Mothers, father(s), daughter: Svetlana Aleksievich and

Canadian Slavonic Papers Revue Canadienne des Slavistes

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Mothers, father(s), daughter: Svetlana Aleksievich and The Unwomanly Face of War Angela Brintlinger To cite this article: Angela Brintlinger (2017) Mothers, father(s), daughter: Svetlana Aleksievich and The Unwomanly Face of War, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 59:3-4, 196-213, DOI: 10.1080/00085006.2017.1379114 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2017.1379114

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CANADIAN SLAVONIC PAPERS/REVUE CANADIENNE DES SLAVISTES, 2017 VOL. 59, NOS. 3–4, 196–213 https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2017.1379114

ARTICLE

Mothers, father(s), daughter: Svetlana Aleksievich and The Unwomanly Face of War Angela Brintlinger Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

This article explores Soviet traditions of documentary prose and in particular Aleksievich’s variant of that genre, focusing on U voiny – ne zhenskoe litso (Unwomanly Face of War). The changing nature of publishing and censorship in the period from 1984 to 2004, among other factors, created a text that is a “dynamic system” (Sivakova) and that has as much to do with the biography and literary methods of the author as with the subjects of her interviews. Through her contributions to the Soviet documentary canon, Aleksievich wrote herself into the fabric of World War II history, forging relationships of kinship with female veterans and male veteran-writers and enacting the patriotism and suffering of World War II memory while also contributing to the Soviet antiwar program of the mid 1980s. The article identifies these relationships – Aleksievich as daughter to mother-veterans as well as to father-documentarian(s) – and Aleksievich’s personal history as essential to understanding Unwomanly Face. Her place within the corps of documentary makers, including her relationship with mentor Ales' Adamovich, was a significant if invisible influence on her text, and by narrating and discussing her process, Aleksievich makes her own participation in the gathering of information a vital part of the final product.

Svetlana Aleksievich; Ales' Adamovich; documentary prose; women war veterans; genre; World War II; memory

RÉSUMÉ

L’auteure Svetlana Aleksievitch écrit de la prose documentaire depuis presque quatre décennies. Cet article examine les traditions soviétiques de la prose documentaire et surtout la variante d’Aleksievitch, se concentrant sur U voiny – ne zhenskoe litso (La guerre n’a pas un visage de femme). La nature changeante de l’édition et de la censure dans la période 1984-2004, parmi d’autres éléments, a créé un texte qui est un « système dynamique » (Sivakova). Ce texte implique autant la biographie et les procédés littéraires de l’auteure, que ses interviewés. Avec ses contributions au canon documentaire soviétique, Aleksievitch s’est intégrée dans le tissu de l’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Elle a forgé des relations de parenté avec des vétérans du sexe féminin et des vétérans-écrivains du sexe masculin, elle a représenté le patriotisme et la souffrance de la mémoire de la guerre, mais elle a aussi contribué au programme soviétique anti-guerre des années 80. L’article souligne l’importance de ces relations – Aleksievitch en tant que fille pour les vétérans-mères ainsi que pour les documentaristes-pères – et de CONTACT Angela Brintlinger © 2017 Canadian Association of Slavists

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son histoire personnelle pour comprendre La guerre n’a pas un visage de femme. Sa place dans le corps des documentaristes, y compris sa relation avec son mentor Ales' Adamovitch, était une influence considérable, bien qu’invisible, sur ses écrits. En racontant et en discutant de son procédé, Aleksievitch rend sa propre participation à la collecte d’informations, une partie fondamentale du produit final.

Svetlana Aleksievich serves as a particularly interesting lens into the Soviet century and into the meaning of war for Soviet citizens, particularly for Soviet women. Her documentary prose, based on oral interviews, grew out of extensive networks and relationships that emphasized mother–daughter-like conversations and confidences, and her debut work, U voiny – ne zhenskoe litso (The Unwomanly Face of War, 1985), emerged from an affiliation with a specific male mentor and cohort of colleagues as well.1 She became a “daughter” to her female interview subjects, while at the same time serving as a symbolic daughter to male veterans, writers, and filmmakers, particularly Belarusian author Ales' Adamovich. A member of the first generation of Soviet citizens to be born after the end of World War II, Aleksievich learned the language of loss at home during her childhood, but she was also strongly influenced by the representation of women during wartime by veteran writers and filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. We can read The Unwomanly Face of War as participating in two processes simultaneously: the memorialization of World War II and the peace activism of the late Cold War period. The book, billed as “the first to show war through the eyes of women,” serves to chronicle not only women’s war experiences but also Aleksievich’s own development as a documentary prose author and the changing publishing protocols of the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras.2 In this article I will first explore the role documentary prose played in the second half of the Soviet century, comparing Aleksievich’s work with those of veterans not only of World War II but also of the Soviet state labour camp system including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a comparison which demonstrates the degree to which documentary work is always political. Next I will look closely at Aleksievich’s own personal history and relationships, arguing that her family’s fate during World War II and her upbringing as the descendant of veterans and martyrs fostered her belief that she had an intuitive grasp of the events she came to chronicle. This kind of pedigree gave extra weight to her dogged pursuit of details and added legitimacy to her role as author, not merely as interviewer or gatherer of oral histories, granting her the right to include her own voice and experiences, including pages from her diary, into her text. In conducting her interviews and in writing the stories of women veterans, Aleksievich presented herself as a daughter to many mothers, thus highlighting the gendered aspects of her method, getting at the truth through conversation. In her pursuit of knowledge about World War II, Aleksievich had the elder Belarusian writer and documentarian Adamovich as mentor and guide, and she deliberately chose him as a kind of father figure, although she may not have entirely grasped the implications of that choice or how that relationship would shape her work. Adamovich shepherded her work into print, easing the way with editors and prefacing it with his own introductory remarks, but, as I argue, he also affected her in other ways, including

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sharing his essentialist view that women, both in wartime and beyond, are responsible, together with veterans, for pursuing a peace agenda and trying to protect the nation from further military risks. Finally, I will highlight the changing nature of The Unwomanly Face of War across 30 years of its publication, arguing along with Natal'ia Sivakova that the book is a dynamic system, bound to change with changing historical circumstances. Indeed, further research might show that in the decade and a half since 2004 the book continues to morph and change in response to personal and political circumstances.

