The Unwomanly Face of War
Penguin Classics, $29.99 pb, 372 pp, 9780141983523
The Unwomanly Face of War by by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
When Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in 2015, the response in the Anglophone world was general bewilderment. Who was she? The response in Russia was the opposite: intense, personal, targeted. Alexievich wasn’t a real writer, detractors said; she had only won the Nobel because the West loves critics of Putin.
Alexievich is kind of a journalist, kind of a social historian. What makes her work different, and important, is that she collects the voices of real people, collates them, and redistributes them, without imposing narrative or explanation. Even biographical information is scant. There is enough to give the speaker authority, but not enough to construe character or personality.
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The Unwomanly Face of War
by by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Penguin Classics, $29.99 pb, 372 pp, 9780141983523
Comment (1)
Miriam Cosic does suggest there might be an explanation for awarding this prize in literature to a “kind of a journalist, kind of a social historian”- the first non fiction, she might have pointed out, since Churchill in 1953- “The response in Russia was the opposite: intense, personal, targeted. Alexievich wasn’t a real writer, detractors said; she had only won the Nobel because the West loves critics of Putin”. And if she wasn’t so hostile to Putin’s Russia, Cosic would have followed this up.
Alexievich has no popular following in Russia. By contrast, previous Russian winners of the literature Nobel— Bunin, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov—are
still household names. She is regarded as an ethnic Ukrainian with Belarusian citizenship writing in the Russian language, whose output consists mainly of poorly disguised political polemics.
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