What comes through is the Job-like Russian lament and wailing and tearful philosophising. 1960s dissident life is the kitchen life. That's where perestroika really took place. Your typical Soviet-floor plan.In the nineteenth century, all of Russian culture was concentrated on aristocratic estates in the twentieth century, it lived on in our kitchens. She sets the tone in the book with this: '-The Russian kitchen…The pitiful Khurshchyovka kitchenette, nine to twelve square metres (if you're lucky!), and on the other side of a flimsy wall, the toilet. The Nobel Committee called it 'polyphony'. She realises there are snatches of literary beauty in these quotidian outpourings and carefully records the musical notes of human suffering and loneliness and of snatches of fleeting happiness.

She talks to people, men and women, old and young, and lets them speak, until they almost exhaust themselves without really being cathartic. Secondhand Time is a collection of interviews of people across the former Soviet Union, spreading from Sakhalin islands in the far-east to Baku in Central Asia. It would be useful to keep in mind Reed and Nobel laureates Pasternak, Sholokhov and Solzhenitsyn as we read Alexeviech's journalistic writings on the post-Soviet state of mind of those who saw the tyranny of the system and experienced the turmoil of the post-Soviet landscape, with its psychological craters and the barren materialism of Western affluence. Solzhenitsyn made the Gulag a byword for repression in the world through his work on Stalin's prison camps in The Gulag Archipelago, which was published in Paris in 1973, three years after he was awarded the Nobel for Literature. Pasternak got it in 1958 for his only novel, Dr Zhivago, a poetic protest against the mechanist Soviet system. The two other Soviet writers who got the Nobel, but were rejected by the Kremlin, were Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Sholokhov was one writer that the Nobel Committee and Soviet leaders had agreed on. In 1965, the Nobel Committee gave the Prize for Literature to Mikhail Sholokhov for the epic novel, And Quiet Flows The Don. He wrote poetry, which would not have won him the Nobel, and his journalism at that time would not have qualified at all.

Unlike Alexievich, who got the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, Reed did not get a Nobel for his writings on the revolution and socialist episodes in Mexico, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Secondhand time svetlana alexievich