The memory of tragedies and the face of the future

In conversation with Svetlana Aleksiévich, her interlocutor, J. A. González Sainz, will ask the Belarusian writer, Nobel Prize in Literature 2015, about her life and work, her life journey between Belarus, Ukraine, Russia and Germany, and her keenly crafted and highly successful works written with a literary style all her own: her polyphonic novels of voices, the voice ceded to and gathered from the humiliated and offended by the tragedies of the century, and then recomposed into splendid literary mosaics. They will talk about Second-hand Time, Boys in Zinc, Chernobyl Prayer and The Unwomanly Face of War, and address the problem of how to preserve the memory of tragedies and also the tragedy of memory, of ideologies, of the weighty ideological heritage of the 20th century, of idealisms, totalitarianisms, communism and the Gulag. The imperialisms, wars and totalitarian propensities being resurrected and which, so it would seem, wish to redraw the face of our future will also be discussed. To speak of the twentieth century, therefore, will be to speak of our present, of Putin’s Russia, of Ukraine, of Europe, of the transformation of men by the worst of themselves and also of the role and meaning of literature.