Summary of Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The beginning of the 1900s was marked by a women’s phenomenon. Women served in all branches of the military in many countries of the world.

Sujets

• History
• Russia
• URSS
• Histoire
• Former Soviet Union

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 11 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822505889
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17 Insights from Chapter 18
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The beginning of the 1900s was marked by a women’s phenomenon. Women served in all branches of the military in many countries of the world.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

I am writing a book about war. I never liked to read military books, but in my childhood and youth, that was the favorite reading of everybody. We were the children of Victory, and the war was remembered constantly.

#2

I wanted to write the history of the war that women had fought in, and the history of their lives after the war. I was shocked by how different their memories were from the memories of the men who had fought in the war.

#3

I have met some remarkable storytellers. People remember not the war, but their own suffering and experiences. They draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read.

#4

I have been given the gift of hearing the voices of the elderly. I have spent years listening to them, and I have learned so much about life and death. War is an all-too-intimate experience, and as boundless as human life.

#5

I want to write the truth about life and death in general, not just the truth about war. I want to get at the truth of those years, without sham feelings. I want to read how people talked at home and what they talked about.

#6

I am a historian of the soul. I examine specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events, and I try to discern the eternally human in them. I build temples out of our feelings and desires, dreams, and that which was but might slip away.

#7

Women’s war is more powerful than men’s. Women are caught up with feelings, and they are capable of seeing what men cannot see. They are not prepared to do what men are prepared to do.

#8

I visited a family that had both husband and wife fought in the war. They met at the front and got married there. The husband immediately sent his wife to the kitchen to prepare something for us. The kettle was already boiling and the sandwiches were served, but the husband immediately got her to her feet again.

#9

I have realized that our memory is not an ideal instrument. It is not only arbitrary and capricious, but it is also chained to time like a dog. We cannot look at the past from anywhere else.

#10

I have been getting rejections from publishers for two years now. The verdict is always the same: war is too terrible. So much horror. Naturalism. No leading and guiding role of the Communist Party. In short, not the right kind of war.

#11

I began to receive dozens of letters daily, my folders were swelling. People wanted to talk. They became more free and more open. I was doomed to continue writing my books endlessly.

#12

I was interested in the notebooks I had written down the censored episodes, and the conversations I had had with the censors. I found pages that I had thrown out myself, and I wanted to explain why.

#13

I was captured by the Germans near Kerch. I was on night duty, and the doctors warned me before I started my shift that the captain would die during the night. I asked him how things were, and he suddenly smiled. I was totally at a loss, and I never even been kissed before.

#14

During the war, I saw horses that were no longer afraid of death. They would gather their own dead, but there were also a lot of German corpses lying around, frozen and icy.

#15

The truth is what we dream about. It’s how we want to be. We advance, and the first German villages are conquered. We’re young and strong, and we haven’t seen women for four years. We catch German girls and eat them.

#16

During the war, people turned against each other. The children of the kulaks returned from exile and took their revenge on those who had denounced their parents.

#17

I was a machine gunner in the Red Army. I killed so many people. I was glad when I saw German prisoners, because I thought that they were pitiful to look at. I didn’t find my sister, but I thought that a piece of a dress was hers.

#18

I am a history teacher. Within my memory, the history textbook has been rewritten three times. I taught children with three different textbooks. Ask me while I’m alive. Don’t rewrite afterward without me.
Insights from Chapter 3

#1

The story of an ordinary Russian girl, of whom there were many then. The place where my native village, Diakovskoe, stood is now the Proletarian District of Moscow. I was not quite eighteen when the war began. I worked on a kolkhoz, then finished accounting school and began to work.

#2

The young people of Komsomolfn, near Moscow, were asked to go and defend their country. They were given call-up papers within a couple of days.

#3

The girls were sent to the Shchelkovo station, near Moscow, to become snipers. They studied the regulations and learned to assemble and disassemble a sniper’s rifle with their eyes shut. They were pitied by the soldiers they were supposed to be fighting alongside with.

#4

When we returned, we started telling our platoon what had happened to us. We would not be able to kill the Germans right away. We had to persuade ourselves to do it.

#5

The first time you kill someone, you are terrified. But after that, you don’t feel any pity. You have seen those blackened little stars, and you know that they are the enemy.

#6

We were advancing very quickly, and we ran out of steam. Our supplies lagged behind: we ran out of ammunition, provisions, and the kitchen was demolished by a shell. For three days, we ate nothing but dry crusts.

#7

I was demobilized after the war, and when I tried to get home from Moscow, I had to ride on a train and then go several miles on foot.