Novel Other Lives and Exegesis ‘A mantle of words’: reading mourning in Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time

Abstract

Other Lives is a novel composed of two temporally distinct halves, focalised by two different women: Susannah, a married teacher working in a displaced persons’ camp in Sydney in the mid- 1950s; and May, Susannah’s teenage granddaughter, who travels to St Petersburg, Russia, following the death of her grandfather Vitaly, a former resident of the camp. Other Lives deals with the legacies of exile and silence, loss and inheritance: how past experiences intrude into our lives unexpectedly, insinuating themselves into the present even as they elude us; how memories of loss mould relationships within families not only when they are shared but also when they are withheld. How mourning takes shape and changes its shape, resisting resolution. Part I is concentrated on the relationship between Susannah and Vitaly, Part II on their granddaughter May’s experiences in Russia in the last year of the twentieth century, on the cusp of Vladimir Putin’s ascension to power. The novel concludes with a brief coda, a final scene of Susannah and Vitaly that picks up where Part I ended, bringing the past into the present. Svetlana Alexievich is unique among post-Soviet writers addressing the breadth of the Soviet legacy, and Secondhand Time, first published in English in 2016, is unique in her oeuvre as a study of post-Soviet perceptions of and responses to loss. In my exegesis I contend that Alexievich’s text is not only borne out of and about mourning, but in fact constitutes a material act of mourning, from the level of the individual voice to the elegiac, circular, unstable and repetitious whole. Confining my analysis to two exemplary sections of Secondhand Time, I consider how the interrupted character of post-Soviet mourning is made visible in the speech of Alexievich’s subjects. In Chapter One I focus on the places where that speech is silent, or silenced; in Chapter Two on the contested discourse by which it is constituted. The concluding chapter of the exegesis comprises a discussion of the composition of Other Lives.

Date of Thesis submission	2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Gail Jones (Supervisor) & Lorraine Sim (Supervisor)