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Reflections on Belarusian Nobel Prize Winner Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich
Belarusian journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievich speaks at a press conference in Berlin, Germany, after winning the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.  © Axel Schmidt/Getty

I first met Svetlana Alexievich in May 1994 on a visit to Minsk, the capital of Belarus. It was my first visit. I went because I had become president of the Open Society Foundations the previous September and I wanted to visit all the foundations established over the previous decade by George Soros. Almost all of them in that era were in the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

Minsk was not a city I would have chosen to visit for touristic reasons. It had been destroyed during World War II. The postwar reconstruction had created a drab city almost entirely made up of buildings that were characteristic of the Soviet Union in that era.

A prominent feature of the main square was a large bronze statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, the secret police force established after the 1917 revolution. Later, it was known as the OGPU, and it eventually became the KGB. I traveled between Moscow and Minsk on decrepit planes operated by Belavia Airlines, an offshoot of Aeroflot, in which the passengers piled their luggage down the center aisle.

Not long after my first visit, Alexander Lukashenko came to power as president of Belarus and soon made clear his government’s intent to close our foundation. That required me to go back a couple of times in a vain attempt to negotiate the foundation’s survival. One of the few pleasures that I derived from my visits to Minsk was the opportunity to get to know Svetlana Alexievich. She served for a period on the board of the Belarusian Soros Foundation (as it was known).

On one occasion, I accompanied her to a meeting of a writers’ club. The discussion there focused on whether Belarusian writers should write in the Belarusian language—which was mainly spoken in rural areas—or in Russian, the language of some of the world’s greatest literature. (She chose the latter.) Another time, I went with her to a meeting of Belarus PEN, where the focus was on attacks on freedom of expression.

I was able to help Alexievich arrange the translation into English of one of her books. A few years later, after publication of her great work, Voices from Chernobyl, I put her in touch with Istvan Rev, director of the Open Society Archive at the Central European University in Budapest, and she donated the extensive collection of materials on which she based the book to the archive.

After the foundation in Belarus was shut down by the government of President Lukashenko in 1997, and court proceedings were launched against members of its staff on specious grounds, I never went back to Belarus. Yet I was exhilarated to learn she had been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. As Belarusians go to the polls to return Alexander Lukashenko for a fifth term—a regime Alexievich has called “a soft dictatorship”—her work has never been more important.

Thinking about Svetlana Alexievich confirms my conviction that great works of art are sometimes produced in the most dismal and repressive circumstances. With the help of fellowships and literary prizes, Svetlana Alexievich has lived for periods in a number of European cities that we think of as great cultural centers. Yet she has always returned to Minsk even though her books cannot be published in her own country.

Up to now, the world has known Belarus mainly as the country suffering under the oppressive rule of Alexander Lukashenko. The presentation of the Nobel Prize in Literature helps us to know that it is also the country of one of the great artists of our era.

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