Authors

Discussion

For several decades, Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been giving voice to the voiceless, to women and men who lived through the Soviet-era repression and whose histories and experiences have been continuously silenced, marginalized, and obscured by the official master-narratives and hegemonic memory scripts. By chronicling “what might not otherwise be heard”, Alexievich’s cycle Voices of Utopia reflects on and critically interrogates the complex dynamics and the multiple consequences of ethical, political, and social invisibilities and erasures. In this presentation, I will analyze the dialogical interplay between master and counter-narratives, hegemonic memory scripts and counter-memory, the mainstream and the marginalized in Alexievich’s novel Boys in Zinc. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the narrative hermeneutics approach (Meretoja, 2018), I will show how the novel’s dialogics of counter-narratives and counter-memory deconstructs and undermines Soviet foundational myths and master-narratives, opening up the hermeneutical space of meaning to a more complex, impure accounts of systemic violence and historical agency (Mihai, 2022). By deconstructing the idealized master-narratives of war and Soviet totalitarianism, Alexievich’s novel invites readers and society to reassess their visions of the Soviet past and its impacts on the post-Soviet present, on how particular interpretations and narratives about the past continue to shape our space of experience, horizon of expectation and historical agency in the present (Meretoja, 2018). Drawing attention to the manifold potentialities and effects of narratives, Alexievich’s novel highlights how narratives can both perpetuate mechanisms of systemic violence and repression, yet also open pathways to resistance and hope. Taken together, the dialogic, open, plural, non-subsumptive, and deeply anti-totalitarian form of her novels articulates the ethical potential of literature, its capacity to disrupt reductive narrative scripts and open new political, social, and ethical possibilities for our present and future (Meretoja, 2018).