The Unwomanly Face of War

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer and reporter, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. For decades she developed her own unmistakable method of documenting history: instead of chronicles and analysis — the human voice, spoken, interrupted, incomplete. Her “novels of voices” — as she calls them — are montages of hundreds of interviews creating a collective testimony to a time. She began work on The Unwomanly Face of War in 1978 and finished in 1983. The book was published in the USSR in 1985 and immediately sold two million copies — but in a censored version. The complete text, with all the passages the censors had ordered removed, appeared for the first time in 2004.

The Unwomanly Face of War is a record of conversations held with hundreds of women who fought in the ranks of the Red Army during World War II. Among them were nurses, snipers, pilots, telegraphists, doctors, partisans, tank drivers. Official war history — heroic, monumental, drained of blood and fear — had no place for them. Alexievich gives them voice.

They speak about things that are not spoken of: that menstruation ceases at the front from fear; that there are no uniforms in women’s sizes; that on returning home neighbours look with suspicion, and men say: “You left us your women, and you brought us frontline girls.” They speak of friendship, love, and death — but differently from men: through the concrete, through the body, through the detail that fits into no anthem.

Alexievich’s style is apparently invisible — the author seems to step out of the text and let her interlocutors speak. But it is she who chooses what to keep and what to cut, which voice to place beside which — and in that choice lies all her talent.