Women, war, and documentary prose For the Soviet Union, arguably the entire twentieth century was a century of war. Aleksievich emphasizes that war was foregrounded, continually present in the country in which she was born.3 As she commented in an interview: “people are always asking me why I, a woman, am always writing about war.” She went on to say: “We have had no other history. Our entire history is military. We were always at war or preparing for war. We have never lived any other way.”4 This statement emphasizes the fact that in the Soviet experience war was not a purely masculine endeavour but rather an all-encompassing political, social, and cultural experience for people of both genders. At the same time, however, by highlighting her own gender, Aleksievich implies a public sense that war is the business of men. That binary attitude, as Anna Krylova has shown, was mostly a post-World War II phenomenon, and Aleksievich shows her age, and her generation, by embracing it so unambiguously.5 During the war women fulfilled many roles, including that of combatant.6 But by the 1960s their military feats, and the image of the woman soldier, began to be reassessed.7 Foremost among those recalibrating the role of women in war were veteran-writers such as Adamovich (1927–94). A Belarusian voice influential throughout the Soviet Union, Adamovich authored a set of novels based in part on his own war experience as a teenaged partisan. Voina pod kryshami (War Under the Rooftops) and Synov'ia ukhodiat v boi (The Sons Go Off to War) were published in 1960 and 1963 as a two-part novel with the general title Partizany (The Partisans), and became feature films with the same titles some years later, premiering together in Moscow in November 1971.8 Primarily a documentary prose and fiction writer, Adamovich also wrote the screenplays for these and other films based on his work. His criticism and reflections about war and the role of veterans in husbanding memory were published widely in newspapers, journals, and collections in Leningrad, Moscow, and Minsk for decades. His most important contributions to war prose are two books based on survivor interviews, the first about Nazi massacres in Belarus – Ia iz ognennoi derevni (I am from the Fiery Village) – and the second about the lives of Leningraders during the 872-day siege of that city, Blokadnaia kniga (Book of the Blockade).9 These documentary books, and the interviewing techniques that underlay them, inform Aleksievich’s work as well. Books such as Aleksievich’s Unwomanly Face share with these and other important works of the post-war period an “orientation toward authenticity” and the use of testimony as “structural material” that are characteristic of the autobiographical mode.10 Like Daniil Granin and Adamovich’s Book of the Blockade, and Adamovich et al.’s I am from the Fiery Village, Solzhenitsyn’s Arkhipelag GULag (Gulag Archipelago) also draws on eyewitness testimony to document atrocities of the Stalinist labour camp system and


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the tragic events of World War II. This type of polyphonous text may seem more like history than autobiography even though the author weaves his or her personal point of view with many other voices, those of witnesses. In their construction, however, these texts lean toward fiction with author as narrator. For example, as Jane Gary Harris has argued, “Solzhenitsyn as the author and subject of Gulag Archipelago is no more nor less reliable than Solzhenitsyn as the author of Cancer Ward or One Day.”11 The same is true of Adamovich and Aleksievich – as bearers of “truth,” they must still be read as authors who, through selection, juxtaposition, and commentary, present the evidence they have gathered in literary form. As Matt Oja has argued for Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the documentary prose works of Adamovich and Aleksievich can be said to have a “central, interpretive thesis.”12 Adamovich maintained that the manyvoicedness of the works, the accumulation of storytellers, is a key component of the genre, and in his view each individual contributor adds “new knowledge of humanity.”13 In other words, the memories of people who survived trauma yielded deep psychological truths and insights, and the author of documentary prose functioned to find and reveal those insights while also gently (or not so gently) curating the stories. Thus these works have a multiplicity of valences for readers and authors – as history, personal testament, psychological insight, fictional shaping, and self-revelation.14 In fact, although Martin Malia contends that Gulag Archipelago was a work in a completely sui generis genre, Solzhenitsyn’s opus does not differ significantly from other works of documentary prose of the 1970s.15 Solzhenitsyn’s own designation, “opyt literaturnogo issledovaniia” or “experiment in literary research,” combines things that had been seen as contradictory: “art and research, literature and empirical inquiry.” “Yet,” Malia argues, “The Gulag is, in fact, both art and historical inquest, with a liberal admixture of philosophy. And in this respect [. . .] it draws on a venerable Russian tradition of humane letters as surrogate politics.”16 As I will show below, the political aspect of Adamovich’s work in particular created a context for Aleksievich, a background for her veterans’ tales.17 Documentary prose, especially about charged topics like war and repression, is always political. It was after a roundtable for documentary writers in Minsk in 1978 that Aleksievich first spoke to her elder colleague about her planned project: to interview everyday women who had served in the war and to record their experiences, feelings, and memories.18 At that same roundtable, Adamovich reminded his fellow documentarians that: in earlier wars the historical fates of peoples, governments were at stake. But never before did the question arise, was the question put: should man, should mankind continue to exist on the planet? In the most straightforward physical sense of the word.19

Tying the past, present, and future together, Adamovich here launched his program of anti-nuclear activism, believing that through writing about war he and his cohort could educate citizens of the Soviet Union and the world at large about the dangers of future conflicts. In this speech Adamovich directly linked war documentary filmmaking and documentary prose with peace activism. From the start Adamovich became an advocate for Aleksievich’s Unwomanly Face, which, like his own Book of the Blockade, he saw as belonging to a genre that presented the “living voices of life itself, of history.”20 The same events, described in different voices

