La prosa documentale di Svetlana Aleksievič: tra reportage e memoir collettivo

This essay offers an analysis of the work of Svetlana Alexievich as the most complete expression of documentary prose, defined as a hybrid narrative and combining the genres of the reportage and the collective memoir. This narrative trend attained full development in Soviet literature during the 1970s and is characterized by a transfer from the author to direct witnesses of the narrated events. While Iryna Shylnikova traces the origins of this trend, a diachronic study of documentary prose allows her to reconstruct Svetlana Alexievich’s artistic method. She explains, at the same time, how a recourse to living testimonies on real facts can be transformed into an aesthetic phenomenon. In particular, Shylnikova focuses on Second-hand Time in an attempt to establish the core points of the author’s poetics.