BOOKS FROM BELARUSLast Witnesses : Unchildlike Stories
Description:
Selected as a Book of the Year 2019 by The Times and Telegraph 'Astonishing. . . Like the great Russian novels, these testimonials ring with emotional truth' - Caroline Moorehead, Guardian Extraordinary stories about what it was like to be a Soviet child during the upheaval and horror of the Second World War, from Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich What did it mean to grow up in the Soviet Union during the Second World War? In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich started interviewing people who had experienced war as children, the generation that survived and had to live with the trauma that would forever change the course of the Russian nation. With remarkable care and empathy, Alexievich gives voice to those whose stories are lost in the official narratives, uncovering a powerful, hidden history of one of the most important events of the twentieth century.Published to great acclaim in the USSR in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, this masterpiece offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human consequences of the war - and an extraordinary chronicle of the Russian soul.
Reviews:
(2 months ago) |
11 Aug, 2025
Unchildlike childhood stories. A simple structure: More than 100 adults recount their childhood memories of the second world war, one after the other. I thought I’d have trouble keeping my attention focussed when there is no overall narrative, but each interview is mesmerising, and collectively profound.
The book shows that films about children in war like Ivan’s Childhood, and Come and See are not abnormally horrific, but the norm for war.
Translated by Richard Paver and Larissa Volokhonsky
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