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In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul
"I love life in its living form, life that’s found on the street, in human conversations, shouts, and moans." So begins this speech delivered in Russian at Cornell University by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. In poetic language, Alexievich traces the origins of her deeply affecting blend of journalism, oral history, and creative writing. Cornell Global Perspectives is an imprint of Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The works examine critical global challenges, often from an interdisciplinary perspective, and are intended for a non-specialist audience. The Distinguished Speaker Series presents edited transcripts of talks delivered at Cornell, both in the original language and in translation.
42 pages, Paperback
Published January 15, 2018
68 people are currently reading
617 people want to read
About the author
Svetlana Alexievich
50 books5,815 followersSvetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano Frankivsk, Soviet Union. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. Alexievich grew up in Belarus, where both her parents were teachers. She studied to be a journalist at the University of Minsk and worked a teacher, journalist and editor. In Minsk she has worked at the newspaper Sel'skaja Gazeta, Alexievich's criticism of the political regimes in the Soviet Union and thereafter Belarus has periodically forced her to live abroad, for example in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden.
Svetlana Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In her books she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. With her "documentary novels", Svetlana Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. Her major works are her grand cycle Voices of Utopia, which consists of five parts. Svetlana Alexievich's books criticize political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus.
In 2015 Ms Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Svetlana Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In her books she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. With her "documentary novels", Svetlana Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. Her major works are her grand cycle Voices of Utopia, which consists of five parts. Svetlana Alexievich's books criticize political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus.
In 2015 Ms Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 1, 2020
"I am a historian of the soul. For me, feelings are also documents. I study missing history, the things that history usually overlooks. History is often arrogant, and dismissive of what is small and human."
From IN SEARCH OF THE FREE INDIVIDUAL: A History of the Russian-Soviet Soul, by Svetlana Alexievich, tr. from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell, 2016.
#ReadtheWorld21 📍 Belarus
justfinished Reading Alexievich's speech/essay with my coffee this morning.
Alexievich was a visiting fellow at the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University in New York in 2016-2017, and delivered this speech to the Center in Russian.
This essay (~25 pages) gives background on some of her oral history methods, her views on historical contexts, and more details on the compilation of her well-known books. She discusses the Soviet censorship and reinstatement during perestroika of The Unwomanly Face of War and Zinky Boys including legal battles to get both works published in full. She touches on the long shadow of Chernobyl, and the soul of the "Red Empire" that she writes so clearly in Secondhand Time, and makes connections with her own family and upbringing as a child of Communism.
Best enjoyed by readers who are familiar with Alexievich's Nobel Prize-winning work, but could also serve as a short introduction to her outstanding body of literature.
Her work has had such an impact on me, and reading her own words - rather than the stories of others that she so often focuses on - was a special treat.
[On Soviet education]
"We lived together in a country where we were taught to die beginning in childhood. We learned death and dying. We weren’t taught that humans are born for happiness, or love, it was drilled into us that humans exist in order to give of themselves, in order to burn, to sacrifice. We were taught to love people with weapons."
[On Chernobyl]
"People were used to the idea of atomic war, but not atomic peace. They didn’t yet realize that the atoms of war and peace are colleagues, they kill in exactly the same way."
Recommended short read for #WITmonth, this is available as a free ebook on several services and on Cornell's website.
From IN SEARCH OF THE FREE INDIVIDUAL: A History of the Russian-Soviet Soul, by Svetlana Alexievich, tr. from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell, 2016.
#ReadtheWorld21 📍 Belarus
justfinished Reading Alexievich's speech/essay with my coffee this morning.
Alexievich was a visiting fellow at the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University in New York in 2016-2017, and delivered this speech to the Center in Russian.
This essay (~25 pages) gives background on some of her oral history methods, her views on historical contexts, and more details on the compilation of her well-known books. She discusses the Soviet censorship and reinstatement during perestroika of The Unwomanly Face of War and Zinky Boys including legal battles to get both works published in full. She touches on the long shadow of Chernobyl, and the soul of the "Red Empire" that she writes so clearly in Secondhand Time, and makes connections with her own family and upbringing as a child of Communism.
