Before stepping onto the stage, Svetlana Alexievich left me with her grayish-beige leather coat, as unfashionable as the rest of her. We had met by chance in March at a literary festival in Austria where the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in literature—a stocky woman in her late 60s, barely 5 feet tall—was being honored. “Hold it for me,” she said, and there was something touchingly Soviet in the gesture: You trust your own to keep an eye out for you. I, too, am a former Soviet citizen; we share the experience of surviving in a world that was “making war …read more
Source: The Atlantic
