This prisoner committed his murder in what was then still the Soviet Union. Then they quarrel and she disappears.īut recent history has added a twist Chekhov could not have imagined. She divorces her husband, abandons her children, marries the prisoner, whom she is seldom allowed to see, and finds a low-paying job nearby. To top it off, his prison is a converted monastery, with walls five feet thick, on an island in an isolated northern lake. He, however, is in prison, serving a life sentence for murder. But then, on the strength of a photograph, she decides that someone else is the man she really loves - whom she once saw in a dream. With three children, she is married to a good man who loves her. In this latest book, one voice is of a woman who seems to have stepped out of a tale by Anton Chekhov. Svetlana Alexievich has said that when she assembles one of her remarkable collections of oral histories she is constructing a “novel in voices”. By Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich, Random House, 496 pages, $30
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