A Chronicler in the Nobel's Sights

The word in recent days was that an "investigative journalist" might be in line -- with Alice Munro, the eventual winner, and Haruki Murakami, the perennial favorite of late -- to win the Nobel literary prize this year. But investigative journalists, as a rule, tend not to be great writers (an enviable wordsmith Bob Woodward is not), much less to produce anything approaching literature. Was it possible that the media was, in its usual makeshift way, trying to describe some sort of a modern-day chronicler instead — and could it mean that even the Nobel committee recognizes the value of literary nonfiction?

That does appear to be the case. Far from a straight journalist, much less an investigative one, Svetlana Alexievich of Belarusia is very much a chronicler, one who is consciously trying to go far beyond journalism to create art out of her deployment and shaping of documentary material. In her own words:

I've been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life.I tried this and that and finally I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire. Together they record verbally the history of the country, their common history, while each person puts into words the story of his/her own life. Today when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified the document in art is becoming increasingly interesting while art as such often proves impotent. The document brings us closer to reality as it captures and preserves the originals. After 20 years of work with documentary material and having written five books on their basis I declare that art has failed to understand many things about people.

But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts, I'm writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced. This is impossible to imagine or invent, at any rate in such multitude of real details. We quickly forget what we were like ten or twenty or fifty years ago. Sometimes we are ashamed of our past and refuse to believe in what happened to us in actual fact. Art may lie but document never does. Although the document is also a product of someone's will and passion. I compose my books out of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our life and being.