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and from different points of view, became even more powerful and, in his view, gave young writers in particular a “freshness of perspective” and the ability to discover their own fates as writers.21 Thus texts about the war served several purposes at once, whether for veteran-writers or for a younger generation: prolonging the living effect of traumatic events, mustering horror at possible future wars even more devastating than World War II, and developing young writers and helping them to hone their talents.22

“Eleven of my family members did not survive. . .”: women veterans, woman writer Aleksievich was born in 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, of a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother. Her commitment to chronicling Soviet experience and the Soviet man, homo sovieticus, stems in great part from this personal history:23 I was also born after the war, when the trenches had become overgrown, the soldiers’ dugin positions were flooded, the recovery shelters had collapsed, the soldiers’ helmets abandoned in the forest had become rusty. But didn’t [the war] also touch my life with its deadly breath? We all still belong to the generations which each have their own account with the war. Eleven of my family members did not survive. . .24

With this introduction, Aleksievich made sure that the first readers of Unwomanly Face in its abbreviated journal variant in February 1984 would honour her pedigree, her right to delve into the painful aspects of war. In Belarus, she reminded readers, 60,000 “muzhestvennye sovetskie patriotki,” “brave Soviet [female] patriots,” participated in the war, a significant portion of the 800,000 women from across the Soviet Union who fought on the front lines.25 Aleksievich's own “account” included a partisan grandmother lost to typhus and two entire families of relatives, children included, burned alive in her native village. In her writing Aleksievich worked to explore women’s voices and to expand the number of them represented in the Soviet picture of war. But although in the first, journal variant of Unwomanly Face she admits that there are hundreds of books written about women in World War II, including memoir literature and fiction written by the women themselves, in a later book introduction she proclaims that “women did not assert their history,” but instead gave in and repeated the male version of the war. In her conversations with women veterans Aleksievich sought unknown veterans, those who could offer her the kind of “people’s memory” she wanted to chronicle, what she saw as the unknown story, the “women’s story.”26 This instinct to divide the war experience into two different, gendered histories can be traced in part to the 1960s re-evaluation of women’s combat role. Although Aleksievich defines her task as a woman’s task, her thesis, which equates women with life and peace, is adopted from the rhetoric of male veterans. Furthermore, distanced from war participants themselves by a generation, Aleksievich generalizes the stories she hears into binary, oppositional ways of thinking about gender, identity, and violence.27 She presents the undertaking as an intimate exercise in entering the war zone several decades on: as she sought out women who fought or otherwise participated in World War II, one after another, she began to feel that she herself was at war, that “her war”


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was lasting for the duration of the interview project. Through her introductory material, Aleksievich foregrounds the women and their voices. She emphasizes their tone and attitude toward her, quoting them as saying things like “I am sharing with you as I would with my own daughter” or “I'll tell you woman to woman, as to a [female] friend.”28 “They called me: ‘my girl,’ ‘my daughter,’ ‘my child,’” she writes.29 These conversations, she stresses, took place in feminized spaces – kitchens and living rooms, over a cup of tea. They sometimes ended with physical gestures – hands held out to touch, to hug her. The pronouns were intimate, with the women immediately calling her “ty.” And the relationships they forged were profound, the conversations private. As Aleksievich describes it, these were women’s conversations, and the space and manner in which they took place were an essential part of the information exchanged. Later some women regretted those intimacies and the written accounts they generated. For instance, Nina Iakovlevna Vishnevskaia, a sergeant and combat medic in a tank battalion, wrote to Aleksievich wanting to correct the details of her interview. Aleksievich remembered their original conversation as being filled with funny stories, the warmth of sharing, the informalities of girl talk. She saw the corrections Vishnevskaia wanted to make as a betrayal of the relationship forged between interviewer (daughter) and interviewee (mother). She recalled: “I could not forget how we drank tea together without ceremony, in the kitchen. And we both cried.”30 This was an example, Aleksievich writes, of how important the interviewing process could be. One on one, she believed, the women were trusting and therefore honest, but if there were others present during the interview it turned into a “razgovor na publiku,” a conversation for public consumption, and no longer represented the women’s truth she was seeking.31 Indeed, although Aleksievich was in her early thirties when she began her project, both she and the women she interviewed often perceived her as a girl, and as they recalled their wars, they relived their own girlhood through her, and she in turn projected her own personal understanding of young womanhood onto their memories. Commenting on this kinship, Aleksievich wrote: I am living as if in two generations – in that which was young in ’41 and in my own, [with people] who are twenty and thirty now. I carry in my consciousness two realities, two human worlds, which are overlapping and diverging, in turns zooming in or becoming smaller, merging into one.32

As in the quoted section above, Aleksievich emphasizes her own self and experience as well as those of her respondents. This book, which chronicles an odyssey to hundreds of cities, villages, and towns, also chronicles the travel and the experiences of the traveller. In organizing the interviews, Aleksievich quoted her interview subjects. Each chapter or section title takes its name from a quotation in the text, thus elevating the women’s voices to a position of power and authority and implying that the women themselves are in control of the book’s contents. At the same time, the quotations are often the most conversational and intimate bits, and they almost always end in ellipses, pointing to their continuation but also imparting a tentative quality to their self-assessments. Voices vary, from veterans quoting their superior officers in such statements as “You have to ripen a bit more, girls, you are still green” to declarations that highlight the difficult nature of the interviews and the memories: “I don’t want to remember. . .” or “That was not me. . .” or “I can still remember those eyes. . .” Finally, some titles seem to

