The Unwomanly Face of War

by Svetlana Alexievich

There is the Motherland and the great Idea. Well, and also Stalin. Why lie? You can’t leave a word out of a song, as they say.

And today … Journalists come to me and ask, “Did you take pictures of the dead? The battlefield …” I began to look … I have few pictures of dead men … When someone was killed, the boys would ask me, “Have you got him alive?” We wanted to see him alive … Smiling …

Sometimes I come home after these meetings with the thought that suffering is solitude. Total isolation. At other times it seems to me that suffering is a special kind of knowledge. There is something in human life that it is impossible to convey and preserve in any other way, especially among us. That is how the world is made; that is how we are made.