“I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood,” said the essayist and investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture. Born in 1948 in Soviet Belarus, Alexievich is fascinated by the way in which ordinary individuals speak about the horrendous suffering that has historically characterized ordinary Russian life:
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More about: History & Ideas, Memoir, Russian Jewry, Women in Judaism