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excuse or pity those who experienced the war: “We did not shoot. . .” and “Mama, what does ‘papa’ mean?”33 These conversational tidbits evoke both interlocutors, the woman veteran and Aleksievich herself. They are misleading, however, in their emphases, given that much of the women’s testimony as reproduced in the body of the text is not at all tentative. By “cherry-picking” her chapter titles, Aleksievich conveys her own understanding of women’s experience, at times contradicting the evidence of her interlocutors.34 For example, as a chapter title “we did not shoot” belies the evidence given by snipers and other women combatants in other portions of the narrative. In Unwomanly Face Aleksievich honoured her interview subjects by giving them their full names and ranks whenever possible. Just as the instinctive Soviet response to the question, “biography?” was to rattle off surname, name, patronymic, and rank or profession, each of her subjects is identified with name, rank, and role where feasible, for example: Vera Iosifovna Khoreva, military surgeon; Maria Semenovna Kaliberda, staff sergeant, signaller; Nonna Aleksandrovna Smirnova, private, anti-aircraft gunner; Elena Nikiforovna Ievskaia, private, procurement officer.35 The details, which add verisimilitude to the stories, also imply verifiability: as should be the case with any historian or journalist, the use of full names of sources connotes the idea that the facts could be checked. Aleksievich wants her reader to perceive these stories – like the military records of the women who narrate them – as documents, the evidence collected line by line, page by page. Alongside her copious notes and audiotapes, Aleksievich kept a diary. And even in the journal publication, which is abbreviated and in general has less self-commentary than the longer, book-length version of Unwomanly Face, she already discusses her own role in the project. As she explains, she questioned whether she had the right to share her feelings and doubts, especially in light of the feelings and suffering she uncovered in her veterans. In the end, though, she decided: a document only has full strength when it is known not only what is in it, but also who compiled it. There are no dispassionate testimonies, in each there is the overt or hidden passion of the person who put pen to paper. And this passion over the course of many years also becomes a document.36

Thus in Aleksievich’s view the material is only part of what she needed to present. Not just the what, but the how – in this genre of documentary prose, the storyteller, the interviewer, the narrator’s voice and persona are as important as those of the witnesses. Like Solzhenitsyn, Aleksievich weaves her own experiences, reactions, and interpretations throughout her text. Although this book is about the women veterans she interviewed, her reader never doubts that it is also about her – her family, who suffered during the war, her lost relatives, but also her classmates and their lost relatives, especially her fellow Belarusians, of whom a quarter of the population did not survive the war. In the end the book is about Svetlana, the “daughter,” “woman,” and “female friend” who had the stamina to seek out these stories.

“He set my thinking machine”: Adamovich as guide and mentor In a 2015 interview after winning the Nobel Prize, Aleksievich gave credit where credit was due, asserting that it was Adamovich who helped her find her voice in the same way


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a vocal coach might help a singer: “Adamovich,” she said, “set my thinking machine [in motion].”37 Beginning with their conversation at the 1978 Minsk documentary writers’ symposium, Adamovich served as shepherd and supporter for Aleksievich’s first major publication. Proud of his young protégé, Adamovich wrote the introduction to the Oktiabr' publication, emphasizing its connection with his own work: Svetlana Aleksievich has collected in the book The Unwomanly Face of War stories, recollections of [women] frontline soldiers, [women] underground resistance fighters, [women] partisans, and we again have a work akin to the books I Am from the Fiery Village and Book of the Blockade.38

In this endorsement Adamovich reiterated the importance of bringing a post-war generation of writers into the business of researching World War II: the energy and mobility of younger writers was necessary to do this work, but also the fresh approach, the ability to make new discoveries. Younger writers, he pointedly asserted, also needed this work for their own sakes, as a proving ground for their budding talents. Thus his own efforts were two-fold: an attempt to keep the memory of World War II in the public eye, and a desire to mentor a new generation of documentary writers. He continued to pursue the first goal through his own writing as well, including the screenplay for the 1985 film Idi i smotri (Come and See), based on the stories from Ia iz ognennoi derevni. Working with director Elem Klimov, Adamovich delivered a film that was “surprisingly intimate,” according to Denise Youngblood. As she writes: Everyone in Come and See seems to have lost the sense of right and wrong in the chaos of war – markedly different from [the earlier Andrei Tarkovskii film] Ivan’s Childhood and reflecting, arguably, the hopelessness of the early 1980s in the Soviet Union.39

The horror of the partisan Flor in Adamovich’s film would mirror the experiences of child-survivors of World War II in Aleksievich’s next book, Poslednie svideteli (Last Witnesses) and gave visual expression to her own family’s experience.40 Even before this, Aleksievich documented her debt to Adamovich, and her apprenticeship to him, with the choice of title for her first publication, which comes from the epigraph to Adamovich’s 1960 novel of partisan life, War Beneath the Rooftops. In the opening frames of the 1967 film of the same name, directed by Viktor Turov, that epigraph is spoken in grave, measured tones: “War has an unwomanly face. But in that war it was the faces of our mothers that we remembered most, most sharply, terrifyingly, and beautifully.”41 With this assessment of the importance of women as mothers – particularly understandable from the point of view of the teenaged partisan Adamovich – Aleksievich signed on to the “critical rethinking of the war experience since the mid-1950s.”42 If during the war “women soldiers” had been valued and utilized on a virtual par with male soldiers, in the 1960s and 1970s Adamovich, along with other veteran prose writers such as Boris Vasilꞌev, transformed “female combatants into pointless victims of war,” thereby erasing women’s achievements on the battlefield and in the rear, in part in order “to criticize the official cult of heroic female martyrdom,” the state-created cult of Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia, among others.43 The result was a younger generation unable to conceive of female combatants, a generation convinced by the essentialist argument that women are first and foremost mothers, connected with creating life and thus unable to kill. “Between the interviews,” as Krylova maintains,

