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Title details for The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich - Available

The Unwomanly Face of War

An Oral History of Women in World War II

by Svetlana Alexievich
Richard Pevear
Audiobook
1 of 2 copies available
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1 of 2 copies available
A long-awaited English translation of the groundbreaking oral history of women in World War II across Europe and Russia—from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“A landmark.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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.
“But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown . . . I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.”—Svetlana Alexievich
Read by Julia Emelin, Yelena Shmulenson, Allen Lewis Rickman, and Alan Winter
THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
“for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
“Patient in overcoming cliché, attentive to the unexpected, and restrained in exposition, her writing reaches those far beyond her own experiences and preoccupations, far beyond her generation, and far beyond the lands of the former Soviet Union.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“Alexievich’s artistry has raised oral history to a totally different dimension. It is no wonder that her brilliant obsession with what Vasily Grossman called ‘the brutal truth of war’ was suppressed for so long by Soviet censors, because her unprecedented pen portraits and interviews reveal the face of war hidden by propaganda.”—Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege

“A mighty documentarian and a mighty artist . . . Her books are woven from hundreds of interviews, in a hybrid form of reportage and oral history that has the quality of a documentary film on paper. But Alexievich is anything but a simple recorder and transcriber of found voices; she has a writerly voice of her own which emerges from the chorus she assembles, with great style and authority, and she shapes her investigations of Soviet and post-Soviet life and death into epic dramatic chronicles as universally essential as Greek tragedies.”—The New Yorker

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 25, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781524708498
      • File size: 412064 KB
      • Duration: 14:18:27

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Julia Emelin and Yelena Shmulenson both give sublime performances of this exceptional work by Nobel laureate Alexievich. This compilation of WWII reminiscences by female veterans of the Red Army was first published nearly 35 years ago and was controversial for its unvarnished view of the war, with the author even being sued for slander a number of years later. These women veterans recall how brutal and horrible their service was. Alexievich's work is a feminine view of the war--many of the woman longed for the feminine aspects of life when they found themselves in such a brutal and overwhelmingly male world. Emelin's and Shmulenson's Slavic accents make it seem as though one is hearing each veteran speak herself. Their expression and inflection are perfect. Some male accounts are performed by two additional performers. After beginning this work, it's next to impossible to stop listening. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 6, 2017
      “I write not about war, but about human beings in war,” explains Nobel-laureate Alexievich (Secondhand Time) in this lyrical, elegant volume. “I write not the history of war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul.” Originally published in 1985 and newly translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, the work was inspired by Alexievich’s postwar childhood memories of the women in her home village and their stories of WWII. Alexievich traveled through the Soviet Union for years interviewing hundreds of other women, collecting a haunting cacophony of almost-forgotten voices. For these women, who joined the Red Army as snipers, medical personnel, riflemen, foot soldiers, etc., war wasn’t about generals and military equipment. “Women’s stories are different and about different things,” Alexievich reveals. “There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.” Alexievich groups the interviews into chapters according to women’s perceptions about their service: “I Don’t Want to Remember...,” “They Awarded Us Little Medals...,” “They Needed Soldiers... but We Also Wanted to Be Beautiful....” Though political contexts have changed, Alexievich’s first book remains as soulful as ever.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 4, 2017
      Speaking with Slavic accents, narrators Emelin and Shmulenson divvy up the many stories of Soviet women serving in the military and resistance movements of World War II in the audio edition of this English translation of Nobel Prize–winner Alexievich’s oral history. There are chilling tales of girls witnessing—and perpetrating—atrocities and then wondering how they will be able to return home and have families of their own. And there are stories of sharpshooters, surgeons, and scouts performing heroically but worrying about their femininity and even their humanity. While the audio format is seemingly a natural fit for an oral history, it’s easy to lose track of individuals in the accounts of hundreds of women. Emelin and Shmulenson do their best to provide unique voices for different women and they state the name of each before reading her story, but listeners can’t refer back to those names as easily as readers could. While the book presents numerous women’s experiences in the war, the stories start to blend together with only two actors providing the voices of hundreds of women. A Random House hardcover.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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