Introduction
There was once a time when I read nothing but philosophical treatises, and the most recent 'best thing that I've ever read' would always be a chapter of Hume, a proposition of Spinoza, or the like. I was also especially fond of Iris Murdoch's work The Sovereignty of Good.
They are all great writers with great ideas, but of late my tastes have changed. The best thing I read in 2025 was something that I chanced upon in the final two weeks of December. I am here to speak of Svetlana Alexievich's oral history, The Unwomanly Face of War. Although I am sure that I will not do it justice, it seems better to at least try to say why I love this book than to surrender these sentiments to time. For I often look back on past posts or text messages and feel that I am gazing upon a stranger's words. How many more strangers are there that have come and gone from the shell of my body without my, or anybody's, notice? That I may one day remember that this version of me once was, I write. Then it cannot be denied that there was once someone who loved this book.
Context and presentation
The book is about frontline girls, or frontovichki, woman soldiers in the Soviet armed forces of World War II. In all combatant countries, World War II marked the entry of women into a public life that had hitherto been dominated by men. Women became welders, postal workers, nurses, typists, calculators, spotters, etc, in order to free up men for frontline combat. What made the USSR unique was (i) the number of women who entered the military, and (ii) their roles. Insofar as Wikipedia is reliable, about 350,000 women served in the US armed forces in World War II, mostly in auxiliary roles. In the USSR, about 800,000 women served, and many of them in frontline combat - combat medics, fighter and bomber pilots, anti-aircraft and artillery gunners, tankers, sappers, infantry, sailors, etc. To that number should be added the many partisan fighters who carried on the fight within German-occupied territory, spying, assassinating, sabotaging, and bombing.
This is a work of history, but not the 'objective history' that we are accustomed to reading. Alexievich does not attempt to present a chronology or account of what happened. The book contains transcriptions of hundreds of oral interviews she carried out across the former Soviet Union, with interviewees she initially sought out individually but eventually was referred to by the previous interviewees. Where she appears, Alexievich precisely marks herself out by writing in italicised text, and she speaks only of her own observations of the interviewees, or her own feelings about the war and its legacy, in distinct sections rather than annotations. The interviewees' space to speak belongs exclusively to them and their stories.
Though minor, this is the first reason why I love the book. General recognition of the frontline girls' contributions was very delayed due to the social penalties attached to the identity:
How did the Motherland meet us? I can’t speak without sobbing … It was forty years ago, but my cheeks still burn. The men said nothing, but the women … They shouted to us,On top of the penalty of active discrimination, there were other incidents that would understandably cause one to resent her identity as a frontline girl, and not be able to speak of it with pride the way that other veterans could:We know what you did there! You lured our men with your young c——! Army whores … Military bitches …They insulted us in all possible ways … The Russian vocabulary is rich …
After the war …
I lived in a communal apartment. My neighbors were all married, and they insulted me. They taunted me:Ha-ha-ha … Tell us how you whored around there with the men …They used to put vinegar into my pot of boiled potatoes. Or add a tablespoon of salt … Ha-ha-ha …
My commander was demobilized. He came to me and we got married. We went and got registered, that’s all. Without a wedding. And a year later he left me for another woman, the director of our factory canteen:She wears perfume, and you smell of army boots and footwraps.
So I live alone. I don’t have anybody in the whole wide world. Thank you for coming …
As the voices of women veterans were silenced, the voices of men veterans, telling a tale of the war as men perceived it, were amplified. This was done for political purposes, or perhaps for the sake of 'moral education' which I myself once also thought the sole purpose of history. And I am a man, after all. But it seems to me that after having gone through so much, and after having their ordeal completely erased from the historical record for so long, a space exclusively reserved for their voices to be heard is nothing more than what the frontline girls deserve. And I think that this is, even if unintentional, a formal expression of that.
The little human being
In the section after this one I will show a few of my favourite stories, as well as panels from the manga adaptation by Koume Keito, in order to illustrate what I am about to say here.
Sometimes in other history books, the author tries to illustrate the historical significance of the event they are writing about. There are many ways to do this. Some extra weight is added by some mathematical or economic analysis that purports to reveal causal connections to past or later events already deemed significant. Or they may cite the diaries of other significant figures. Take the fall of Singapore, for example. Sometimes we read of how the Japanese defeated the Allies so swiftly despite being so outnumbered, or of the victory's role in breaking the myth of Western invincibility in colonial Asia. Other times we simply get Winston Churchill's pronouncement of that event the worst defeat in British military history.
At least for me, all of that is nothing compared to the deluge of names in the book, followed by their transcribed testimonies. I felt as though I had very briefly met all of these people who had fought in and survived that terrible war, and the inconsistencies or differing viewpoints among the various accounts made it feel all the more real. For after a certain age is reached, a perfect uniformity of opinion seems artificial and suspicious. One becomes conscious of how many people are simply reticent about their own opinions, how much people's interests can differ and guide those opinions and their expression. Alone among the natural kinds, human nature is given towards diversity and duplicity, in a way that no mineral or animal approaches. Some women were happy on the frontline despite all the death and destruction, because they found love and never loved again after the war. Some entered the war out of patriotism and then grew jaded, despising the Soviet authorities. Others went in and came out fervent communists. Some spoke of how the very same men who protected them in battle could themselves become threats in the rear line, lacking any other outlet for their sexual urges. Some loved Stalin, some hated him and knew of his role in the Holodomor.
The goal of theory is to render reality comprehensible. But I suppose I had had enough of theories of human nature given to me by the great philosophers. Here in this book was human nature on display in all its gritty beauty. And to begin with, I loved those philosophy books where it felt most like the author was speaking directly to me. They had great ideas, but those great ideas made me want to know them more. And conversely, getting to know them more made their ideas seem richer and less abstract. That was why I loved Hume and Murdoch, and after reading a biography of Spinoza, I slowly grew to love him too.
I said something about the goal of theory. It is a tool, for doing things with. I am perfectly aware that nothing can be done with the unprocessed, raw human nature on display in Alexievich's book. In the first place, a human being is capable of serving a purpose, of having something done with him, to the extent that he resembles some part of a tool, and not his untamed state. A theory of human nature, in certain traditions, plays a part in moral philosophy precisely by narrowing the perceived gulf between untamed human nature and the part a moral ideal needs him to play. And it looks like the censors that delayed her book's publication until the perestroika were aware of this too. I stand with her in this little exchange with censors that she included in the foreword, before the stories start:
—This is a lie! This is slander against our soldiers, who liberated half of Europe. Against our partisans. Against our heroic people. We don’t need your little history, we need the big history. The history of the Victory. You don’t love our heroes! You don’t love our great ideas. The ideas of Marx and Lenin.
—True, I don’t love great ideas. I love the little human being …
Inhumanly human things
The title of this section is taken from the excellent prose of Alexievich's introduction.
When women speak, they have nothing or almost nothing of what we are used to reading and hearing about: How certain people heroically killed other people and won. Or lost. What equipment there was and which generals. Women’s stories are different and about different things. “Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.
If you let me go on forever, I would end up reproducing the book's entire text. So I shall simply content myself with two stories that constantly return to me. No doubt they reflect my personal tastes, as well as the aid of graphical representation by the manga. But still, I can explain why I choose these two. The first is a story of inhuman courage housed within a human shell. The second is a story where the great deed that was done was simply to be human.
Albina Alexandrovna Gantimurova, Sergeant Major, Scout
A girl's standing up
My first decoration was the medal "For Courage"...
A battle began. A barrage of gunfire. The soldiers lay cowering. The order came: “Forward! For the Motherland!” They just lay there. Again the order, again they just lay there.
They gave me the medal, and that same day we went on a mission. For the first time in my life I had … our … women’s thing … I saw blood and howled: “I’m wounded …”
There was a paramedic in the scouts with us, an older man. He came to me.
Tamara Stepanovna Umnyagina, Junior Sergeant in the Guards, Medical Assistant
There can't be one heart for hatred, and another for love...
Near Stalingrad … I was carrying two wounded men. I’d carry one for a bit, leave him, go back for the other. And so I carried them in turns. Because they were very badly wounded, I couldn’t leave them. How can I explain this simply? They had both been hit high up on the legs; they were losing blood. Minutes were precious here, every minute. And suddenly, when I had crawled away from the battle and there was less smoke around, suddenly I realized I was carrying one of our tankmen and a German … I was horrified: our people are dying there, and I’m saving a German!
Closing thoughts
This book really made me feel some things. In the days when I constantly read philosophical treatises, things felt very complicated and very simple at the same time. The theories, perhaps, were extremely complicated and subtle. But there was always either an answer at the end of the long chain of deductions, or the belief that at there was an answer, just one not found yet. And eventually I began to feel bored and cut off from reality, hemmed in within a sea of theory. At the same time, although as a man I too loved to read stories of heroism and daring, and about all the generals and strategies, I felt that that was cut off from the life of ordinary people. Reading this book alongside Judgment at Tokyo, that feeling is greatly enhanced.
Those other books have their place. One cannot help but ask what it all means, and what follows, either from a chain of arguments or from a record of some great event. One wants to draw some conclusion for their own lives after having spent all the time following a cast of theoretical or historical characters. To do that with this book, however, seems a disservice. For haven't the frontline girls given us enough just by being there and doing what they did?
No comments:
Post a Comment