“Putin’s world is not my world” – Swedish Dagbladet

Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate in Literature in 2015. Photo: Dan Hansson

MOSCOW. – Oops! Thank you very much. It was amazing, says Svetlana Aleksijevitj when SvD first of all calling her home in Minsk and congratulations.

She replies in her home phone and as soon as we started the interview begins her phone call. It will continue to call the next day. Self is Aleksijevitj very calm and responds extremely friendly and without haste to my questions.

– There are so many difficult feelings. This is a huge thing. Being one in a row – Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ivan Bunin … This is fantastic, but also sad. From now on, this award will forever be on my shoulders. That means it will be harder to work.

In what way?

– I’ve always felt the need to go further. That you can not get caught in the same things. That’s the whole time I’ve tried to do. Now we have to continue to do a good job, whatever I takes me.

You have through the years has interviewed hundreds of people who have given you all the interviews are the basis for your books. What does this prize to them?

– How many of them are already dead. One of the youngest of the women I interviewed for “War has no female face” died 90 years old in Israel six months ago. I wanted her to see a play that has been made on the basis of the book, but she managed not to.

When Aleksijevitj wrote the book “War has no female face” of the 1980s, there were still enough many female veterans left alive that she would obtain a large material. Today, this book is no longer able to write.

You are Belarusian, but writes in Russian. What does this prize for freedom of speech in Belarus and Russia?

– It means a lot. Russia and Belarus are in a terrible situation right now as you know. I think that my voice gets a different meaning. At least there will no longer be so easy for the power to dismiss me with a wave of our hand. They will have to listen to me. There are so many people out there who are tired and no longer have the energy to believe in anything. This can mean something for them too.

Russian press acclaimed Nobel Prize after the announcement, both the opposition and the Kremlin Loyal. The state-controlled newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta had a dresser text on its news page, with a picture that looked remarkably old. Neither the Russian or Belarusian media have a particularly high degree interviewed or attention Aleksijevitj during all the years she has written, despite the fact that she has become a bestseller in the West and her books was raised to the skies in Europe.

The Putin-critical Russian writer Dmitry Bykov felt that the choice of Aleksijevitj was not a literary selection.

– This award indicates that the Nobel committee prioritizes the work’s social importance above its literary qualities. Aleksijevitj is a masterful publicist, but the new aesthetic openings may be looking for in her lyrics, says Bykov in the Russian online newspaper gazeta.ru.

For Svenska Dagbladet says Svetlana Aleksijevitj that she may no longer appear publicly somewhere in his homeland. There is much talk about the apathy has spread in both Belarus and Russia, which Aleksijevitj not agree with.

– Every time I meet people in different contexts, for example among intellectuals, I see how they need someone to listen. When I give speeches literally lit people up. They want to talk about these things.

Her cell phone rings in one, it also rings at the door. A few hours later keeps Aleksijevitj press conference in the opposition Belarusian newspaper Nasha Niva basement. Where she says that she loves both the Belarusian and Russian people that she belongs in the Russian cultural sphere, and that she is a true cosmopolitan.

When Aleksijevitj speak Russian beat her cultural resident immediately through: the beautiful language , the careful diction, modesty. Aleksijevitj is a typical example of the best that the Soviet intelligentsia could produce.

– I love the humanitarian Russian world, the one that the whole world bow to. Literature, ballet, classical music. But I do not like Beria, Stalin and Putin’s world. It is not my world.