Saturday, October 10, 2015

Svetlana Alexievich greets Göteborg – Gothenburg Post

On Friday met GP a happy, touched, yet comprehensive Nobel Laureates in central Minsk.

– I will continue to say what others can not says Svetlana Alexievich.

The attention surrounding Svetlana Alexievich has been tremendous since the Nobel Prize was announced Thursday. In a room at the hotel Monastyrski in Minsk we encounter the now world famous author and the newspaper’s long-standing employees. The translator Kajsa Öberg Lindsten are in place and interpret between Russian and Swedish.

Despite the turbulence seems Svetlana Alexievich completely calm, she takes warmly by the hand and ask to bring health to the GP’s readers.

– I have such warm memories of the readers of the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten, when I met them at different times. I greet the people of Gothenburg and GP’s readers. A big greeting to you, she says, laughing too heartily at the news that Caféva in Haga now start to serve a Svetlanasoppa.

For several years, she returned to live in Belarus. Here are her books published in Belarusian at a small publishing house, but because the large state publishing houses dominate the market overall, she is unknown to the public and ignored in the public debate. But some kind of recognition, it was still when state television yesterday, in an approximately 20-second spots, dutifully announced that the first Belarusian writer ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

Aleksijevitj has not withheld what she likes dictatorship, and that she does not intend to do in the future either.

– I continue as I have done before, possibly even more and more open. I live after all in a dictatorship, and most can not say what they want. The risk of ending up in prison and lose their jobs and everything awful. I see it as my task to say aloud what others can not say. I have done this before and I want to continue.

The state may ignore her, but many Belarusians cheered yesterday when the Nobel Prize was announced.

– What I saw yesterday was that People took it personally here. People cried and hugged each other, they saw it as a victory. It is a big responsibility. I was heartbroken when I saw that people hugged each other in joy. People who think completely different in many things, but still saw it as a vindication for themselves and their country.

It took a while, but in the evening yesterday was still a greeting from President Aleksandr Lukashenko – what are you thinking about it?

– It played probably a role that Germany’s president and foreign minister had already congratulated me then, but I can surely say that I appreciate his courage, says Svetlana Aleksijevitj and laughs.

You are a soul historian who writes about the little man in the war. Today there is war again in Europe. Do you think the little man gets to speak?

– I think when the little man is alone, she is just like a small grain of sand, and has no chance. But an artist, a writer like me, can capture the voice of the many young people. I do not push it in Belarus but so far I can get my books printed in Russia and in the world – and still have the little man’s voice a chance.

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