Two Russian-Jewish Women of Distinction, and Their Distinctive Diaries

“I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood,” said the essayist and investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich in her 2015 Nobel Prize lecture. Born in 1948 in Soviet Belarus, Alexievich is fascinated by the way in which ordinary individuals speak about the horrendous suffering that has historically characterized ordinary Russian life:

When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think—how many novels disappear without a trace! . . . I love the lone human voice.

Aliexievich is hardly alone among the distinguished breed of Russian observers and chroniclers of this kind. From Alexander Herzen’s brilliant autobiography My Past and Thoughts and Prince Peter Kropotkin’s dramatic Memoirs of a Revolutionist in the 19th century to Evgeniya Ginzburg’s harrowing Journey into the Whirlwind and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s piercing Hope against Hope in the 20th, Russian writers have transformed the rehearsal of distressing facts into high literary art.