Les cercueils de zinc - Prix Nobel de Littérature 2015 [ Nobel Prize 2015 ] (TITRES) (French Edition)

From 1979 to 1989, a million Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed 50,000 casualties-- and the youth and humanity of many tens of thousands more. In Zinky Boys journalist Svetlana Alexievich gives voice to the tragic history of the Afghanistan War. What emerges is a story that is shocking in its brutality and revelatory in its similarities to the American experience in Vietnam-- a resemblance that Larry Heinemann describes movingly in his introduction to the book, providing American readers with an often uncomfortably intimate connection to a war that may have seemed very remote to us. The Soviet dead were shipped back in sealed zinc coffins (hence the term "Zinky Boys"), while the State denied the very existence of the conflict; even today the radically altered Soviet society continues to reject the memory of the "Soviet Vietnam." Creating controversy and outrage when it was first published in the USSR-- it was called by reviewers there a "slanderous piece of fantasy" and part of a "hysterical chorus of malign attacks"--Zinky Boys presents the candid and affecting testimony of the officers and grunts, nurses and prostitutes, mothers, sons, and daughters who describe the war and its lasting effects. Svetlana Alexievich has snatched from the memory hole the truth of the Afghanistan War-- the beauty of the country and the savage Army bullying, the killing and the mutilation, the profusion of Western goods, the shame and shattered lives of returned veterans. Zinky Boys offers a unique, harrowing, and unforgettably powerful insight into the realities of war and the turbulence of Soviet life today "Svetlana Alexievitch a osé violer en 1990 un des derniers tabous de l'ex-URSS : elle a démoli le mythe de la guerre d'Afghanistan, des guerriers libérateurs, celui du soldat soviétique que la télévision montrait en train de planter des pommiers dans les villages alors qu'en réalité, il lançait des grenades dans les maisons d'argile où femmes et enfants étaient venus chercher refuge. L'Union soviétique était alors un Etat militariste, camouflé en pays ordinaire et il était dangereux de faire glisser la bâche kaki recouvrant les fondations de granit de cet Etat. Elle privait les jeunes gars revenus de la guerre de leur auréole d'héroïsme : ces garçons avaient perdu leurs amis, leurs illusions, leur sommeil, ils étaient devenus incapables de se refaire une vie et sont devenus aux yeux de leur entourage, et cela dès le premier extrait paru dans la presse, des violeurs, des assassins et des brutes."-- Quatrième de couverture