The moral voice of Svetlana Alexievich has resonated loudly today in the Palau de la Generalitat. The Nobel Prize for Literature is in Barcelona to collect, this afternoon, the Premi Internacional Catalunya. “Life is not about killing each other,” she said. “The world is with Ukraine, we thought it would be a short war, but the whole world has come to support Ukraine. Me too. I want Ukraine to win, and I’m sure that will win if Putin doesn’t push the nuclear button.
To questions from this newspaper, he revealed that “I have abandoned my book project on love because I had the initial manuscript and all the notes of the interviews in my house in Minsk, which I had to leave in a hurry to go live in Berlin. I hope I can take up this theme of love when I can return to my country. Now I am writing another book, encyclopedic, on homo sovieticus, focused on Belarus and other places, a continuation of my work on the subject. because we thought we had finished with communism … but no. I talk to many people, Russians and Ukrainians too, who tell me how difficult it is to preserve the human heart in the middle of a war. I have been nothing but a journalist all my life and what fascinates me are the real testimonies, listening to them is sublime music”.
He also expressed solidarity with the journalist Katsiaryna Andreeva -who, seven years ago, acted as an interpreter in her extensive conversation with ‘La Vanguardia’ at her home in Minsk- “imprisoned for no reason, only for reporting on the protests against Lukashenko, first to two years and then eight more. She is a brilliant woman, the granddaughter and wife of a journalist, a symbol of all the people the regime imprisons to sow terror, turning them into martyrs.”
“I am amazed,” she says, “to see how, in some towns in deep Russia, people say goodbye to the soldiers who are going to fight in the Ukraine with chants and applause. This is not the reality of the cities, where young people do not want to go to the war and they clash many times with their parents because of it. The borders are filled with people who want to leave Russia, their intellectual elite already lives abroad. It’s okay: every young person who flees is one less soldier”.
The writer has also welcomed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to various human rights activists in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. “I know that there are Ukrainians who protest when they also give prizes to Russians… but they are very brave people who fight against the war. There are those who have a mental mush about it. Our peoples, all of them, have been involved in a war without want it. I write in Russian, I am Belarusian but half Ukrainian (my mother was), we all have a thousand mixtures in our blood.
