Soviet Women’s War Stories: Reimagining Women’s Violence in Svetlana Alexievich’s Narratives

• In Event: Poets, Soldiers, Doctors, and Travellers: Intersectional Experiences of Women in Modern Eastern Europe

Abstract

Approaching gender as a set of discourses that represent and enforce meaning based on perceived membership in sex categories and political violence as male-centric, this paper analyzes how gender identities and the subsequent gendering of violence are constructed and legitimized by Soviet institutions of power and how the naturalization of such identities is evident in Svetlana Alexievich’s work. It looks at how the conflicting construction of a peaceful/anti-violence “Beautiful Soul” affects female actors of WWII and the Soviet-Afghan War and turns to Alexievich’s interview collections to demonstrate how the communist state influenced these women’s decision to go to war, as well as their perception of themselves as soldiers. The women soldiers’ views of concepts such as femininity, motherhood, and disability will be discussed alongside the state’s definitions to reveal how the female subjects of Alexievich's books both conform to the constructed image and problematize and disrupt it by sharing their personal experiences.

Author

• Liubov Kartashova, Duke U