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Aleksievich “writes her own story about women’s essential foreignness to combat and their unavoidable sacrifice at the front.”44 In a point Aleksievich made in the introductions to both the journal and book versions of Unwomanly Face, we can clearly see this orientation. For example: Everything that we know about woman is best encapsulated in the word “miloserdie” [mercy]. There are other words – sister, wife, friend, and highest of all – mother. But isn’t miloserdie present in all of these as essence, as calling, as final meaning? Woman gives life, woman preserves life, woman and life are synonyms.45

This rhetoric exemplifies Aleksievich’s own version of the history of women’s participation in World War II. She argues that “everything we know about war has been told to us by men,” a statement that is demonstrably not true, and she highlights women’s unique role and relationship to life in ways that not all of her women veterans would endorse.46 Ignoring those memoirs, novels, and collections of documents written and published by and about women which emphasize the multiplicity of attitudes women have had toward war, Aleksievich instead embraced her mentor’s essentialist view of women as mothers. When Aleksievich disregarded the contradictions between her interview subjects’ narratives and her own assessment that woman equals life, she showed herself to be a true daughter of Adamovich.47 It is true that some of the subjects offered support for Aleksievich and Adamovich’s interpretation; she quotes one of her heroines as saying: “killing is not a woman’s role.”48 But many other stories in the book offer different interpretations of war service, including pride not just in patriotism or bravery, but also in skill and achievements. Aleksievich’s “central, interpretive thesis” omits this complexity. In the late 1970s, as Adamovich continued to chronicle his own war and that of his contemporaries, he also became an outspoken foe of nuclear war. In another 1978 speech Adamovich emphasized the urgency of a looming third world war, words that resonate with Aleksievich’s later characterization of Soviet and post-Soviet citizens. All these years we (literature emerging from, born of the consciousness, from the experience of people in a period dominated by war) lived under conditions of post-war consciousness. And suddenly we find ourselves in a pre-war time, again pre-war.49

This question of war as a continual backdrop to Soviet life – and the issue of “post-war” or “pre-war” consciousness – reminds us that by the late 1970s, for example, with the Soviet “brotherly” invasion of Afghanistan coming in 1979, and particularly by 1981 as Ronald Reagan began his first term as president of the United States, detente was ending and the Cold War was getting truly frosty. For Soviet citizens the continual rhetoric of patriotism and pride related to the Soviet victory in World War II was now accompanied by fears about future wars with the American superpower and, in response to that, by state-sponsored and approved peace activism. 1978 through 1984, the time during which Aleksievich was researching and writing Unwomanly Face of War, was a time of increasing anxiety in international relations. In the face of the global arms race, Aleksievich highlighted her fears of war and of ecological catastrophe and fought back. “The most powerful weapon, the most


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invincible is the human memory” which is rich and complex, “so much more complex,” she argues, than the blueprints for the most hellish machine they have invented or want to invent in order to kill not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of people at once and along with them their memory, that immaterial matter without which we, human beings, would cease to be human.50

Here Aleksievich characterizes her own work – the oral interviews and documentary prose which preserve human memory – as a worthy weapon of peace, mustered against the military technology of the West. No engineering schemes, she maintains, can overcome the power of humanity itself. This form of peace activism, using words to counter machinery, aligns Aleksievich with Adamovich. Thus, although Aleksievich maintains that her approach to the women veterans in Unwomanly Face is from a woman’s point of view and that in her interviews she took on the role of daughter, her overriding thesis parallels the work of her mentor. Women, she argues throughout the book – whether in its introductions, its chapter titles, or its interpolated personal reflections – are primarily mothers, the givers and defenders of life, and to kill, to be true military combatants, is not in their nature. Instead they are the repository of memory, and through her documentary prose she is keeping that memory alive and herself defending life. Aleksievich presents the Soviet people as a peaceful people, preoccupied above all with preventing further war. While writing about individual women veterans, the essentialist Aleksievich also invents a generalized “woman,” one who has and will take on many roles in order to save mankind. Aleksievich concludes the journal publication of Unwomanly Face with an extended analysis of one woman’s story, one woman who stands for all. The woman dreamed of giving birth to a daughter whose fate would differ from her own, a daughter who would live in a time of peace. Aleksievich presents her as a representative of a nation that feared war and was doing all in its power to prevent the return of war. How, Aleksievich argues, could the nation want more war, after all its sacrifices? The woman’s very identity, her past and her future, made her into an activist for peace. Was it really in the name of this that woman saved life, saved the world – was a mother, a daughter, a wife, a sister, and a Soldier? Let us bow down low to her, all the way to the ground. To her great Mercy [Miloserdie].51

This image of the merciful woman has religious resonance and raises the status of the woman veteran to that of the Bogoroditsa, the Mother of God. After all, miloserdie has numerous meanings and connotations – not just mercy but grace, loving-kindness, solace, compassion, benevolence – but by elevating the word through capitalization at the end of her piece, Aleksievich highlights its religious aspect.52 Aleksievich has honoured the individuality of each of her interview subjects – by name, military rank, and assignment, and through the direct quoting of their words – but as she concludes her document she combines them all into one great Merciful woman, speaking as one in the campaign to prevent World War III.

