The Highest Form
The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich, 1983 (2017).
This book is rather different to the sort of thing I usually read and review — it is not economic history! So think of this as a sort of ‘Christmas special’. That said, this is possibly the least Christmas-y book imaginable…. be warned. I decided to unlock the supplemental to this review (a brief extract from the book) because it gets across style and emotional resonance in a manner short quotations cannot. I recommend scrolling to the bottom to check it out.
Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad and Life and Fate are among my favourite novels. While rather different books in some ways — the former a brilliant-if-regime-friendly story of heroism and sacrifice in the most brutal meat-grinder of the Second World War, the latter a more complex (and critical) exploration of the war and Soviet society — both are resonant, emotionally and intellectually, in a way few other novels I have read are. I suspect this is, at least in part, due to the force of their historic context. For the so-called Great Patriotic War is the most brutal and perhaps the most just war ever waged. Its human cost is near incomprehensible; you are left wondering how such violence could have been worthwhile. But it was. It is inarguable that the fight against, and victory over, the greatest evil ever known to history is an extraordinary moral achievement on behalf of the Soviet people. But reading about the war still leaves you with contradictory impulses: a revulsion to human tragedy which invites pacifism, and a respect for the Victory that negates it.
Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War is not a novel.1 It is literary oral history, a series of vignettes which recounts the story of the women who fought — as snipers, nurses, partisans, and radio operators — in the Red Army during the Second World War. But reading it, I found my mind return to many of the same themes I encountered through Grossman. The women Alexievich interviews are torn by the same contradictory impulses: a horror at what they lived through, a bitterness at how they were treated afterwards, an uneasy, at times ashamed relationship to Stalin, but also a deep pride in the Victory they suffered and killed for.
The horrors these women endured stick in your mind the most — the book is nothing short of harrowing. Whether it is the woman describing eating dried animal shit to survive; the young girl, paralysed while delivering resources to partisans at night; the woman who describes finding a fellow nurse “eyes put out, breasts cut off… impaled on a stake… she was nineteen years old”; or the woman who killed her own child after a German soldier told her to “toss him up, I’m going to shoot him”, throwing her baby to the ground before he could. By documenting this, Alexievich has produced a potent reminder of just how ridiculous it is that ‘clean Wehrmacht’ myths were ever spouted, because the Wehrmacht’s atrocities are everywhere in the stories she collected; not least in the fact that it did not take women prisoners like men, but executed them, making the frontlines an especially dangerous place. But war was not equally brutal for all. From the stories they tell, it is clear that the partisans endured the worst suffering, perhaps given their proximity to the enemy, and the fact they were often fighting alongside their loved ones.
Alexievich’s women also understand (or at least explain) the gendered part of their suffering differently. For some, the war felt like a temporary abrogation of woman-hood: it was as if they had become men. Others despaired for the trappings of domestic life; for example, many discussed craving embroidery. One woman even claims that wearing men’s underwear was the part of war that she most despised — and she was a frontline foot soldier! This suffering appears to pale compared to the horror of the battlefields. But, as Alexievich reminds the reader, many of her interviewees probably conceal the extent to which they suffered as women, and at the hands of their fellow soldiers. It is particularly illuminating when one (a medical assistant) recounts that “after the battle each of [the men] lies in wait for you… You can’t get out of the dugout at night… Did other girls talk to you about that or did they not confess?” (they did not, at least as far as Alexievich recounts). It is one of the inevitable shortcomings of the book, and of oral history itself, that no matter how deep Alexievich digs, the full extent of the suffering she documents can remain elusive. Decades of silence hold a powerful spell. But Alexievich gives an outline so that we, as if observing a black hole, can glimpse just enough to appreciate its sheer gravity.
