Early in Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, we encounter a haunting image: an official letter arrives from the Soviet authorities summoning a young girl to the war front. Her father and brothers are already at war and she is eager to play the same part as them in national defence. She feels special, as if she is the chosen one. When she arrives at the unit she is shocked by the sight of thousands of woman — a sea of them — gathered to go to war. This elliptical and indelible image is characteristic of the book.

Originally published in Russian in 1985, the first state-sponsored and heavily censored English translation of The Unwomanly Face of War appeared in 1988. Finally, after almost 30 years, Anglophone readers have access to a fully restored and complete translation, wonderfully rendered by the formidable duo of Russian translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

This book is the result of hundreds of interviews that Alexievich — a Belarusian investigative journalist and the 2015 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature — conducted with a multitude of Russian women who took part in the Second World War. “I listen to pain ... Pain as the proof of past life,” Alexievich writes in the incensed and unrelenting introduction that alone is worth the book’s price. Indeed, that is what she offers us: an oral history of pain, suffering and the love, joy and sacrifice of the thousands of women whose voice one will not find in any official narrative of ‘the Great Patriotic War’ — the term found in the Russian lexicon for the Second World War.

A new translation presents a fully restored and uncensored version of a classic about Russian women who enlisted in the Second World War

Alexievich’s interviewees are brave, even heroic. They find solace in expressing their patriotism and they are exhilarated by the opportunity to take part in national endeavours. They are soldiers, snipers, doctors, nurses, tanker drivers and munitions operators. On and off battlegrounds they perform tasks of unusual and undeniable gallantry, but their efforts are absent from the official Soviet archives.

One looks with awe at the strength of Alexievich’s technique of unravelling inconsequential moments and trifling details to remedy the colossal discrepancies of historical narratives. In this book, she unearths a trove of silenced female voices and testimonies that are as affecting as they are shocking.

While their voices were buried after the war, injustices began on the battlegrounds themselves. Thrilled as they were to go to the frontlines, some women feared being unwanted when they returned. When a man returns from war, “it’s not so terrible. He’s a hero anyway. He can marry! But if a woman is crippled, it’s her destiny that’s at stake,” confesses one woman. Many others like her are apprehensive about becoming unattractive, being rejected and maligned after the war. There is something immensely touching and moving about these miniature horrors of these women. It’s not the war they fear; it’s the consequences they dread.

There is a lot that is crushing and shattering about these testimonies: a wedding dress fashioned from bandages; a mother who drowns her baby so that the sound of its crying doesn’t give them away to the German forces; a woman whose body is used as a human shield for Soviet tanks; a pilot who abandons her daughter in a camp as she flies away. The sheer, brutal intensity and sadness in these stories makes for a difficult reading experience, emotionally and intellectually. It is fortunate, then, that Alexievich balances the melancholy with moments of genuine light-heartedness and beauty. These remembrances provide an ephemeral relief to the reader from the visceral and gruelling details of war. “And there was so much that was funny,” rejoices a young woman cherishing the memory of the myriad rules and regulations of the battlefield and how difficult it was to get used to them. Other women, between explosives and gunpowder, find love. Many come back home and do, in fact, get married. One woman explains the euphoria of returning home and dancing for the first time after months of arduous labour. Another finds satisfaction in leaving candy under a lieutenant’s pillow.

In delineating these firsthand accounts, Alexievich takes us so incredibly close to these voices that it is as if the narrator was confessing directly to us. Yet, despite the overall potency and alchemy of her technique, it is not possible to overlook some major quibbles. The greatest flaw of this book is that Alexievich’s own interview questions have been omitted. Hence, the reader is never aware of the tangents she is trying to explore. Most testimonies read as mere stories the interviewees have confessed to Alexievich. The effect of this is two-fold. Firstly, it lets Alexievich off the hook; without her questions the reader cannot judge her investigative procedure or journalistic integrity. Secondly, perhaps as result of the first effect, Alexievich’s investigative technique, which she has so uniquely and dexterously fashioned, is relegated to the precarious boundary between fact and fiction and the reader is left in an intellectual quagmire, unable to quite trust Alexievich’s journalistic candour and reluctant, at the same time, to shrug it off as mere fictitious concoction. What further exacerbates the reader’s mistrust is the fact that Alexievich has chosen to excise the dozens of photographs of her interviewees that were originally printed in the Russian edition.

In the end, however, these technical freckles do not mire the book’s overall beauty. The voices it contains are eclectic and cacophonous, but in its scope and in its narrative it is nothing short of sweeping and symphonic. It is also a vital and important book, not in the least because it lifts the lid on a secret vault comprising hundreds of voices that haven’t been heard before, but also because it acts as a much needed corrective to the male-dominated narrative of Soviet history. “Men were victors, heroes, wooers, the war was theirs ... they robbed us of the victory,” one woman laments. In this quintessential book, Alexievich restores their victory to them.

The reviewer is a Karachi-based freelance writer

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral
History of Women in World War II
By Svetlana Alexievich
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volohonsky
Random House, US
ISBN: 978-0399588723
384pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 1st, 2017