Svetlana Alexievich spent years asking people to tell her what the collapse of the Soviet Union felt like from the inside. What she built from their answers is one of the most demanding acts of listening in contemporary literature.

There is a moment in the introduction to this book where Alexievich describes what she is trying to do, and it is worth reading carefully. She is not writing history, she says. She is not analysing politics. She is trying to capture what she calls the feeling of time — the emotional and psychological texture of living through an event that dismantled not just a political system but a whole way of understanding the world and one's place in it. Her method is listening. Her form is the accumulated testimony of hundreds of people who agreed to speak, often at great length, about things they had not previously put into words.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is one of those historical events that looks entirely different depending on where you stood within it. For some it was liberation — the opening of a closed society, the return of possibility. For the people whose voices fill this book, it was something closer to bereavement: the loss of a collective framework that had given life its structure and meaning, however imperfect that framework was. These are not the voices of ideologues defending the system. They are ordinary people — workers, soldiers, widows, children of true believers — trying to articulate what it felt like when the world they had been formed by simply stopped being the world. The disillusionment Alexievich records is grief for a self that had been built inside a particular story, and that had nowhere to go when the story ended.

Alexievich's own voice is almost entirely absent. She conducts the interviews — sometimes returning to the same person multiple times over years — but what appears on the page is the speaker's account, lightly edited, stripped of the questions that prompted it. The effect is of an unmediated intimacy that is, of course, a sophisticated literary construction. The sequencing, the juxtapositions, the silences between testimonies: all of these are Alexievich's decisions. But the decision to remove herself as narrator, to resist the temptation to explain or contextualise or draw conclusions, is itself a profound act of respect toward her subjects. She trusts the voices. She trusts the reader. She does not tell you what to think about what you are hearing.

This is listening taken to its formal extreme — and it produces knowledge that no other method could. The political history of the Soviet collapse is extensively documented. What Alexievich gives us is something that documentation cannot: the sound of people discovering, in the act of speaking, what they actually experienced. Many of her subjects seem to be articulating things for the first time, finding language for feelings that had no previous outlet. The interview, in her hands, is not an extraction of existing information but a space in which something new comes into being. That is the empathy argument at its most concrete: that genuine listening does not simply receive what is there, it creates the conditions for what is there to become speakable.

In the BBC Newsnight interview with Alexievich — recorded around the time of her Nobel Prize — she speaks about her method with the same precision and moral seriousness that the books embody: about why she chose voices over analysis, about what it costs to carry other people's stories, about the responsibility of being the one who decides what gets kept and what gets left out.