Suffering Is a Daunting Job
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Personal life experience is the stuff from which history emerges and the stuff from which a generation’s identity evolves. By showing the patterns and textures of individual experiences as well as where they interface, Belarusian author Svetlana Aleksievich makes the abyss of Soviet history legible: the violence, the wars, the catastrophes, and the long afterlife of socialist utopia and totalitarian ideology in the post-Soviet realm.
(Osteuropa 5/2010, pp. 6–16)