Gender Identity and the Myth of the “Great Patriotic War” in Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War

Abstract

Abstract Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s first book U voiny ne zhenskoe litso (The Unwomanly Face of War), a “novel in voices” based on oral histories, challenges the heroic narratives of the late Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War by depicting the ordinary lives of Soviet women soldiers. Alexievich contends that war is “unwomanly” and downplays the overt challenges to traditional gender roles that women soldiers posed. Nevertheless, she includes episodes that undermine her own assertions about women’s difference from men and their desire to preserve life, creating ambiguity in her message and offering glimpses of an alternative gender order lurking under the surface. These alternative possibilities of understanding gender threaten both the war myth and the norms of Soviet gender relations.