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“I want to write the history of this war. . . the women's history. . .”: The Unwomanly Face of War as “dynamic system” In the analysis above, I have quoted primarily the 1984 abbreviated journal version of Aleksievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War. This first publication did much of what the book does. It featured an introduction from the author that describes her thesis – that woman and life are synonyms – and her process, “her war.” In that introduction she also cited official statistics of numbers of women warriors and set up her research into the hundreds of stories behind those numbers: “fates, whole lives which were turned upside down and warped by the war.”53 In the 80 pages that follow, Aleksievich offered 11 sections and the stories of over 80 individual veterans, significantly fewer women than are present in the 14 chapters of her book-length publication, but nonetheless representative of the entire project. The short prefatory remarks by Adamovich in Oktiabr' also placed Aleksievich within the corps of documentary prose writers. Thus, while she overtly aligned herself with the women storytellers, her mentor demonstrated her connection to the male point of view. The book-length version of The Unwomanly Face of War from 1985 fills in more stories and three more categories of women, but still very much resembles the abbreviated first publication – an attempt to tell the “women’s history” of World War II with an emphasis on an essentialist definition of the female gender. However, as Sivakova has pointed out, “Aleksievich’s documentary writing is a dynamic system which has undergone constant changes.” This, Sivakova argues, is the most significant quality of the author’s work: that “the movement of the author’s thought does not stop even after publication.”54 A look at the introductory material to the 2004 Moscow publication of Unwomanly Face – advertised as the first “full version” of the book – confirms this idea of a “dynamic system.” If in Oktiabr' Aleksievich wrote that “her war,” her research activity, lasted four years, by 2004 she emphasizes that it was a seven-year process. If the 1985 book version already reads like a fuller version of the journal account, this new, 2004 edition opens with even more self-revelations and a more detailed explanation of what and who shaped her original publications. In the order presented, these new materials comprise: (1) a “conversation” with an unidentified historian about the global phenomenon of the “feminization” of war during the Second World War, which increases the statistic of women in the Soviet army to one million; (2) a set of excerpts from the “diary of the book” which Aleksievich kept from 1978 to 1985, chronicling her feelings, fears, and thoughts at the time; (3) a postscript dated 2003 and titled “Seventeen Years Later”; and (4) several sections related to censorship – passages omitted by the censor, excerpts of a conversation with a censor, and some passages which Aleksievich herself chose to omit from the 1985 publication.55 Each of these additions subtly changes the book as a whole. The reader cannot help but wonder whether the “latest” version is indeed the “fullest,” and whether another, more complete version will appear in due time. Indeed, excerpts from the “diary of the book” imply that there is more, that a subsequent publication could be even fuller. In part this process is inherent in any work of documentary prose. Just as Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina added to the Blokadnaia kniga more stories of Leningrad women during the Siege, so any individual author may want to reconsider the bits left on the cutting-room floor and find a way either to reintroduce them to an already published


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book, or to create a new work entirely. Adamovich wrote and rewrote the story of partisans in Belarus during the war, including his two-part novel The Partisans, his Khatynskaia povest' (Khatyn' Tale, 1974), his collective I am from the Fiery Village, and the film script Come and See. These additions and accretions to texts of documentary prose may be conditioned by the specific political circumstances of the late and post-Soviet Union. After all, Solzhenitsyn, after his monumental Gulag Archipelago and his memoir Bodalsia telenok s dubom (The Oak and the Calf), added another set of revelations titled Nevidimki (Invisible Allies), a description of those who helped him to write and shepherd Gulag into publication. We might see this as another part of the paratext, what could have been merely acknowledgements if Gulag had been published in a different political circumstance under which it was possible to name names.56 But we should also recognize the degree to which it is a Soviet phenomenon, a characteristic of authors whose lives were lived under Stalin, during Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw and Leonid Brezhnev’s detente, at the dawn of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, and in the postSoviet years of archival revelations and later political retrenchment. Aleksievich concludes: “I was a person of my times, and I had my own war.”57 Although she does not acknowledge the contradictory statements in her interviews or the ways in which her overriding thesis is not always supported by her evidence, she does, in the end, understand that each individual person, a product of her own generation, has her personal version of World War II, and that that version can shift and change with time. The title to the 2004 preface – “A person is more than war” – presents this idea in a fairly cryptic manner, but it seems that Aleksievich wants her reader to understand that memory is slippery and subject to outside influence. “[A person] is directed by something that is stronger than history,” she states.58 Here Aleksievich seems to confess that recollections are not entirely trustworthy, not the same as what actually happened, but she then elevates the stories she has collected to a new height: “this is creative work. Telling [stories], people create, ‘write’ their lives. It happens that they ‘add [to their lives]’ and ‘rewrite’.”59 About her “heroines,” the women veterans in Unwomanly Face, Aleksievich writes: Who are they – Russian or Soviet? They were Soviet – the Russians, and the Belarusians, and the Ukrainians, and the Tadjiks. . . They really did exist, those Soviet people. [. . .] And yes, they did have the GULAG, but they also had Victory.60

In describing, protecting, and honouring these Soviet people, Aleksievich continued to argue her own thesis in subsequent editions of her book. However, we can also observe a change over time, as her concerns shift from the fear of a new war in the Reagan era to a concern about the legacy of the Soviet Union in post-Soviet times. In the 2004 edition she demonizes her censor, blaming him for the erasure of “women’s history.” She quotes the censor’s attitude specifically: Yes, Victory was difficult to achieve, but you must seek heroic examples. There are hundreds of them. Instead you show the war’s dirt. Its undergarments. In your rendition our Victory is terrifying. What are you trying to get at?

Aleksievich relays her simple answer: “Truth.” She sets up this gendered binary: the (male) censor’s “truth” excludes what he sees as low, private, intimate, what he associates with women – “undergarments.” But the (female) author’s “Truth” includes the dirt,

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the blood, and the shame. She is adamant that the “women’s war” is inhabited by people, not heroes, that their view is different from men’s view: “Men hide behind facts [. . .] whereas women evoke emotion.”61 By citing her conversations with the censor, Aleksievich highlights the nature of much of Soviet literature, documentary and otherwise: there is no final version, but rather a dynamic system in which the text can change throughout time. The journal version of her book Unwomanly Face was given the stamp of approval in 1984 by an editorial board and her mentor Adamovich, who presented her and her work to readers, but it constituted mere excerpts of versions she was to publish in Moscow and in Minsk the following year. Aleksievich’s uncensored 2004 version of the book added back details that had remained on the censor’s cutting-room floor, and also included her own further musings, diary entries, and recollections. As the USSR fell apart and the threat of World War III receded, her adopted peace activism also waned, replaced instead by anger at the male-led Soviet literary bureaucracy.

