A Document and Prose in the Works of Svetlana Alexievich

Abstract

In the midst of the controversy provoked by the award of this year's Nobel Prize to the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, the author tries to illuminate the documentary nature of her prose and the importance of such works for contemporary literature by analyzing the image of the author in The Voices of Utopia documentary cycle. The analysis reveals that the presence of the author in the text is increasingly divided into a distinct inner, testimonial perspective, close to the other voices of the book's heroes, and into an external, less obvious compositional and metadiscourse author's voice, which organizes and clearly formulates the idea of the work as a whole.