Second-Hand Time

The final, fifth book of the famous artistic-documentary cycle "Voices from Utopia" by Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize laureate in literature "for her polyphonic writing - a monument to the suffering and courage of our time." "Communism had a crazy plan,"... the author recounts, "to remake the 'old' man, the decrepit Adam. And it worked. Perhaps the only thing that worked. Over seventy years in the laboratory of Marxism-Leninism, a separate human type was produced - homo soveticus. Some consider him a tragic character, while others call him a 'sovok'. It seems to me that I know this person; he is familiar to me, I have lived side by side with him for many years. He is me. These are my acquaintances, friends, parents." The monologues included in the book were recorded over ten years during travels across the former Soviet Union.