6/20/2023 0 Comments Svetlana second hand time![]() ![]() ![]() “The rhetoric from the state then was the same as now. “It’s customary,” she says, in laid-back tones. All were Nobel laureates from the Russian-speaking literary world, rejected and rubbished by the Soviet leadership. They put her, she points out, in the great tradition of “ Bunin, Brodsky and Pasternak”. These snubs leave Alexievich unperturbed. “Two days later, once the polls were over and everyone had gone home, he stated publicly that I decry the peoples of Russia and Belarus in my work.” She adds wryly: “ Vladimir Putin didn’t congratulate me either.” He congratulated me that evening on TV,” Alexievich recounts. There were lots of international observers, so Lukashenko was forced to acknowledge the Nobel prize. Her name is missing from school textbooks. Her books are unpublished, available only from Russia, or smuggled in via Lithuania in small underground editions. ![]() ![]() At home, officially at least, she was an unperson. Lukashenko faced a dilemma: the award was self-evidently a major honour for Belarus, and yet Alexievich was one of his most prominent critics. This was Belarus’s implacable dictator of 21 years, Alexander Lukashenko. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |