Secondhand Time

Svetlana Alexievich’s “Second-Hand Time” is the final book of the famous cycle “Voices of Utopia,” by a Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.

“Communism had a crazy plan—to remake the ‘old’ person, a crumbling Eve. And it worked… Maybe the only thing that worked. Over more than seventy years, in the laboratory of Marxism-Leninism, they bred a separate type of human—homo soveticus. Some call it a tragic character, others call it ‘sovok.’ I think I know this person. I’m familiar with her; I lived close to her, side by side, for many years. She is me. These are my acquaintances, my friends, my parents.”

The monologues included in the book were recorded over ten years during trips across the former Soviet Union.