Abstract
The book The Secondhand Time completes the artistic-documentary cycle of
works The Voices of Utopia by S. Aleksievich, a Russian-speaking Belarusian author. Like
her other books, it actualizes, in her own words, “the genre of human voices, confessions,
testimonies and documents of a human soul”. Unlike Western documentary writers whose
works oppose the artistic world by undressing and desacralizing it, S. Aleksievich, by following
the traditions of the Russian literature, strives to preserve the sacred in her material,
oftentimes introducing the artistic and esthetic elements. The article analyzes the tools that
the author uses in her book, such as selecning facts and documents, alternating “voices”,
editing them, including other sources in the text, moving from location to locatoin, explicit
and implicit depiction of conscience, psychology of interlocutors, accentuating basic elements
in monologues and remarks, allusions, reminiscences, etc. The conclusion evaluates
artistic value of this work.
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