Quite poignantly, she zeros in from several angles (press reports, official documents, an interview with someone who knew him) on Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev, who was said to be a supporter of the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, and who hanged himself in his Kremlin office when it failed. dreams into reality.” This was true of the woman who loved the prisoner, and it was also true of the Russian people as a whole, who lived, for some 70 years, in a society ostensibly based on a dream of human brotherhood that turned out to be something catastrophically different.Īmong believers in the dream of Soviet Communism, Alexievich finds a nostalgia for its achievements and a deep sense of loss. “There is something in the Russian spirit,” she said in her Nobel lecture, “that compels it to try to turn. (It appeared in Russia in 2013.)Īs in many a Chekhov story, few of the people she records are happy. If he is ever released, it will be into a radically different Russia, where, as one of Alexievich’s interview subjects says, “the discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb.” It is the contrast between these two countries - as felt by people living in the second but remembering the first - that is the subject of “Secondhand Time,” her first book to appear in English since she won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year.

This prisoner committed his murder in what was then still the Soviet Union. But recent history has added a twist Chekhov could not have imagined.

Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich