Random House Trade
The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II
Key Metrics
- Svetlana Alexievich
- Random House Trade
- Paperback
- 9780399588747
- 7.8 X 5.1 X 1.1 inches
- 0.6 pounds
- History > Women
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post - The Guardian - NPR - The Economist - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Kirkus Reviews
For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her invention of a new kind of literary genre, describing her work as a history of emotions . . . a history of the soul.
In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women--more than a million in total--were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten.
Alexievich traveled thousands of miles and visited more than a hundred towns to record these women's stories. Together, this symphony of voices reveals a different aspect of the war--the everyday details of life in combat left out of the official histories.
Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Unwomanly Face of War is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the twentieth century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war.
THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.
A landmark.--Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
An astonishing book, harrowing and life-affirming . . . It deserves the widest possible readership.--Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train
Alexievich has gained probably the world's deepest, most eloquent understanding of the post-Soviet condition. . . . [She] has consistently chronicled that which has been intentionally forgotten.--Masha Gessen, National Book Award-winning author of The Future Is History
Author Bio
I’ve been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. I tried this and that and finally I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire. Together they record verbally the history of the country, their common history, while each person puts into words the story of his/her own life.
Today when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified the document in art is becoming increasingly interesting while art as such often proves impotent. The document brings us closer to reality as it captures and preserves the originals. After 20 years of work with documentary material and having written five books on their basis I declare that art has failed to understand many things about people.
But I don’t just record a dry history of events and facts, I’m writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced. This is impossible to imagine or invent, at any rate in such multitude of real details. We quickly forget what we were like ten or twenty or fifty years ago. Sometimes we are ashamed of our past and refuse to believe in what happened to us in actual fact.
Art may lie but document never does. Although the document is also a product of someone’s will and passion. I compose my books out of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our life and being. It took me three-four years to write each of my books. I meet and record my conversations with 500-700 persons for each book. My chronicle embraces several generations. It starts with the memories of people who witnessed the 1917 Revolution, through the wars and Stalinist gulags, and reaches the present times. This is a story of one Soviet-Russian soul.
Source: alexievich.info
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