Best enjoyed by readers who are familiar with Alexievich's Nobel Prize-winning work, but could also serve as a short introduction to her outstanding body of literature.
Her work has had such an impact on me, and reading her own words - rather than the stories of others that she so often focuses on - was a special treat.
[On Soviet education]
"We lived together in a country where we were taught to die beginning in childhood. We learned death and dying. We weren’t taught that humans are born for happiness, or love, it was drilled into us that humans exist in order to give of themselves, in order to burn, to sacrifice. We were taught to love people with weapons."
[On Chernobyl]
"People were used to the idea of atomic war, but not atomic peace. They didn’t yet realize that the atoms of war and peace are colleagues, they kill in exactly the same way."
Recommended short read for #WITmonth, this is available as a free ebook on several services and on Cornell's website.
August 1, 2019
This book is an account of how the writer approaches getting her stories and writing them. As well as some background on the books she has published. I read "Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets" which was fantastic.
About her approach to creating her books, she writes....
"It’s important to catch words in flight, as they’re born. It’s important not to miss the conversational part of life, which we often neglect, dismiss as unimportant, leaving it to disappear in the bustle of life, in the darkness of time. It seems surprising that this could be literature. But I want to make every bit of our life into literature. Including ordinary, everyday words....I am a historian of the soul. For me, feelings are also documents."
"I was collecting the human. Dostoevsky asked the question: “How much of the human is there in a human being?” How can the human in this human being be protected? That’s the question I’m looking to answer... If I hadn’t read Dostoevsky, I would be in despair."
And what she gets from listening...
"In telling his own story, a person creates; he doesn’t copy reality, he creates. Memories are living creatures. People put their entire lives into their memories: what they read, what they thought about, whether they were happy or not. Documents evolve along with the human soul."
She went to some hard places to write her books, which often took years to create. This included the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Chernobyl disaster. As well as the chaos of post-perestroika, which left many afraid who could even get enough food. This left an opening for the emergence of Putin as dictator. People were willing to trade their freedom for stability and material goods.
Her accounts can be heartbreaking, such as this pertaining to the war in Afghanistan in a book titled "The Boys in Zinc"...
Boys in Zinc began with one little girl. I couldn’t forget her. In the municipal cemetery in Minsk they were burying officers brought back from Afghanistan in zinc coffins. There were grandiose, combative speeches, wreaths…. A little girl tore away from the grownup’s hand like a bird and cried out: “Papa! Papa! I drew lots of boats for you, just like you asked. Where are you?”
"It is there, in the live human voice, in the live reflection of reality, that the mystery of our presence is hidden, and the insurmountable tragedy of life."
Now....
"Books pile up in the bookstores and markets by the hundreds. Everything has been published: Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Evgenia Ginzburg…. At one time, people were imprisoned for having these books, they were dismissed from universities. Nowadays people hurry past them."
They stand in line for makeup instead.
Her Noble Prize lecture (2015)...
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lit...
"Secondhand Time"....
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
About her approach to creating her books, she writes....
"It’s important to catch words in flight, as they’re born. It’s important not to miss the conversational part of life, which we often neglect, dismiss as unimportant, leaving it to disappear in the bustle of life, in the darkness of time. It seems surprising that this could be literature. But I want to make every bit of our life into literature. Including ordinary, everyday words....I am a historian of the soul. For me, feelings are also documents."
"I was collecting the human. Dostoevsky asked the question: “How much of the human is there in a human being?” How can the human in this human being be protected? That’s the question I’m looking to answer... If I hadn’t read Dostoevsky, I would be in despair."
And what she gets from listening...
"In telling his own story, a person creates; he doesn’t copy reality, he creates. Memories are living creatures. People put their entire lives into their memories: what they read, what they thought about, whether they were happy or not. Documents evolve along with the human soul."
She went to some hard places to write her books, which often took years to create. This included the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Chernobyl disaster. As well as the chaos of post-perestroika, which left many afraid who could even get enough food. This left an opening for the emergence of Putin as dictator. People were willing to trade their freedom for stability and material goods.
