces: how was I killed? Am I really killed?
Together with the nurses, I went to the hospital for Afghan civilians, we brought gifts to the children. Children's toys, candies, cookies. I got about five teddy bears. We arrived at the hospital - a long barracks, everyone had only blankets from bed and linen. A young Afghan woman came up to me with a child in her arms, she wanted to say something, in ten years everyone here has learned to speak a little Russian, I gave the child a toy, he took it with his teeth. “Why with teeth?” - I was surprised. The Afghan woman pulled the blanket off the little body; the boy was missing both arms. “It was your Russians who bombed.” Someone held me, I fell...
I saw how our “Grad” turns villages into plowed fields. I was in an Afghan cemetery, as long as a village. Somewhere in the middle of the cemetery an old Afghan woman was screaming. I remembered how in a village near Minsk they carried a zinc coffin into the house, and how my mother howled. Is not human scream was not an animal... Similar to the one I heard in the Kabul cemetery...
I admit, I didn’t immediately become free. I was sincere with my heroes and they trusted me. Each of us had our own path to freedom. Before Afghanistan, I believed in socialism with human face. She returned from there free from all illusions. “Forgive me, father,” I said when we met, “you raised me with faith in communist ideals, but it’s enough to see once how recent Soviet schoolchildren, whom you and your mother teach, (my parents were rural teachers) kill people unknown to them on a foreign land, so that all your words turn to dust. We are killers, dad, do you understand!?” The father began to cry.
Many free people were returning from Afghanistan. But I have another example. There, in Afghanistan, a guy shouted to me: “What can you, woman, understand about war? Do people die in war like they do in books and movies? There they die beautifully, but yesterday my friend was killed, a bullet hit him in the head. He ran for another ten meters and caught his brains...” And seven years later, the same guy is now a successful businessman, loves to talk about Afghanistan. - He called me: “Why do you need your books? They're too scary." This was already a different person, not the one whom I met in the midst of death, and who did not want to die at twenty years old...
I asked myself what kind of book about the war I would like to write. I would like to write about a person who does not shoot, cannot shoot at another person, to whom the very thought of war brings suffering. Where is he? I haven't met him.
1990–1997
Russian literature is interesting because it is the only one that can tell about the unique experience that a huge country once went through. People often ask me: why do you always write about the tragic? Because that's how we live. Although we now live in different countries, but the “red” man lives everywhere. From that life, with those memories.
For a long time I didn’t want to write about Chernobyl. I didn’t know how to write about it, with what tool and where to approach it? The name of my small country, lost in Europe, about which the world had heard almost nothing before, sounded in all languages, and we, Belarusians, became the people of Chernobyl. We were the first to touch the unknown. It became clear: in addition to communist, national and new religious challenges, more ferocious and total ones await us ahead, but still hidden from view. Something was revealed after Chernobyl...
I remember how the old taxi driver swore desperately when a pigeon hit the windshield: “Two or three birds crash every day. And the newspapers write that the situation is under control.”
In city parks, leaves were raked up and taken out of town, where the leaves were buried. They cut off the soil from the infected spots and buried it too - the soil was buried in the ground. They buried firewood and grass. Everyone had a little crazy faces. An old beekeeper said: “I went out into the garden in the morning, something was missing, some familiar sound. Not a single bee... Not a single bee is heard. None! What? What's happened? And on the second day they didn’t take off and on the third... Then we were informed that there was an accident at the nuclear power plant, and it was nearby. But for a long time we knew nothing. The bees knew, but we didn’t.” The Chernobyl information in the newspapers was entirely made up of military words: explosion, heroes, soldiers, evacuation... The KGB was working at the station itself. They were looking for spies and saboteurs, there were rumors that the accident was a planned action by Western intelligence services to undermine the camp of socialism. Moved towards Chernobyl military equipment, the soldiers were driving. The system operated as usual, in a military manner, but a soldier with a brand new machine gun in this new world was tragic. All he could do was take large radio doses and die when he returned home.
Before my eyes, the pre-Chernobyl man was turning into a Chernobyl man.
Radiation could not be seen, touched, smelled... Such a familiar and unfamiliar world already surrounded us. When I went to the zone, they quickly explained to me: you can’t pick flowers, you can’t sit on the grass, you can’t drink water from the well... Death lurked everywhere, but it was already some kind of different death. Under new masks. In an unfamiliar guise. Old people who survived the war were evacuating again - they looked at the sky: “The sun is shining... There is no smoke, no gas. They don't shoot. Well, is this war? But we have to become refugees.”
In the morning, everyone greedily grabbed the newspapers and immediately put them aside with disappointment - no spies were found. They don’t write about enemies of the people. A world without spies and enemies of the people was also unknown. Something new was beginning. Chernobyl, like Afghanistan, made us free people.
The world has expanded for me. In the zone, I felt neither Belarusian, nor Russian, nor Ukrainian, but a representative of a biospecies that could be destroyed. Two catastrophes coincided: a social one - the socialist Atlantis went under water and a cosmic one - Chernobyl. The fall of the empire worried everyone: people were concerned about their day and everyday life, what to buy and how to survive? What to believe? Under what banners should we stand again? Or should we learn to live without a big idea? The latter is unknown to anyone, because they have never lived like this before. The “red” man faced hundreds of questions, and he experienced them alone. He had never been so lonely as in the first days of freedom. There were shocked people around me. I listened to them...
I'm closing my diary...
What happened to us when the empire fell? Previously, the world was divided: executioners and victims are the Gulag, brothers and sisters are war, the electorate is technology, the modern world. Previously, our world was still divided into those who imprisoned and those who imprisoned, today it is divided into Slavophiles and Westerners, into national traitors and patriots. And also on those who can buy and who cannot buy. The last, I would say, is the most severe test after socialism, because recently everyone was equal. The “red” man was never able to enter the kingdom of freedom that he dreamed of in the kitchen. Russia was divided without him, he was left with nothing. Humiliated and robbed. Aggressive and dangerous.
What I heard when I traveled around Russia...
– Modernization is possible in our country through sharashkas and executions.
– Russian people don’t seem to want to be rich, they’re even afraid. What does he want? And he always wants one thing: so that someone else does not become rich. Richer than him.
“You won’t find an honest person among us, but there are saints.”
“We can’t wait for more generations to be flogged; Russian people do not understand freedom, they need a Cossack and a whip.
– Two main Russian words: war and prison. He stole, walked around, sat down... went out and sat down again...
– Russian life should be evil, insignificant, then the soul rises, it realizes that it does not belong to this world... The dirtier and bloodier it is, the more space there is for it...
– There is neither strength nor any kind of madness for a new revolution. There is no courage. A Russian person needs such an idea to send chills down his spine...
– This is how our life hangs out - between a mess and a barracks. Communism is not dead, the corpse is alive.
I take the liberty of saying that we missed the chance we had in the 90s. To the question: what kind of country should be - strong or worthy, where people can live well, they chose the first - strong. Now is the time of strength again. The Russians are fighting the Ukrainians. With brothers. My father is Belarusian, my mother is Ukrainian. And so it is for many. Russian planes are bombing Syria...
A time of hope has given way to a time of fear. Time has turned back... Second-hand time...
Now I’m not sure that I’ve finished writing the story of the “red” man...
I have three homes - my Belarusian land, my father’s homeland, where I lived all my life, Ukraine, my mother’s homeland, where I was born, and the great Russian culture, without which I cannot imagine myself. They are all dear to me. But it’s difficult to talk about love these days.
