Svetlana Aleksievich: “Find a person in a man”

It is difficult for a person, Dostoevsky noticed this. You have to literally collect yourself, the most human in itself, but this is where self -esteem rests.

“Once I was struck and lead the words of Dostoevsky in life, trying to understand,“ how many people are in a person ”. It is in this that I see the meaning of writing – collecting a person. The twentieth century was not the best time to succeed in this – the time of war, revolutions, Gulag, Auschwitz and Chernobyl. People were constantly tested for strength. Our experience is sad. There was enough man in the camp for two days, as the Shalamov testifies. And in war too. We learned about ourselves that it is easier to be a weak creature, a half -man, supple material for all kinds of experiments promising paradise on Earth. And it is very difficult for a person – not a hero, but just a person. Maybe only in the last minutes before his death or in the hours of love, a person manages to be himself and he looks like God’s plan. I am always looking for such a shocked person. He has something to tell. This is my hero

“.

Svetlana Aleksievich, Belarusian documentary writer, laureate of two dozen prestigious international awards. This year I was awarded the world of the Union of German Publishers and Book Motorgists. The collection of works by Svetlana Aleksievich in 5 volumes is published in the publishing house “Time” in September.

* Fedor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Russian writer, the phrase was taken from his “notebooks of 1880–1881” (f. Dostoevsky “Diary. Articles. Notebooks “, Zakharov, 2005).