Boys in Zinc: Svetlana Alexievich (Penguin Modern Classics)

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We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse. There are a hundred people in the catering college where I work and I am the only one who lost her husband in a war the rest of them have only read about in the newspapers. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Beautifully written book about the experiences of USSR soluiers and families in the Afghan war, but so much that applies to the Ukraine invasion, corruption, bullying, lack of information, looting and casual murder, 40 years apart but nothing changes.

Women made wild with despair when their men came home in zinc coffins lashed out at the regime; the gulag could not compete with their grief. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her books were not published by Belarusian state-owned publishing houses after 1993, while private publishers in Belarus have only published two of her books: Chernobyl Prayer in 1999 and Second-hand Time in 2013, both translated into Belarusian.

I hoped I would get to see him when they went to do their morning gymnastics but they were all running in identical striped vests and I missed him, didn’t catch a last glimpse of him. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). I note that most are from educated families, the intelligentsia—teachers, doctors, librarians—in a word, bookish people. His translation of Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia was awarded the inaugural PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010.

The ‘bandits’ had only old Maxim machine-guns we had seen in films, the Stingers and Japanese machine guns came later. The second half is about the trial the author went through after publication as Russia battled to understand it's own position in regard to the war. But the horror is weirdly eased by occasional surreal moments, such as the Afghan children who scamper down from the mountains at night to scatter heroin in the Soviet camps, hoping to stupefy the invader, or the miles of wheat fields set alight which brought a warm flash of nostalgia to one soldier as “the fire carried the childhood smell of bread up into the air”, reminding us the bloodied warrior is still just a Soviet boy who misses home and hearth, and perhaps if war is waged by ordinary people then it can be stopped by those same ordinary people. From 1979 to 1989 Soviet troops engaged in a war in Afghanistan that claimed thousands of casualties on both sides.I’d run home, the icon would be hanging there, and I’d get down on my knees and pray, ‘Save him for me, God! I remember he said we’d only beaten the Americans here by one hour, and everybody was waiting to welcome us back home as heroes. The paper further proposes that conflicts between the preternatural and the material, and between elite and non-elite voices--key themes of the works studied – are vital to understanding the age of change which Alexievich, through her use of extensive interviews, was seeking to record. This book has two distinct parts, in the first the author, Svetlana Alexievich, weaves together the sentiments and memories of some who served in the Soviet forces sent to Afghanistan in 1979, accounts blended with the painful reminisces of those mothers forced to come to terms with the fact that their beloved sons were coming home in a 'zinc coffin.