Of the fifteen women who have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, six are from Eastern or Central Europe. Born between 1891 and 1962, in the stretch of land from East Germany to Belarus, these Nobel women differ wildly in the way they write—especially about power and hopelessness, two subjects they all share. There’s Elfriede Jelinek, whose 1983 novel The Piano Teacher uses BDSM as a way of talking about abuse and deviance. Then there’s Svetlana Alexievich, whose renderings of Chernobyl testimony are as spare and haunting as the exclusion zone itself. And, of course, there’s Olga Tokarczuk, whose dialogue delights in that brand of sarcasm so unique to the Eastern European aesthetic: ‘Cheer up! Soon it’ll get worse.’
Despite their differences, Eastern Europe’s Nobel women often use a similar tone of voice, one that is bleak, desperate, and detached. Perhaps it’s a tonal signature of their region’s suffering over the past hundred years, a century that included genocide, gulags, nuclear tragedy, and government surveillance. These six selections represent both the range and unity of these authors, along with the continental catastrophes that unite them.