Svetlana Alexievich — Secondhand Time
Svetlana Alexievich (1948 –) was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, then Soviet Ukraine. She moved at a young age to Belarus, where she became a journalist and political activist. In 2015, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her 2013 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets – a collection of over 700 oral histories of the Soviet Union. Hers is a style that is polyphonic and documentary, that captures, as she describes in a 2015 interview for The Guardian, “how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a college of everyday details.” Secondhand Time is a narrative of contradiction and multiplicity: a history that exists in a constant state of movement, many accounts of which are recorded to unfold at the Black Sea shore.
Excerpt:
For a long time, I couldn’t bear living alone. I had absolutely no will to live. It’s not that I’m afraid of solitude, I just don’t know how to live without love. I need the pain…the pity…Without that, I’m lost, the way I get scared when I’ve swum out too far into the sea. Out there, I’m alone…It’s dark in those depths…I don’t know what’s down there…
[We sit talking on a terrace. The leaves are rustling, then it starts raining.]
You know how beach romances go, they don’t last long. They’re flings. Like life, but in miniature. They sparkle and fade, it’s pretty. Like what we don’t get to have in real life and what we really want. That’s why people love traveling so much…meeting people…so I’d braided my hair, I was wearing a blue polka dot dress that I’d bought the day before we left at a children’s store. The sea…I like to swim out pretty far, there’s nothing in the world I love more than swimming. In the morning, I’d do my exercises under a white acacia. One day, a man walked by, just a regular man, totally normal-looking, not young. He noticed me, and for some reason it made him very glad. He stood there watching me: “Would you like me to come over and read you some poems this evening?” “Maybe, I’m about to go on a long swim!” “I’ll wait for you.” So he waited for me for several hours. He read poorly, constantly fixing his glasses. But it was touching. I saw…I saw what he was feeling…Those movements, those glasses, that nervousness. I’ve completely forgotten what poems they were. And why should that be so important? It was raining then, too. It started raining. I remember that…I haven’t forgotten a thing. The feelings…Our feelings are like some sort of separate entities—suffering, love, tenderness. They have lives of their own, they don’t depend on us. For some unknown reason, you suddenly choose one person over another, even though the other one might be better. Or without even realizing it, you’re suddenly part of another person’s life. You don’t know it yet, but they’ve already found you…They’ve sent out their signal…“I’ve been waiting for you.” With those words, he met me the following morning. And for some reason, something in his voice made me believe him, even though I wasn’t at all ready for this. Quite the opposite. But everything around me had transformed…It wasn’t love yet, but it felt like I had suddenly been given a lot of something. Two people had gotten through to each other. The signals had been received. I swam far out into the sea. When I came back in, he was waiting for me. Again, he told me, “We’re going to be happy together.” And for some reason, I believed him again...
Explanation:
Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time (2013) was the recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, praised for its polyphonic compilation of over 700 oral accounts of Soviet collapse. This excerpt, translated by Bela Shayevitch, captures one elderly woman’s reflections upon a trip to Sochi on the Russian Black Sea coast. A popular holiday destination, she recalls her first encounter with the man who would become the love of her life: “a man…just a regular man, totally normal looking, not young… [who] noticed me, and for some reason it made him very glad.” She reminisces upon swimming far out to sea, and returning to find him waiting for her on the sand: “Without even realizing it,” she continues, “you’re suddenly part of another person’s life. You don’t know it yet, but they’ve already found you…They’ve sent out their signal…I’ve been waiting for you.” At the Sochi shore – typically host to “beach romances”, or “flings” that “sparkle and fade” – this interviewee recounts a sense of revelation to something profoundly unknown – to feelings, intuitions, or a language of connection, it is implied, solely comprehensible at the Black Sea shore. At the littoral in-between, such language comes into fated focus: two halves become a synchronous whole.
Citation: Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Trans. Bela Shayevich, Random House, 2016, (Kindle Locations 4220-4221).