Why it matters that a journalist has won the Nobel Prize in Literature

“Journalism is the literature of civic life,” wrote Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in the latest edition of their influential work, “The Elements of Journalism.”

Now that the Swedish Academy has awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature to Svetlana Alexievich, a journalist from Belarus, can we remove the qualifier “of civic life” and simply recognize journalism as literature?

Probably not. Literary snobs will never be persuaded, no matter how prestigious the honors bestowed upon reporters.

And make no mistake about it, that’s what Alexievich is: a reporter. She’s a reporter in the gloriously old-fashioned sense of someone who gets up from behind her desk, shuts her laptop, turns off her smartphone, ventures into unfamiliar territory and talks to people face to face.

But, of course, she’s more than that. You don’t win a Nobel Prize simply for pounding the pavement or transcribing an interview. It’s her vision that makes her unique, the sense of purpose that animates and unifies all she does.

Whether she’s telling the stories of Soviet female soldiers who fought in World War II, giving voice to the young Red Army conscripts who survived Afghanistan, or trying to put into words the catastrophe that was — and still is — the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Alexievich seeks to capture one thing: authentic human experience.

She does this through an artful, original take on oral history — “a genre where human voices speak for themselves,” as she put it on her website, “Voices from Big Utopia.”

“I compose my books out of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our life and being,” Alexievich said. “I’m writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced. This is impossible to imagine or invent, at any rate in such multitude of real details.”

That’s an artist speaking, but that’s also a journalist in the best sense. A journalist tells true stories about things that matter. Most journalists stay on the surface, and that’s fine. In the case of breaking news, in fact, that’s essential.

But a few journalists — the driven ones, the ones on fire with curiosity — explore below the surface. Their view extends beyond the immediate. For these reporters, everything human is fair game. Exterior events are interesting only as a portal to the interior lives of those who lived through them.

“I’m searching life for observations, nuances, details,” Alexievich explained on her website. “Because my interest in life is not the event as such, not war as such, not Chernobyl as such, not suicide as such. What I am interested in is what happens to the human being, what happens to it in our time. How does man behave and react. How much of the biological man is in him, how much of the man of his time, how much man of the man.”

So why does it matter that this journalist from Belarus, who writes in Russian and whose body of work is only partly available in English, is now a Nobel laureate?

Journalism has long existed on the periphery of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Several laureates began their writing careers as newspaper reporters, such as Ernest Hemingway (1954) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982), but none had been recognized for their reportage.

With Alexievich’s award, journalism takes center stage. It is, as The New Yorker‘s Philip Gourevitch said, “a long-overdue recognition of reportage as a form of literature equal to fiction, poetry, and playwriting.”

But more than that, Alexievich’s triumph reminds all journalists of what their vocation is capable of. We need breaking news and bare-bones facts and live tweets and scoreboard updates. But we also need reporting that does justice to our lives as complex, fully dimensional human beings.

Alexievich has rightly been honored for pursuing a vision of that kind of reporting. Now it’s time for others to build on her legacy.

____________________

SUGGESTED READINGS BY AND ABOUT SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH

The place to start is “Voices from Big Utopia,” Alexievich’s website. “Big Utopia” is her name for the ill-fated former Soviet Union, whose collapse is the great historical fact that colors all her work.

Start with her autobiographical essay, “A Search for Eternal Man,” in which she summarizes her artistic vision. Then read  “The Chronicler of the Utopian Land” for an overview of her life and work.

A visit to the Nobel Prize site should come next, followed by two fine pieces about Alexievich published in The New Yorker after she won the award:

• Masha Gessen, “Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Win,” The New Yorker, Oct. 8, 2015

• Philip Gourevitch, “Nonfiction Wins a Nobel,” The New Yorker, Oct. 8, 2015

Not many of Alexievich’s books are available in English, but the ones that have been translated bear the stamp of a tenacious reporter blessed with the sensibility of an artist. Two are in print and available at Amazon:

• “Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster”

• “Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War”

One can only wonder what Studs Terkel, the American master of oral history as a portrait of human experience, would have said upon hearing news of Alexievich’s Nobel win. But surely we know what the indefatigable Chicagoan would have done: He would have interviewed her!

NOTE: The photo of Svetlana Alexievich was taken by Elke Wetzig and is used under Creative Commons License Attribtion-ShareAlike 3.0.