Svetlana Alexievich :Documenting the history of human feelings.

"This is Russia!..In Russia you cannot afford to be a delicate flower. In Russia you must be a burdock or a dandelion."
--J.M.Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg

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"Look through any textbook...Not a single coup in history went off without terror, everything always ends in blood. With tongues torn out and eyes gouged out. Like the Middle Ages. You don't have to be a historian to know that..."
--Svetlana Alexievich, Second-Hand Time.

Second-Hand Time is stories narrated by people (docu-novel?) about the fall of Soviet Union ("it was a golden age for jokes! 'A communist is someone who's read Marx, an anti-communist is someone who's understood him.' ") and the two decades that followed it.
As the participants of the socialist drama narrate their tales via Svetlana Alexievich we listen with rapt attention.

While discussing Richard Overy's The Morbid Age, in Fractured Times, Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century, Eric Hobsbawm prefers to call the excavation of contemporary popular reactions to what was happening in and around people's lives as the mood music of history. Svetlana Alexievich I presume, however, does not fit into the category.

Another quote from Second -Hand Time: On the eve of the 1917 revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, 'And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.' Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us second-hand. (P-32-33)