Conclusion As much as Aleksievich protests that the men’s version of history changed her women interviewees’ points of view, and that only through one-on-one, “mother”–“daughter” conversations can the real “truth” be revealed, her own essentialist thesis was clearly subject to the influence of the 1960s reassessment of women soldiers and the 1970s male veteran point of view, in particular that of her mentor Adamovich. Welcoming her female lineage, she does not acknowledge the extent of her “father’s” influence on her writing. She also holds to this understanding of “women’s history” in the post-Soviet era, unwilling to let go of her own version of Victory, a Victory which defined what it meant to be Soviet. It is not unusual for republications to change and morph, to be subtly or not so subtly rewritten or to accrue prefaces and afterwords, particularly in the late Soviet and postSoviet situation of mutable state censorship policies and shifting political winds. Unwomanly Face of War shares this fate. In this, too, Aleksievich is a daughter of her Soviet times.

Notes 1. Excerpts from U voiny – ne zhenskoe litso were published in the journal Oktiabr' (organ of the Union of Soviet Socialist Writers) in February 1984 (“U voiny – ne zhenskoe litso,” Oktiabr' 2 (1984): 22–107) and in the Minsk literary journal Nëman. The first full publication in book form came out with several publishers in 1985. In this article I will quote from the Oktiabr' publication as well as the enlarged post-Soviet edition, Svetlana Aleksievich, U voiny – ne zhenskoe litso (Moscow: Izd. “Pal'mira,” 2004), referring to these texts as U voiny – Oktiabr' and U voiny 2004 respectively in the notes. The expanded post-Soviet edition has the advantage of demonstrating what Aleksievich wanted to reinstate after censorship, and it has a particularly useful preface. See Markwick and Cardona, Soviet Women, 246. 2. U voiny 2004, 4. 3. See my Chapaev and His Comrades for one exploration of the Soviet twentieth century as a century of war. 4. Aleksievich, Vremia sekond khend, 9, translation mine.


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5. See Krylova, “Neither Erased nor Remembered”; see also Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, esp. 269, footnote 71. For more on World War II and the authors who chronicled it see Ellis, Vasiliy Grossman and Damned and the Dead; Hodgson, Written with the Bayonet; Shrayer, I Saw It. 6. For a detailed look at varying types of military service for women, see Markwick and Cardona, Soviet Women, and especially Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat. 7. Not by them yet, though, as Markwick and Cardona argue, in the 1960s “women soldiers increasingly voiced their wartime experiences, mostly in anodyne, strictly vetted, collective memoir anthologies, which cleaved to the depersonalized, heroic master narrative” (Soviet Women, 245–6). See also Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, 292. 8. Directed by Viktor Turov in 1967 and 1969 respectively, the films included songs written and performed by Vladimir Vysotskii that became extremely popular and entered the canon of “war songs.” 9. See Adamovich, Bryl', and Kolesnik, Ia iz ognennoi derevni and Adamovich and Granin, Blokadnaia kniga. 10. Harris, “Introduction. Diversity of Discourse,” 18. 11. Ibid., 17. 12. Oja, “Fictional History,” 113. 13. Adamovich, “V soavtorstve s narodom,” 55; Nichego vazhnee, 280. In this sense Adamovich compares documentary prose to the novels of Dostoevskii. 14. Oja comments on the irony of how many Soviet memoirs, especially of the Gulag, were read as straight history (“Fictional History,” 111, footnote 1). Simmons and Perlina state that their project of gathering women siege survivors’ voices was in part motivated by the sense that Blokadnaia kniga was shaped by the political considerations of its day and by the undefined editorial decisions of Adamovich and Granin (Simmons and Perlina, Writing the Siege, xxx). 15. Ericson and Klimoff agree that the genre of Gulag is “hard to pin down.” “Neither objective history, nor personal memoir, nor political treatise, nor philosophical meditation, it is all of these at once, in an amalgam in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (The Soul, 107–8). 16. Malia, “A War,” 50. 17. On Adamovich see Tumarkin, Living and the Dead, 208. 18. See Adamovich’s introduction to the journal variant of U voiny, 22. 19. Minsk, February 1978 speech at the roundtable discussion of documentary writers; published as “V soavtorstve s narodom.” This quote in the original reads “byt' ili ne byt' cheloveku, chelovechestvu na planete?” (57). I have added “should” to clarify in English the meaning of the Russian infinitive construction. 20. There is an ambiguity here because of grammar and style. Adamovich regularly uses a comma rather than a conjunction, and I have translated the sentence thus. However, in this case he may have meant “living voices of life itself, [and their] stories.” The original reads: “zhivye golosa samoi zhizni, istorii.” 21. U voiny – Oktiabr', 22. Simmons and Perlina agree that: “An aggregate picture provides greater perspective. . .” (Writing the Siege, 211). They assert in their introduction, though, that editorial choice plays an important role in that picture. 22. Adamovich’s call for literature to address the threats of looming nuclear war was titled “Sdelaite sverkhliteraturu” and was published in the journal Oktiabr' in November 1984. U voiny came out in that same context of fear of future world wars. 23. Reception by conservatives and other pro-government commentators of Aleksievich and her work at the time of her Nobel Prize labelled her a “Russophobe” and aligned her with Solzhenitsyn in this regard. See Krupin, who declared that she is “developing Solzhenitsyn’s line” (“Svetlana Aleksievich . . . Solzhenitsyn”). 24. U voiny – Oktiabr', 23. 25. Ibid.

