Secondhand Time

A symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia, from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 

"Dramatic chronicles as universally essential as Greek tragedies."  -  Philip Gourevitch, The New Yorker 

In Second-Hand Time, Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich writes the life stories of housewives, artists, party workers, students, soldiers and traders living through a time of political upheaval – the fall of the Soviet Union and the two decades that followed it. As they tell her their secrets, their passions, their sorrows, their hopes, she builds a picture of a nation and of lived history, as epic as the greatest of novels. 

"Alexievich’s voices are those of people that no one cares about, but the ones whose lives constitute the vast majority of what history actually is... This is history, major history, but written, as all history should be, from below."  -  The Guardian UK 

When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions - a history of the soul.” Alexievich’s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.

“Already hailed as a masterpiece across Europe, Secondhand Time is an intimate portrait of a country yearning for meaning after the sudden lurch from Communism to capitalism in the 1990s plunged it into existential crisis."   -  The New York Times