Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories review: Harrowing accounts of war

Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories

Author: Svetlana Alexievich Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

ISBN-13: 978-0141983554

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Guideline Price: £12.99

Svetlana Alexievich’s first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, was published in the USSR in 1985 after years of censorship by the Soviet authorities, and went on to sell millions. To write it, Alexievich travelled around the USSR as a journalist for several years in the late 1970s, recording the voices of women who had lived through (and often fought in) the second World War.

The polyphonic choral history she constructed from the amassed testimonies stands apart from the countless books that have been written about the war, not only for its simple-but-radical idea of focusing on female wartime experience, but for the power and novelty of its narrative method. For my money, it’s up there with the greatest books ever written about war.

In Unwomanly Face and the five books Alexievich has written since, vast historical events are narrated by hundreds of voices which become one voice. Her work reads as if the soul of great Russia is rearing up to speak of the terrible, brave, cruel and pitiful things it has seen and done. Each subject is allowed to speak in her own words, with authorial input largely restricted to sequencing and editing the transcripts.

At its best, Alexievich’s remarkable method transmutes the base materials of journalism into a transporting literature, and she has deployed it to chronicle such momentous upheavals as the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, the catastrophe of Russia’s prolonged occupation of Afghanistan, and most ambitiously, in Second-Hand Time, Soviet life itself, from its rise to its demise.

The primary drawback to Alexievich’s fast-cutting, cast-of-hundreds approach to narrating is also its chief strength. Although she gives the name of the person who is speaking, along with their profession and age, the continuity of the first-person voice across multitudinous avatars creates a peculiar effect whereby individuality recedes, and a single, form-shifting being seems to recount the diverse experiences of the witnesses and historical actors: an essential humanity, even.

Frailty and sorrow

We don’t stay with any one narrator long enough for them to become unique, yet through their amalgamation, a pointillist portrait emerges of the human being in all its dignity, strength, frailty and sorrow.

Also published in the Soviet Union in 1985, shortly after The Unwomanly Face of War, was Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories. Only now, in the global swell of interest in Alexievich since she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is it appearing in English.

Like Alexievich’s debut, Last Witnesses attempts to convey “a history of human feelings” of the second World War. Rather than chronicle the dates and battles and names of generals, the author presents us with the unvarnished voices of those who were there – in this case, the men and women who were children during wartime. Alexievich apparently recorded her subjects during the same period she spent interviewing women for Unwomanly Face.

So is Last Witnesses as great as its predecessor? No, it isn’t, for a number of reasons, some of which are inseparable from the subject matter, and others of which arise from Alexievich’s slightly but crucially altered formal approach in her second book.

In her great works, while allowing her witnesses to speak for themselves, Alexievich occasionally intervenes to comment on the challenges she underwent while composing the work, her feelings around the material, and so on.

In Last Witnesses, she is entirely absent: on the first page, a voice begins to speak – an adult recalling childhood experiences of war. A few pages later, another voice takes over, and this relay continues till the end, with no particular shape to the material nor any authorial comment at all.

Resultantly, there is no real structure to the book, nor much to suggest that Alexievich has sequenced the testimonies so that they might become more than the sum of their parts.

Stunned witnesses

This formlessness seems partly to have been imposed on the collator-author by the material itself. There is an undifferentiated quality to many of the remembrances that make up this book, a corollary to the essential passivity of children in wartime. In contrast to women or men, children can rarely be more than war’s stunned witnesses: they cannot take up arms or tools and alter its course.

In Last Witnesses, the names and genders change as certain archetypally traumatic experiences occur over and over: the separation of a child from its parents; the witnessing of a mother being killed; the plangent cries of mama or papa as a village burns or the men are rounded up.

Of course, there is much here that is horribly specific. One little girl watches her pregnant cousin being hanged by German soldiers in the village square; the soldiers warn the onlookers not to cry, and kill the adolescents who do. A boy suspected of aiding the partisans is taken to a cellar and tortured; when he vomits on the floor he is ordered to lick it up. A girl sees her guardian angel as she is herded onto a boxcar and transported to Buchenwald (“If people had known their fate, they wouldn’t have survived till morning”). A man recounts an atrocity he witnessed at eight years old, his brief narration leaving no doubt that the psychic damage was irreversible: “I grew up gloomy and mistrustful, I have a difficult character . . . It’s hard to love me. I know it . . .”

Rampant barbarism

It will surprise no one to hear that barbarism was rampant as the Third Reich made its doomed bid to conquer Russia, but the archaic shapes it assumes can startle:

“The Germans went from cottage to cottage . . . They gathered those whose children had joined the partisans . . . They cut their heads off in the middle of the village . . . We were ordered to watch . . .”

Last Witnesses is somewhat lesser than its author’s greatest books, yet the project of which it is an instalment elicits deepening awe at what this still-living Belarusian has accomplished: an irreplaceable “living history” of the Soviet Union and its people. Alexievich stands among the greatest chroniclers of hell, but she is also an affirmer of that grizzled and unfashionable entity, the human spirit. Few have done so much to trace the emotional contours of the 20th century’s cataclysms before they tumble into oblivion. As one of her narrators insists:

“We are the last witnesses. Our time is ending . . . We must speak . . .

Our words will be the last.”