Alongside this suffering, there is hatred. As one woman explains, “Hatred—it was stronger than the fear for our near ones, our loved ones, and fear of our own death”. It is easy to see hatred as unambiguously evil; to be forgiven, but never supported. But Alexievich reveals an understanding of hatred which is more complex, showing it to be an essential motivator of resistance, and the necessary child of extreme suffering. This is all the more poignant given that women are usually left out of this story: killing and vengeance, the unsavoury but heroic parts of war, are the domain of men; while women experience only ‘pure’ suffering and its more tame child, grief. But Alexievich is showing war’s unwomanly face. One woman recounts seeing a German soldier throw a child down a well and hearing its scream, which “still rings in [her] ears”. After that, she explains, “your heart seeks only one thing: to kill them, kill as many as possible, annihilate them in the cruelest way”. Many of the women Alexievich interviewed killed. Some, such as the snipers, killed many. By and large, they do not express remorse or guilt — why would they? As they admit, they were fuelled by hatred. This implicit discussion of hatred does enter more difficult terrain. In the brief moments in the book where women discuss the fighting in Germany near the end of the war, the anecdotes are largely of mercy and kindness to the enemy — but not all of them. One woman says to Alexievich that “I remember… of course, I remember a German woman who had been raped. She was lying naked, with a grenade stuck between her legs… Now I feel ashamed, but then I didn’t”. While hatred is inextricable from suffering, grappling with it is much more difficult. With only a few words of her ‘own’, Alexievich makes a powerful attempt.
Detailing all this suffering, in all its forms, matters greatly to Alexievich — it is not for shocking the reader. Although she avoids authorial intervention, there are moments when Alexievich comments in her own voice. One such passage, from the introductory notes, is worth quoting in full:
I listen to the pain… Pain as the proof of past life. There are no other proofs, I don’t trust other proofs. Words have more than once led us away from the truth.
I think of suffering as the highest form of information, having a direct connection with mystery. With the mystery of life. All of Russian literature is about that. It has written more about suffering than about love.
And these women tell me more about it…
Nowhere else does Alexievich distill her book’s purpose so succinctly. But it is equally true that she reveals at the same time one of the book’s deepest, if not unacknowledged, tensions. Alexievich is writing her book in a decaying Soviet Union which had built its identity around the Victory, and the Great Idea that really-existing socialism represented. Her critical response to this intellectual environment is inevitably a humanistic anti-History. When told by the censor that “we don’t need your little history, we need the big history. The history of the Victory”, Alexievich’s (presumably retrospective) response is “true, I don’t love great ideas. I love the little human being”. But, as Alexievich is well aware, her little human beings love great ideas. To most of Alexievich’s interviewees, the Soviet Union meant something, socialism meant something; and, most of all, the Victory meant everything. One woman declares she belonged “to the generation that believed there is something more in a life than human life. There is the Motherland and the great Idea”. Another, an underground fighter, captured by the Gestapo during the war, recounts an interrogation:
“The fascist wanted to understand why we were such people, why our ideas were so important to us. “Life is above any ideas,” he said. I, of course, disagreed with that.
It is the Gestapo interrogator who sounds the most like Alexievich here. She knows this, of course; her fascination with how tiny lives intersect with Idea and History is at the very core of the book. Alexievich’s entire project can be seen as an attempt to explain this apparent contradiction: that although her interviewees are the victims of History, so much of their identity stems from it and the Great Idea. As she remarks in the introduction, “There was such a thing as Soviet people. I don’t think such people will ever exist again… They had Stalin and the Gulag. But they also had the Victory. And they know that”.
I would be remiss not to end on a contemporary note, because while reading The Unwomanly Face of War, it returned to my mind again and again that the genocide in Gaza is, in many ways, the Eastern Front in miniature. The sheer barbarism of the invader; the flawed but unquestionably righteous victim; the unimaginable suffering, and the world-historical stakes: the resemblances are everywhere. Our minds should be as clear about Palestine as with the Eastern Front: that while the mistakes and moral failures of the Red Army and Hamas have cost those whom they claimed to protect dearly, and while both possess a callousness and brutality of their own, the struggle of the people within and underneath them against genocide and fascism is supremely moral. I can only hope young Palestinian women will one day be scratching their names on the blackened walls of the Knesset, as their Soviet counterparts once defaced the Reichstag. Alexievich reveals there is so much to unravel in Victory: injustice, scar tissue, silence. But the Victory comes first.
Check out the supplemental to this review below! This one is free, but these are usually paywalled, so if you are not a paying subscriber and you enjoy the blog, please consider signing up. I would really appreciate the support.
The original was published in Russian in 1985, and translated into English as War’s Unwomanly Face not long after. This edition, translated in 2017 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, also includes additional materials and comments by the author which did not make the original for a variety of reasons.