In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich ‘for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.’ The Belarusian had been recording the oral history of Soviet, post-Soviet individuals for 40 years, mostly voices of ordinary people living extraordinary lives, of those caught in the Afghanistan war (Zinky Boys) for instance or the Chernobyl disaster (Voices from Chernobyl).
As she writes in the introduction of her most famous tome Second-Hand Time, which was published in English in 2016: “It never ceases to amaze me how interesting ordinary, everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths. History is only interested in facts; emotions are excluded in its realm of interest. I look at the world as a writer, not strictly a historian. I am fascinated by people.”
This fascination for people resulted in her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, which was published in Russian in 1985, and has been translated into English now. In it she interviews — conducted in the late 1970s and early 80s — hundreds of women who participated in World War II. In that telling, a completely unknown side of history is unravelled. About a million Russian women fought in World War II, tank drivers, soldiers, snipers, and Alexievich tracks down many of them and listens to their incredible and moving stories.
Her fellow Belarusian and mentor, Ales Adamovich, wrote oral histories of the Soviet participation in the War, but his narratives hardly included women. When the war ended, few were willing to acknowledge the fact that women had been sent to fight, and they became ‘silent as fish.’ One former pilot told Alexievich the three years she fought in the war she felt she had ceased to be a woman. When after the fall of Berlin, her future husband proposed to her, she was shocked. “Now, in the midst of chaos?... Begin by making me a woman,” she told him. Many others told her that they were eager to get to the front, but were not prepared for such devastation and brutality. Some of those lucky to return home alive never felt young again, though they were still in their 20s. Others were grateful their story was being recorded: “It’s terrible to remember, but it’s far more terrible to forget.”
Alexievich gives us many voices, running one after another, uninterrupted. “I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings...,” she writes in the introduction, but adding some more factual details would have helped enormously to appreciate this harrowing tale better. What’s missing is a thread of context that could tie it all together.
The Unwomanly Face of War; Svetlana Alexievich, Penguin Random House, ₹599.