![]() ![]() Svetlana Alexievich's books criticize political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus. Her major works are her grand cycle Voices of Utopia, which consists of five parts. With her "documentary novels", Svetlana Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. In her books she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. Svetlana Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In Minsk she has worked at the newspaper Sel'skaja Gazeta, Alexievich's criticism of the political regimes in the Soviet Union and thereafter Belarus has periodically forced her to live abroad, for example in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden. She studied to be a journalist at the University of Minsk and worked a teacher, journalist and editor. Alexievich grew up in Belarus, where both her parents were teachers. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. ![]() Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano Frankivsk, Ukraine. Zinky Boys offers a unique, harrowing, and unforgettably powerful insight into the harsh realities of war. Svetlana Alexievich brings us the truth of the Soviet-Afghan War: the beauty of the country and the savage Army bullying, the killing and the mutilation, the profusion of Western goods, the shame and shattered lives of returned veterans. The Soviet dead were shipped back in sealed zinc coffins (hence the term “Zinky Boys”), while the state denied the very existence of the conflict. ![]() What emerges is a story that is shocking in its brutality and revelatory in its similarities to the American experience in Vietnam. Creating controversy and outrage when it was first published in the USSR-it was called by reviewers there a “slanderous piece of fantasy” and part of a “hysterical chorus of malign attacks”- Zinky Boys presents the candid and affecting testimony of the officers and grunts, nurses and prostitutes, mothers, sons, and daughters who describe the war and its lasting effects. From 1979 to 1989 a million Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed 50,000 casualties-and the youth and humanity of many tens of thousands more. ![]()
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