How Women Lived Under Soviet Rule

Before stepping onto the stage, Svetlana Alexievich left me with her grayish-beige leather coat, as unfashionable as the rest of her. We had met by chance in March at a literary festival in Austria where the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in literature—a stocky woman in her late 60s, barely 5 feet tall—was being honored. “Hold it for me,” she said, and there was something touchingly Soviet in the gesture: You trust your own to keep an eye out for you. I, too, am a former Soviet citizen; we share the experience of surviving in a world that was “making war all the time, or preparing for war,” to quote from The Unwomanly Face of War. One of the saddest books you may ever read, it was the work that launched Alexievich’s 30-plus-year career of “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” as the Nobel citation put it.

“Historian of the soul” is the way Alexievich, writing in her journal, described her vocation as she worked on the collage of Soviet women’s memories of World War II that first won her an audience, in 1985. “Listen,” begins a former sniper (one of roughly 1 million women who served in the Soviet army, in every capacity). Alexievich does just that, and then records the tale, strewn with ellipses and distilled to its haunting essence—one fragment of testimony