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26. Krylova explores the myth of the woman soldier, who morphed from “triumphant martyr” to “unnecessary victim of the Stalinist state and her own ignorance of essentialist gender differences” (“Neither Erased nor Remembered,” 86). But women were not missing from depictions of combat, either, as she shows. Her study Soviet Women in Combat is exemplary in its careful construction and description of the contradictory narratives and images of woman and war. See especially, Chapter 1. Youngblood also discusses images of women in war films, including during the war itself, in “Ivan’s Childhood.” For a history of war in Russian film see Youngblood, Russian War Films and Norris, Blockbuster History. 27. Here I am using Krylova’s terminology. See Soviet Women in Combat, 238. 28. U voiny 2004: “Mne dazhe zhalko tebia. . . Kak dochke govoriu. . . Takaia molodaia, a khochesh' eto znat'” (26–7). “Eto khorosho, chto ty molodaia. Dochka mne. Ia uzhe staraia” (45). “Rasskazhu tebe, vot kak ono bylo. . . Po-zhenski. . . Kak podruge” (86). 29. Ibid., 10. 30. Ibid., 97. 31. Ibid., 96. 32. U voiny – Oktiabr', 57. 33. These headings in Russian read: “Podrastite, devochki. . . Vy eshche zelenye. . .” “Ne khochu vspominat'. . .” “Eto byla ne ia. . .” “Ia eti glaza i seichas pomniu. . .” “My ne streliali. . .” “Mama, chto takoe – papa?” See contents, U voiny 2004, 315. 34. Krylova, “Neither Erased nor Remembered,” 98–9; Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, 269. 35. U voiny 2004, 67, 53, 68, 167. 36. U voiny – Oktiabr', 24. 37. Saprykin, “My pereputali.” 38. U voiny – Oktiabr', 22. 39. Youngblood, “Ivan’s Childhood,” 93. See also Lawton, who calls the film “apocalyptic,” in Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema, 225. 40. Poslednie svideteli: Kniga nedetskikh rasskazov. See especially the memories of Vasia Astashonok, 10 years old during the war (5–6), which are similar to Flor’s. 41. Voina pod kryshami. 42. Krylova, “Neither Erased nor Remembered,” 89. 43. Ibid., 97. For more on Kosmodem'ianskaia and the myth of martyrdom see Platt, “Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia mezhdu istrebleniem”; Harris, “Memorializations of a Martyr”; Markwick and Cardona, Soviet Women, 120–5; Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, 219–21. 44. Krylova, “Neither Erased nor Remembered,” 99. 45. U voiny – Oktiabr', 22. 46. U voiny2004, 8; see Krylova, “Neither Erased nor Remembered,” 97–8. 47. Krylova, “Neither Erased nor Remembered,” 98–9. 48. U voiny – Oktiabr', 22. 49. Adamovich, Nichego vazhnee, 5. These words resonate with Aleksievich’s later characterization of Soviet history in Vremia sekond khend, 9, quoted above. In “Sdelaite sverkhliteraturu” Adamovich even predicts a fourth world war (188). This, by the way, may very well be the specific text and author being parodied by Viktor Pelevin in his lampoon of those who are “sil'nye dukhom” (“strong in spirit”). See Pelevin, Omon Ra, 48. 50. U voiny – Oktiabr', 58. 51. Ibid., 107. 52. This vision, of course, has very little to do with the actual history of the Soviet Union at this time, because the country – if not the nation, the narod, and the individual women who were a part of that nation – continued to behave in an aggressive and militaristic fashion after the Second World War. 53. Ibid., 23. 54. Sivakova, “Funktsii zaglavii”, 179. 55. U voiny 2004, 5–23. 56. Solzhenitsyn published Nevidimki in Novyi mir in 1991 and eventually added it to Bodalsia telenok s dubom. On Nevidimki see Erickson and Klimoff, Soul and Barbed Wire, 147 and ff.


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57. 58. 59. 60.

U voiny 2004, 23. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 16. This concern with defining the “Soviet person” continued to occupy Aleksievich and is the topic of Vremia sekond khend. On war, patriotism, and trauma see Merridale, “Soviet Memories” and Oushakine, Patriotism of Despair. 61. U voiny 2004, 19, 8, 14.

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Heather Coleman and the anonymous reviewers of Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes for insights that helped in developing this article, as well as the organizers and participants of the seminar on World War II at the Northeast Modern Languages Association Conference (April 2011), and especially Boris Briker, Adele Lindenmeyr, and faculty and students for the opportunity to speak about Svetlana Aleksievich at Villanova University in March 2016. Thanks also to Steven Conn and Sara Dickinson for their assistance at various stages of this project.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor Angela Brintlinger is Professor of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at Ohio State University (Columbus, OH, USA). Her publications include Writing a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture, 1917–1937 (Northwestern University Press, 2000, 2008), which looks at biography during these years; and Chapaev and his Comrades: War and the Russian Literary Hero across the 20th Century (Academic Studies Press, 2012), which takes the iconic hero of the 1923 biographical novel Chapaev and traces its influence in fiction and poetry. She is also editor of Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and Chekhov for the 21st Century (Slavica, 2012), and translator of Vladislav Khodasevich’s Derzhavin: A Biography (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).

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Tumarkin, Nina. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Voina pod kryshami. Screenplay by Ales' Adamovich, directed by Viktor Turov. 1967. Minsk: Belarus' fil'm. Premiered Moscow, 29 November 1971. Accessed 08 March 2017. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=yAmcN2fX7po. Youngblood, Denise J. “Ivan’s Childhood and Come and See: Post-Stalinist Cinema and the Myth of World War II,” in World War II: Film and History, edited by John Whiteclay Chambers and David Culbert, 85–96. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Youngblood, Denise J. Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914-2005. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007.