The Unwomanly Face of War

What Readers Say

The Unwomanly Face of War gets its highest Reddit score in a "best book nobody's heard of" thread — which is slightly ironic, as one commenter points out, since Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But the commenter's underlying point stands: the book is less read than it should be, especially in the English-speaking world. The pitch needs no embellishment: over two hundred personal accounts of Soviet women who fought on the Eastern Front in World War II. More than a million women served — as pilots, tank drivers, snipers, machine-gunners, nurses, doctors — and after the victory, their contributions were officially suppressed and erased. Alexievich spent years traveling across the Soviet Union to record these voices before they were gone.

Who It's For

Readers who want oral history that reads like literature. If Night by Elie Wiesel gave you a sense of what it means to document atrocity in first person, this book applies that register to women's experience of the same war from the other side. People who have read military history and felt the systematic absence of women's perspectives — this fills that absence with two hundred specific voices. It's difficult in the way all honest accounts of war are difficult, and necessary in the same way.

Reading Context

Originally published in Russian in 1985 and suppressed by Soviet authorities until 1988. This English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky was published in 2017. Alexievich's Nobel Prize in Literature (2015) was awarded for her invention of "a new kind of literary genre" — polyphonic oral history that becomes something more than journalism or testimony. The Unwomanly Face of War is her first book and in many ways her most essential. Pairs with Secondhand Time for the polyphonic method, or with All the Light We Cannot See for readers approaching the Eastern Front from the West.