Second-hand time
E-book, Czech
Second-hand time
The author received the Nobel Prize in Literature 2015
Time at Second Hand is an exceptional book by an extraordinary author, winner of the most prestigious Russian, European and American literary awards. The end of the communist regime and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire brought disappointment, frustration and disorientation to its citizens after initial hopes. The text is a mosaic of dozens of real voices that Alexijević recorded on a tape recorder during interviews with various people. They're talking about it, how they believed in the Soviet system, killing and dying for his cause, talks about the secrets and horrors of communism, about Stalin's gulag, wars, Chernobyl...
The reader is confronted with a variety of fates and opinions, from which common traumas and obsessions gradually emerge. The heroes of the book consider August 1991 to be the peak of the free uprising of Russian society, when hundreds of thousands of Russians took to the streets of Moscow to confront the tanks of the putschists attempting to undo the democratic reforms of the previous two years. It was a moment of great, if not very concrete, hopes, after which sobering came. Capitalism was imagined by the Russians as a kind of big supermarket, and suddenly they woke up one day in a third world country that they no longer understood. Anarchy and the advent of the market economy brought inflation, brazen looting and criminality, loss of direction, economic decline and corruption. Time at Second Hand is a book that offers a deep probe into Russian society and helps to understand its contemporary development. It forces the reader to think about what Russia is and why it is incapable of modernizing faster. Why the popularity of the autocrat Putin is around 85% and why 70% of Russians consider Stalin a great man. It is a book about why the chauvinism of Greater Russia is not only still alive, but, God forbid, increasingly militant.
An extraordinary book, winner of many prestigious awards - in France it won the Lire magazine's Best Book of the Year 2013 and the Prix Médicis 2013, in Germany with the German Booksellers' Peace Prize 2013, presented at the Frankfurt trade fair, The author herself has previously won other major prizes in Germany, Sweden, Polish, France, Russia and the USA.
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