It is difficult to discuss Svetlana Alexievich`s book as one does not

A laudatory speech by Chair of the Jury Maciej Zaremba Bielawski
for the Laureates of the 6th edition of the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage:
Svetlana Alexievich, Michał Olszewski and Mariusz Kalinowski
It is difficult to discuss Svetlana Alexievich’s book as one does not know where to
begin. Perhaps then I should start from the most topical dimension of this reportage. It is
going to be an appeal to the politicians of the democratic world. Make sure to read Secondhand Time, since neither ambassadors’ reports nor satellite imagery will help you to
understand what Russia is and what can happen in this country. Sociologists’ reports will not
help either, as contemporary science is unable to cope with such notions as “destiny”,
“longing” or “myth”. And it will certainly not understand the fact that a community can
recollect an era of debasement and terror as times when life had deeper meaning. And that
there is a grain of truth in this belief. Vasily Petrovich N., a party member since 1922, says:
“Our era… my… These were great times! No-one lived for themselves.” (p. 182)1
Svetlana Alexievich does not judge or condemn. She wants to remain, as she said in an
interview, “a cool-headed historian, and not a historian with a flaming torch. Let time be the
judge. Time is just, not this near time, but distant time. The time when we are gone. When our
passions are gone.”
That is a second dimension of this unusual book: a unique record of passions of the
past era. When Ryszard Kapuściński was collecting materials for his Imperium, he noticed
with horror that he had to be really quick as it took just a few years for people to have
problems with restoring the atmosphere of the times that had just gone away.
A few years later Svetlana Alexievich reconstructs in detail the state of mind of Soviet
man. How does she manage to do that? Perhaps one should have cultivated the myth of the
Great Patriotic War? Or perhaps the case was that Kapuściński asked different questions?
Svetlana Alexievich says: “I do not ask about socialism, but about love, envy, childhood,
ageing. About music, dancing, hairdos. About thousands of life’s details that are gone. It is
the only way to frame a disaster into something ordinary and try to tell something” (p. 11). I
am quoting Alexievich as there is no point in trying to express it better.
Svetlana Alexievich reveals the fascinating way in which the most intimate and private
1 All quoted fragments are English translations of excerpts from the Polish edition of Second-hand
Time..., translated by Jerzy Czech, Czarne Publishing House, Wołowiec, 2014.
experiences – happy and unhappy love affairs, friendships, sacrifices, disappointments and
betrayals – intertwine in people’s fates with events of great History. Her special talent is best
evidenced here, as is the effect of her enormous, long-standing, painstaking work. Fragments
of human fates, everyday micro-events make up an enormous epic, a historical panorama of
the land that spans from Minsk to Central Asia.
This way, asking about seemingly trivial matters, sitting over tea in kitchens, she
restores from memory the spirit of Soviet communism that is still present in contemporary
Russia. More tangled than we used to consider it to be. Here is one more quotation: “I keep
walking around circles of pain. I can’t get out. Pain contains everything: both horror and
triumph; sometimes I believe that pain is a bridge between people, a hidden link, and at other
times I think with despair that it is an abyss” (p. 379).
It is a portrait of mentality that is tragic, where things that connect people at the same
time divide them, a mentality that one is unable to understand without the notion of faith.
Was Second-hand Time not such a great title, the book could have been called “Faith
and Fear”.
*
To all appearances, Michał Olszewski’s World's Best Shoes is a completely different
project. It is a collection of reportages on different subjects written for a newspaper. One-off
texts, or so they seem – a collection of Polish contemporary problems. From toxic air in spa
resorts – a scoop – to the repressed memory of acts of collaboration by some Chełmno
inhabitants during the Holocaust. The books includes texts about paedophile priests, toxic
industrial facilities as well as social and administrative pathologies.
The nature of intervention reportage is that it becomes outdated fast. The reporter’s
energy is focused on stirring the public. It is not personalities that are the most important here, but
the roles they play in a given drama.. And this is the way it probably should be. This was
probably what a certain wise rabbi meant when he said that newspapers had plenty of facts,
which are indeed true, but very few truths. The Bible, on the other hand, has not a single
verifiable fact, but quite a lot of truths. And not necessarily those that were revealed, but
rather told.
There are exceptions to this rule. Olszewski’s book contains reportages that can be
read almost like biblical parables. (For example “Sheep means hope”). Written with restraint,
using seemingly simple language which tries not to be intrusive for the reader. The stories are
open-ended, open to interpretations, but therefore even richer in meaning. It seems that
intervention reporter Michał Olszewski makes his task more difficult for himself.
Włodzimierz Nowak, a finalist of the first edition of our Award, put it nicely in the following
words: “He will stare, he will ponder, as if he forgot that the deadline is looming”. Why does
he complicate his work so much? Let us hope that he cannot do it any other way. Perhaps it is
because with Olszewski the subject nearly always seems to be something else than what we
have before our eyes. An existential question: Could that be me? What do I and this person
have in common?
Asked why he was so attracted by debauched and disregarded people, he said he was
looking for an answer to the question what would happen if he himself had drawn the short
straw in life. What happens to someone who is derailed from normal life by a particular
situation or their own weakness? Do they change so much that there is no hope of return
anymore?
Does Svetlana Alexievich ask similar questions – mutatis mutandis, on an enormous
scale – with reference to post-Soviet nations? I believe Michał Olszewski would agree with
Svetlana Alexievich’s opinion given in her interview for Gazeta Wyborcza daily: “I don’t
collect nightmares, I don’t collect pure suffering. In my conversations I look for the human
soul. I try to understand how it happens that a person remains a person. What are their
chances? Where can they find strength? I look for emotions.”2
Let me highlight one more similarity between these books. Olszewski is also
interested in the way that repressed, distorted or mythologized history corrupts the present.
Michał Olszewski’s book is positive proof that press reportage, of the transient kind,
can be a more important source of knowledge about the secrets of the human soul, both
individual and collective, than literature. The reportage collection includes stories that would
be regarded as too improbable, grotesque or aggressively symbolic if born in the mind of a
novelist. But they are real.
*
For the first time in the Award’s history we are offering a separate distinction for the
best translation of one of the ten nominated books.
Göran Rosenberg’s story, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, is not only intimate,
but it is also written in a special style, as if invented for this particular occasion. Sometimes it
seems that the sentences are prolonged to discharge the emotions gathered in them. As we
said in our verdict, this prose cannot be correctly translated, it must be acted out, or
“Płaczę coraz częściej” (I cry more and more often), interview conducted by Ewa WołkanowskaKołodziej, Duży Format, 30 April 2015.
2
interpreted, as fidelity to the note may prove to be infidelity to the phrase. There are also
pauses invisible to the eye, one needs to listen to them carefully.
Mariusz Kalinowski not only perfectly rewrote this music into a Polish melody. As
pointed out by the jury’s expert Professor Leonard Neuger, Kalinowski allowed himself to use
words that Rosenberg does not use, as they are non-existent in Swedish. Such a central word
for the story is “saved” instead of “överlevande” or “survivor”. Saved is a more dramatic
state, as if the fact of surviving defined being. Neuger writes that “Polish here is better than
Swedish and even more painful.” Is there any better praise for a translator?
Maciej Zaremba Bielawski
(translated by Jarosław Dąbrowski)