I have just finished reading Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War, in the
Penguin translation from 2017. I had heard of it before but came across it by
chance in the municipal library, in the section devoted to Nobel Prize winners.
(Well, some of them: I haven't seen Rabindranath Tagore or Gabriela Mistral
there.) I'm glad I did find it.
Not that
it's a light read. In fact it's one of the grimmest books I know. Alexievich
interviewed women who had fought in the Second World War, in the Red Army - the
organization which actually did stop Hitler. Hundreds of thousands of women
were mobilized or volunteered, from 1941 on, and they were not just nurses and
cooks and drivers but also machine-gunners, artillerists, snipers, guerrilla
fighters, combat medics, tank crew and frontline pilots. They were combatants
in the most murderous combat in history, the four years of slaughter and
genocide that the Germans called the Eastern Front.
But after
the Victory, their story was not just forgotten, it was repressed. The
Stalinist regime conducted a loud celebration of triumphant masculine
heroism. The women - apart from a few
officially-designated heroines - were expected to swallow their trauma and fade
back into private life as wives-and-mothers-and-workers. Which most tried to
do, only to find other women suspicious and many men rejecting. The longed-for
gender normalization in peace became a second war for some.
Alexievich
began to collect their stories around 1978 and went on for seven years, tape-recording
some interviews and making notes of others, from what we sociologists would
call a large snowball sample. Alexievich wasn't a sociologist or a historian,
and in writing this, wasn't acting as a journalist either. She was a novelist,
and the interviews became the raw material of a great literary work giving a
multi-voiced collective portrait of the experience of women in war. It's not
like Life and Fate or War and Peace, or for that matter All Quiet on the Western Front, which
have central characters and a story line. It's a quilt of hundreds of episodes
and different voices and emotions. But it does have an implied narrative, I
think, which is Alexievich's reading of the changes brought about by mass
violence.
The
distinction between journalism and literature became a legal issue when
Alexievich was sued over a later book, Boys
in Zinc, and forced to defend herself as a writer in court. (The lawsuit
seems to have been a political manoeuvre by the resurgent authoritarian forces
in Belarus.) But The Unwomanly Face of
War is even more complicated. The author's project, and the speakers' act
of telling, become a running commentary on the story itself. For me the most
moving thing in the book is not the description of horrors but the short
chapter about the women who found it impossible to speak. The cataclysm of the
1940s was still working in their lives.
Alexievich
couldn't get the manuscript published at first, but perestroika made it possible and a censored version came out in
1985. I presume this translation is the uncensored version; it pulls no
punches. Penguin have put on the cover a contemporary picture of one of the
officially-recognized heroines, who commanded a squadron in the Red Air Force.
She's in dress uniform with all her medals, which include the Soviet equivalent
of the VC. She looks about seventeen.
She is looking over her shoulder, with an absolutely unreadable expression.