During World War II, more than a million women fought in the Soviet Union. They are young girls aged 15-30, but they take on the duties that are considered "men's positions": they are doctors, snipers, tank infantry, submachine gunners... "No Women in War" is a memoir of Soviet female soldiers and female medical personnel in World War II. The war in their eyes brings us a completely different perspective, and it is also a shock and shock that has never been seen before.
The author of this book, Aлeксиeич), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, has spent decades traveling across the vast land of the former Soviet Union, visiting thousands of people who have experienced events on the front line, consulting documents from all sides, and painstakingly compiling a series of Oral Histories of the Soviet Union – this is the epic of ordinary people's lives.
This article is excerpted from the introduction of "No Women in War" "Writing War, But Also Writing People".
Writing about war is even more about people
Text | Alexievich
Source | "No Women in War"
I'm writing a book about war...
I've never liked to read war books. Although it was a favorite reading for everyone in my childhood and girlhood, all my peers at that time loved to read books about war. This is not surprising: we are all children of the victory in World War II, the descendants of the victors. And first and foremost, what can I remember about war? I just remember my childhood surrounded by incomprehensible and frightening words, melancholy and bitter. People always look back at wars: in schools and families, in marriage halls and baptismal ceremonies, during festivals and after funerals, even in conversations with children. The boy next door once asked me, "What are the people in the ground doing?" How do they live there? "Even we children want to solve the mystery of war.
Since then, I have been pondering the question of death... And never stopped thinking about it. For me, death is the fundamental mystery of life.
Everything we have begun in that terrible and mysterious world. In our family, Grandpa was Ukrainian, died on the front lines and was buried somewhere in Hungary. Grandma was Belarusian and died of typhoid fever in the guerrillas. Her two sons, who were soldiers, disappeared in the first few months after the war broke out, and only one of the three sons came back, my father. Eleven of my family's relatives, along with their children, were burned alive by the Germans, either in their huts or in the village church. Every family died, and every home was torn apart.
For a long time, the boys in the country still liked to play games between Germans and Russians, shouting in German: "Raise your hands!" "Get back!" "Hitler is finished!"
At that time, we did not know that there was a world without war, and the world we knew was the world of war. And the people in the war are also the people we know. Until now, I didn't know another world and another kind of person. Did they ever exist?
Soviet hero and Rear Admiral Lyudmila Mikhaillovna Pavlichenko
After the war, the village where I spent my childhood was a woman's village, and it was all women. I don't remember hearing men's voices. That's how I spent it day after day: listening to women talk about war over and over again, washing their faces with tears every day. They sang too, but as much as they cried.
In the school library, most of the books were about war. The same is true of the libraries in the village and the district center, and Dad often goes to the district to borrow books. Now I have the answer and know why. Is all this accidental? All our time is spent fighting or preparing for war. People's memories are also of how the war was fought. Never experienced a different kind of day, probably not a different life. We never think about whether we can live a different way, which requires us to spend a long time learning in the future.
In school, we are taught to love death. Most of the content of our writings is how eager we are to die in the name of so-and-so... That became our dream...
However, there is a boiling debate on another topic outside, attracting more people.
I've always been full of bookishness, both afraid of reality and attracted to it. In the face of life, ignorant and fearless. Now, I think: If I were a very realistic person, would I still be involved in such an endless tunnel? Why is all this happening? Is it really because of ignorance of the world, or is it because of the perceptual process? After all, perception has a process...
I search tirelessly... In what kind of vocabulary can I use to express everything I hear? I was looking for a genre of writing that reflected the world I saw and could carry what I saw and heard.
At one point I got a book, "I Come from a Village of Fire," by Adamovich, Brel, and Kresniko. It was only when I read Dostoevsky that I experienced such a shock. It's an extraordinary form, a novel made up of the voice of life, the voice I heard as a child, the sound of the streets, the alleys, the homes, the cafes, the cars and trams, day and night. That's it! The scope was locked, and finally found my pursuit. Exactly what I had a hunch about.
Ales Adamovich became my teacher...
Sniper of the 255th Marine Brigade, Ronov Elizabeth
For two whole years, I didn't do as many interviews as I had originally envisioned, but I was reading. What is my book going to say? Is it just another war work? ...... Why write? There have been thousands of war works, thin and thick, well-known and obscure, and many more have written articles commenting on these works. But...... Those books are all men writing about men. Of course, this makes sense. Everything about war, we get it from men. We are all captured by men's ideas and feelings of war, and even the language is male. However, the women were silent, and no one but me had ever asked our grandmother, our mother. Even the women who had been to the front were silent, and even if they occasionally recalled, they were not talking about women's wars, but always men's wars. Follow the rules and choose your words. It was only after tears flowed from their own homes, or in the small circles of the front line, that they began to tell the story of their own wars, experiences that were completely unfamiliar to me. Not only me, but also strangers to everyone.
More than once during the interview, I became a witness, a listener to new stories that had never been heard before. I experienced the same shock as when I was a kid. In these stories, a certain mysterious, strange viciousness is revealed... In these women's narratives, there are none, or almost none, the things we used to be accustomed to reading and hearing: how some heroically struck out against others and triumphed, or how others failed. Nor does it say how military technology confronts or how generals command it. Women's stories are stories of another type of person telling another kind of thing. Women's wars have their own colors, their own breath, their own interpretations, their own emotional space. They are all speaking in their own language. There are no heroes and incredible feats, only ordinary people, forced to do human causes that are beyond human reach. At that time, not only people were suffering, but even the land, birds, and trees were suffering. They suffer silently and silently, which makes the memories even more frightening.
Why? I kept asking myself. In the male world, after women have stood firm and defended their position, why can't they defend their history, their words and emotions? It's because they don't believe in themselves. The whole world still has something to hide from us women. The women's war is still unknown...
And I just wanted to write the story of this war. Women's stories.
Two Soviet female pilots: Rufina (left) and Natalia
After the first interviews were completed...
It is inevitable to be surprising that these women used to be all kinds of professionals in the military: health instructors, snipers, machine gunners, anti-aircraft gun commanders, sappers, but now they are accountants, laboratory inspectors, tour guides, teachers... At this moment, it has nothing to do with the role they played back then. When they look back on the past, it seems that they are not talking about themselves, but telling stories of other girls. Today, they are all surprised by themselves. In my eyes, this is evidence that history is becoming human, becoming more similar to ordinary life, that is, there is another interpretation of history.
In person, the women who tell the story are thrilled, and some fragments of their lives are comparable to chapters of classic works. From heaven to earth, one examines oneself so clearly, and one is confronted with a complete journey, either to heaven or to earth—from angels to beasts. Memories – This is not an exciting or indifferent retelling of an experience that has passed, but when time goes back, the past has been given a new life. First of all, it's all about creation. When people tell the story, they are also creating, writing about their own lives. Additions and rewrites are common. Be careful, though, and be vigilant. At the same time, pain melts and destroys any falsehood. Pain is a super high temperature! I'm sure that ordinary people—nurses, cooks, and washerwomen—will be more honest with themselves. If defined more clearly, what they say comes from themselves, not from newspapers or books they have read, still less from parrots, but from pain and suffering. No matter how strange it may seem, the emotions and language of those who have been educated are more easily repaired and processed by time, and universally encrypted, and are always impregnated by certain repetitive doctrines and fictional myths. I have been trekking, traveling a lot of roads, going around in various circles, just to hear the story of women's wars, not the kind of men's wars- nothing more than how to retreat, how to counterattack, nothing more than which troops on the front line... What I need is not an interview, but many opportunities, like a relentless portrait painter.
Often, I sit in an unfamiliar house or apartment all day. We drank tea together, tried on newly bought shirts together, talked about hairstyles and recipes, and looked at pictures of our children and grandchildren together. Next...... After a while, you don't know how, or why, that long-awaited moment suddenly appeared. When one distances oneself from the precepts of stone and cement, which are like monuments, one returns to oneself and confronts oneself. The first thing they think back on is not the war, but their own youth, which is a life of their own... I must seize this moment, not to be missed! However, often after a long day full of words, facts and tears, only one sentence remains in my mind – but what a touching sentence! -- "When I went to the front, I was just a silly girl. So I actually grew up in the war! Although the tapes were tens of meters long, four or five boxes, I only left this sentence in my notebook.
What can you do to help me? This will only help if we are accustomed to living together. As the saying goes, "things are clustered in groups, and people are grouped." In the face of this world, we have shared joy and tears. We can bear both suffering and speak of suffering, and it is suffering that is a testament to our heavy and turbulent lives. For us, suffering is an art, and it must be admitted that women have the courage to embark on this journey...
Female snipers in the Soviet First Front in Germany on April 5, 1944, from left to right: first platoon, Stepanov (20 killed), Belousov (killed 80), Vinogradov (killed 83), second row Ciboviskaya (killed 24), Mareka (killed 79), Marikina (killed 70), third row Biroblova (killed 70), Lobocovski (killed 89), Artamonov (killed 89), Zhubchenku (83 killed), Obkhov (killed 64), BirYakov (killed 24)