Her accounts can be heartbreaking, such as this pertaining to the war in Afghanistan in a book titled "The Boys in Zinc"...
Boys in Zinc began with one little girl. I couldn’t forget her. In the municipal cemetery in Minsk they were burying officers brought back from Afghanistan in zinc coffins. There were grandiose, combative speeches, wreaths…. A little girl tore away from the grownup’s hand like a bird and cried out: “Papa! Papa! I drew lots of boats for you, just like you asked. Where are you?”
"It is there, in the live human voice, in the live reflection of reality, that the mystery of our presence is hidden, and the insurmountable tragedy of life."
Now....
"Books pile up in the bookstores and markets by the hundreds. Everything has been published: Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Evgenia Ginzburg…. At one time, people were imprisoned for having these books, they were dismissed from universities. Nowadays people hurry past them."
They stand in line for makeup instead.
Her Noble Prize lecture (2015)...
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lit...
"Secondhand Time"....
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
April 23, 2019
Discurso curtinho da Svetlana que está disponível gratuitamente no Kindle. Aqui, ela basicamente resume o seu fazer literário, suas técnicas, estratégias e a abordagem que utiliza com seus sujeitos, além de explicar um pouco de seu pensamento sobre a formação da "alma soviética". Alguns trechos daqui já estavam presentes em alguns textos de apoio das edições brasileiras dos livros. Como sempre, Svetlana dando aula sobre como a história é composta dos "sujeitos pequenos" tanto quanto de grandes eventos.
Read
November 24, 2025Sue me, on a kick. Unsurprisingly beautiful. Everything in this world (my self selection of books to read and geographic location) is telling me its time for a massive Dostoevsky read. Sigh
July 29, 2025
This is just the transcript of a speech the author gave in 2016 (so not a full book). She is probably my favorite author of all time so I am trying to read everything she has written. I love her books so much and this speech provided some interesting insight into how she approaches her craft. She is a global treasure.
October 11, 2021
An exceptional writer
January 21, 2023
“The story of one person is fate; the story of hundreds of people is history.”
"I am a historian of the soul. For me, feelings are also documents. I study missing history, the things that history usually overlooks. History is often arrogant, and dismissive of what is small and human."
“I collect the human spirit. You may say: it’s an ephemeral thing, too elusive. But art attempts to capture it. And every era has its own answers.”
“In telling his own story, a person creates; he doesn’t copy reality, he creates. Memories are living creatures.”
“Everything has been published…. At one time, people were imprisoned for having these books, they were dismissed from universities. Nowadays people hurry past them.”
Title: In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul
Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Year 2018
Genre: Nonfiction - Russian history & culture
Page count: 42 pages
Date(s) read: 1/20/23
Reading journal entry #25 in 2023
“Chernobyl changed our understanding of time—many radioactive particles will live for a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years, thereby altering space. A few days after the accident, radioactive clouds were detected over Africa. Concepts like ‘our own’ and ‘foreign’ were obliterated. Borders don’t exist for radiation.”
"I am a historian of the soul. For me, feelings are also documents. I study missing history, the things that history usually overlooks. History is often arrogant, and dismissive of what is small and human."
“I collect the human spirit. You may say: it’s an ephemeral thing, too elusive. But art attempts to capture it. And every era has its own answers.”
“In telling his own story, a person creates; he doesn’t copy reality, he creates. Memories are living creatures.”
“We lived together in a country where we were taught to die beginning in childhood. We learned death and dying. We weren’t taught that humans are born for happiness, or love, it was drilled into us that humans exist in order to give of themselves, in order to burn, to sacrifice. We were taught to love people with weapons.”
“Everything has been published…. At one time, people were imprisoned for having these books, they were dismissed from universities. Nowadays people hurry past them.”
Title: In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul
Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Year 2018
Genre: Nonfiction - Russian history & culture
Page count: 42 pages
Date(s) read: 1/20/23
Reading journal entry #25 in 2023
July 28, 2021
Cuanto más leo a Svetlana más me gusta. Tiene una forma única de capturar historias y, como dice ella, de escuchar. Admiro su análisis humano.
