Many of the chapters are life stories of the witnesses, who recount their experiences from World War II until the fall of the Soviet Union. It begins with an introduction by Alexievich herself, then presents several recollections of the days of protest during the August 1991 coup. The book is subtitled Last of the Soviets. Bela Shayevich) is also a collection of narratives by Russophones, most of whom began the nineties in the Soviet Union and finished those years only to find themselves in another country, the Russian Federation. Her recently translated Secondhand Time (Random House, 2016, trans. Svetlana Alexievich, a more recent Russophone winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, would seem to continue this tradition. However, the documentary evidence and testimonies of others, which were used to write the book, make it one in a line of Russian literary works of prose (see, for example, Babyi Yar: A Novel Document, by Anatoly Kuznetsov) that don’t translate well into the Anglophone world’s genre distinction between fiction and nonfiction. And although Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize before The Gulag Archipelago’s publication-thus based on his earlier works, all within the genre of “novel”-even this book is considered a literary work. The novel is also based on experiences he collected from other prisoners, known as zeks. Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is a novel based on the author’s experiences in the gulag and, afterward, internal exile, all of which lasted from 1945 to 1956. This essay was originally published on July 5, 2017. In today’s feature, Ian Singleton tackles truth, translation, and history in Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time. Editor’s Note: For the first several months of 2022, we’ll be celebrating some of our favorite work from the last fourteen years in a series of “ From the Archives” posts.
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