Women and War

The Nobel Price in Literature was given to a prominent Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich today. I cannot be prouder to be Belarusian as I am now. She is the first Belarusian proper to receive The Nobel Price (by that I mean there are quite a few laureates of Belarusian decent but they stopped identifying themselves with the country when the received the award). And she is a woman. Who writes about other women in all sort of roles: mothers, daughters, colleagues, soldiers, counterparts, spouses, and manymany others. Svetlana Alexievich’s books are must-read for all those interested in feminism, Eastern Europe, injustice in the world, war and human nature. They are feminine perspective on one of the most important events in the world like WW II, Chernobyl disaster, war in Afghanistan in 1980s, and collapse of the Soviet Union. 

She began her series of books under the title of Voice of Utopia with collecting narratives from women’s striking recollections of WW II in the book War’s Unwomanly Face. That was her first book. The side of the war she showed smashed many people who glorified the courage of Soviet soldiers against the wall. She depicted the women’s fate in wartime, how they were raped by their counterparts, how they were rejected by their families because they were considered unworthy as everyone knew that women in military equaled to women repeatedly raped or whores, how Jewish women who were hiding from Nazis were used for sex for certain time and then killed by those glorious Soviet soldiers and guerillas. She uncovered lots of ugliness about war. When men share their stories about war the talk about heroism and courage, when women talk about war they talk about how scary it is, haw hard is to kill, how devastating is to see the battle field after the battle, how to deal with menstruation when you live in a dugout in a forest, how to let others kill your own child because his cry will give out the location of the unit and then everyone will die, how to watch people being tortured for information, how to watch other women – German ones, when the Soviet military entered Germany’s territory – being raped... She told so many stories that would never be heard without her. She showed how women’s contribution in war and how their pain was largely ignored after the war was over.

First Alexievich published War’s Unwomanly Face in abridged version as Soveit censorship could not allow ruining the myth of WW II perfect victory  - well, this is our version of the story. After the book was published, she received so many letters from men thanking her for telling the truth and sharing their stories. Those letters were published much later.

This is only one book. There are other great books in the series like Voices from Chernobyl, Zinky Boys (about mothers who received the children back from Soviet-Afgan war in zinc coffins), Second-hand Time (about Soviet people who didn’t find their place in society in post-Soviet times). I hope you will have a chance to read the books by Nobel-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich.