With the arrival of the Germans, in their “stomping iron-shod boots”, fathers are lined up and shot, mothers killed by bombs, houses set on fire. Safety is brutally replaced by fear, pain and hunger.

Many of her hundred or so testimonies open on the day the war broke out, a time recalled as cheerful: the weather was good and children were out playing with friends or picking mushrooms. A logical sequel to her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War – interviews with the women who served in the Red Army, which sold more than 2m copies – it captures the memories of people who had been children, aged between three and 14, during the second world war. L ast Witnesses, now published in English for the first time, and translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, first appeared in 1985. When, in 2015, she was awarded the Nobel prize for literature – the first journalist to be so honoured and credited with inventing a new literary genre – it was greeted with outrage in the state-controlled Russian media, which claimed that she had won it only on account of her anti-Putin views. Her subversive, anguished testimonies, taken from ordinary people, have not been appreciated. Oral history was not recognised as professional research by the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Alexievich’s books have attracted repeated criticism in a country where the state has kept tight control of its history through the media, school books and anniversary celebrations, ensuring a shared, tidy and victorious collective memory of the past.

Alexievich would not have attended the court hearing, she wrote later, except that she felt it her duty to confront her accusers, not to apologise to them, but to “ask their forgiveness for the fact that it is not possible to get at the truth without pain”.Īll non-fiction writers are vulnerable to charges of invention and distortion, and none more so than Alexievich, who has spent more than 40 years producing her own remarkable version of recent Soviet history, one based exclusively on interviews, strung together as a series of monologues, unmediated by commentaries. Though the case was in part thrown out, it said much about the fickleness of memory and the way that the rawness of grief – conveyed to Alexievich during the interviews – had quickly been overlaid by a more bearable narrative, in which the war had been a heroic venture to help Afghanistan create a new society: their sons and husbands had not died uselessly but for a noble cause.

They accused her of offending their “honour and dignity” and of portraying their soldier sons as “soulless killer-robots, pillagers, drug addicts and racists”. I n 1993, two years after Svetlana Alexievich published Boys in Zinc, her oral history of Russia’s war in Afghanistan, she was sued by a number of the people she had interviewed.

Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich