Fighting a War: Svetlana Alexievich’s Prose between History and Literature

Abstract

In this dissertation, I analyze three books from Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning cycle, Voices of Utopia, in their initial and later heavily revised editions and demonstrate how Alexievich turns oral history into literature. The first three narratives of the cycle, The Unwomanly Face of War (1983), Last Witnesses (1985), and Boys in Zinc (1990) examine individual experience in two Soviet wars: World War II and the Soviet-Afghan War. I argue that Alexievich stylizes oral testimonies in these books according to the conventions of specific performative genres: requiem in The Unwomanly Face of War, magic tale in Last Witnesses, and confession in Boys in Zinc. I demonstrate how the use of these performative genres as narrative frames allows Alexievich to engage both her interviewees and her readers in ritualized reenactments of individual and collective war traumas. Through these reenactments, interviewees relive their war traumas in the form of a solemn commemoration, a brutal maturation rite, or the agony of the last confession, while readers bear witness to these painful processes. I maintain that with these performative collaborations between interviewees and readers Alexievich honors individual and collective traumas of war and presents them as verbal monuments to human suffering during Soviet-era wars. Her texts strive to demolish foundational Soviet mythologemes of World War II and to force readers to reassess their vision of the Soviet past and its impact on the post-Soviet present.