En estas apenas 23 páginas sacadas de un discurso que hizo hace un repaso sobre las historias de las que ha escrito para hacerse eco de la raíz central: el alma soviética, su construcción y su poco a poco destrucción. Intenta cuestionarse dónde queda la libertad sin tener una respuesta muy concreta... Sin duda una maestra de las palabras.
"It's important to count words in flight, as they're born. It's important not to miss the conversational part of life, which we often neglect, dismiss as unimportant, leaving it to disappear in the bustle of life, in the darkness of time. It seems surprising that this could be literature. But I want to make every bit of our life into literature. Including ordinary, everyday words".
✍🏼IRATXE
En estas apenas 23 páginas sacadas de un discurso que hizo hace un repaso sobre las historias de las que ha escrito para hacerse eco de la raíz central: el alma soviética, su construcción y su poco a poco destrucción. Intenta cuestionarse dónde queda la libertad sin tener una respuesta muy concreta... Sin duda una maestra de las palabras.
"It's important to count words in flight, as they're born. It's important not to miss the conversational part of life, which we often neglect, dismiss as unimportant, leaving it to disappear in the bustle of life, in the darkness of time. It seems surprising that this could be literature. But I want to make every bit of our life into literature. Including ordinary, everyday words".
✍🏼IRATXE
August 11, 2020
Most Interesting Public Lecture by Nobel Literature Prize Winner, 2005. Svetlana Alexievich's public lecture in 2017 was at Cornell University delivered in Russian and translated. As an investigative journalist, she searched for the truth of the Soviet individual and post Soviet individual recording human voices for 30 years. She quotes Dostoevsky, author and psychologist, How much of the human is there in a human being? And goes on to say, How can the human in this human being be protected? That's the question I'm looking to answer. I collect the human spirit. The book The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul is included and is written in Russian.
February 11, 2023
This is a twenty-minute read, tops.
She starts out by explaining how she invented her genre. She's brilliant! Just brilliant.
The whole speech has endless insights. One question she asked all of her Homo Sovieticus interview subjects is 'would you rather have a nation that is strong, or that is admirable?' 80% chose strong.
I guess we're seeing the results of that play out every single day.
She starts out by explaining how she invented her genre. She's brilliant! Just brilliant.
The whole speech has endless insights. One question she asked all of her Homo Sovieticus interview subjects is 'would you rather have a nation that is strong, or that is admirable?' 80% chose strong.
I guess we're seeing the results of that play out every single day.
December 24, 2020
This is not a book, as much as it is an explanation of why she writes the book she writes. That being said, I gave it three stars because I was disappointed in the content, but my interest was piqued. It does serve as a good introduction to her reasons for writing. It does make me want to read her other works.
July 18, 2022
"Conversational language isn’t burdened, it isn’t preconceived. It goes its own way and celebrates: with syntax, intonation, accent. Feeling is resurrected accurately. I follow feelings, I am an historian of things that leave no trace."
June 5, 2023
I feel as if as I've just dipped a toe into the author's work in reading this essay, hence the three stars rather than four - I wish it had been longer. But, I already like her approach and sense of irony, and I'm looking forward to reading more of her work.
December 21, 2019
A resume
A whistle stop tour of her work concluding with the question what is freedom? An important writer who is not as well known as she should be.
A whistle stop tour of her work concluding with the question what is freedom? An important writer who is not as well known as she should be.
December 2, 2021
A reflection by the author on her previous work
June 11, 2022
Interesting look 'behind the scenes'
December 28, 2022
Beautiful, makes one want to pick her books
February 26, 2023
Black hole era concerns everybody. “Shouts and sobs can’t be polished, or the main thing will be neither the tears nor shouts, but the polish.”
June 6, 2023
"I discover my books on the street, I hear them outdoors... It is important to catch words in flight, as they are born" (5).
Read
October 13, 2023Unfortunately my version was in Russian
November 1, 2023
Not really sure what this was supposed to be. Seemed to be an intro in English, about 20 pages of Russian (????) and that was it.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews