The Unwomanly Face of War

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In February 2022, on the eve of the large-scale invasion, during the news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented on Ukraine’s duty to adhere to Minsk agreements despite the threat of Russian military escalation: “Like it or don’t like it, it’s your duty, my beauty” (“ Нравится – не нравится – терпи, моя красавица” ) using a reference to a song about the raped sleeping beauty lying in a coffin by Krasnaya Plesen, founded by a Russian band residing in occupied Crimea. That statement was an illustrative example of how Russia exploits sexism and misogyny even on the level of international politics. Svetlana Alexievich: Nobel laureate leaves Belarus for Germany". Deutsche Welle. Archived from the original on 1 October 2020 . Retrieved 28 November 2020.

The composition on the theme "Years of War" can tell not only about exploits on the front line. And the horrors of battles in it are not the main topic. There are worse things than bombs and shelling. The most terrible thing is the fate of the mother who survived her sons. The story of Chingiz Aitmatov is dedicated to women who overcame all the hardships of the war - hunger, daily exhausting work - but never waited for their children. Mother should not bury her son. With his death she will not be able to reconcile, no matter how valiant a feat he may have committed. Even if her son is a Hero of the Great Patriotic War. The composition of the work "Mother's Field" makes it possible to reveal the theme of the tragic fate of soldiers' mothers. The polyphonic performance of testimony in Svetlana Aleksievich's Voices from Utopia Johanna Lindbladh

A heroine or a living legend?

Turkish) Çernobil Duası - Geleceğin Tarihi. Kafka Yayınevi, 2017. Translated by Aslı Takanay. ISBN 978-605-4820-52-8. Since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014, the public image of Ukraine in Russia has been shaped as an image of stereotypically “weak” women in a patriarchal system of values. Together with slutshaming and references to rape culture, this tactic was aimed to strengthen the propaganda narrative about the “external governance” of Ukraine as a “failed state” and its “dependence on the Western curators”. This is often followed by the use of the derogative “baba” (Russian for “female peasants”) and a comparison with women as the synonym of weakness and a secondary role in society’s hierarchy. Describing Ukraine and the Ukrainian president as “cheap baba” and comparing the state with a “prostitute” is also used as a metaphor for Ukrainian “venality” and corruption. Such comparisons may be found both in Telegram channels promoting Russian propaganda for the internal audience and Russian mouthpieces in Ukraine: is being strengthened. As Russian identity is deeply rooted in the traditional values supplemented by the image of a strong hyper-masculine leader, whom Putin tries to be, the patriarchal models and values are used both as instruments of showing the neglect to the symbolic “other” (both Ukraine and is Western allies) and increase the support of the Russian-Ukrainian war in the Russian society.

English) The Unwomanly Face of War, (extracts), from Always a Woman: Stories by Soviet Women Writers, Raduga Publishers, 1987. A woman by nature is destined forthe birth of life, but not to destroy it. But if you need to protect your home and your children, she will take up arms. And she will learn how to kill. But after that it will remain on her soul a heavy load, bleeding wound. A woman who takes life is always scary. Even if this life belonged to the enemy, the fascist and the occupier. After all, war does not have a woman's face ...

Before the eyes of Julia Drunina, young guys and girls were killed. Under fire, in the cold and mud, a seventeen-year-old girl from the Moscow intellectual family made her way with her fellow soldiers to the front line. She bandaged the wounded, starved, frozen, and saw corpses. She wrote poetry in the trenches. "Front poetry by Julia Drunina" is an interesting topic, which is worth devoting to the composition. A new literary genre. Trauma and the individual perspective in Svetlana Aleksievich's Chernobyl'skaia molitva Irina Marchesini Such a comparison is used by Russian propaganda to describe not only Ukraine as a state but also the Ukrainian president, which has an extra humiliating connotation in the patriarchal optics. This is how this strategy was realized by Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov: Based on the book: War's Unwomanly Face / War does not have a woman's Face / The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II / У войны не женское лицо by Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize winner in Literature

Flood, Alison; Harding, Luke; agencies (2015-10-08). "Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel prize in literature". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 2016-09-06 . Retrieved 2016-08-16. Colin Dwyer (2015-06-28). "Belarusian Journalist Svetlana Alexievich Wins Literature Nobel: The Two-Way". NPR. Archived from the original on 2015-10-09 . Retrieved 2015-10-08. German) New, expanded edition; übersetzt von Ganna-Maria Braungardt. Hanser Berlin, München 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24525-9.

The most brutal war

All these tactics and techniques show how gendered the Russian propaganda is and how much the image of contemporary Russia relies on the values of hyper-masculinity. While women in politics (such as Ursula von der Leyen, Jen Psaki, Samantha Power, Liz Truss) are traditionally depreciated and ridiculed by both official discourse and on the media and labeled as “incompetent”, “foolish”, “hysterical” or “weak”, the traditional vision of woman in Russian society as passive and submissive and the vision of man as dominative I've been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.

Mothers, father(s), daughter: Svetlana Aleksievich and The Unwomanly Face of War Angela Brintlinger The recollections are told by elderly soldiers through recordings of small bits of information that they can remember, each telling their tiny collaborative contributions to the warEnglish, UK) Boys in Zinc. Penguin Modern Classics 2016 ISBN 9780241264119, translated by Andrew Bromfield. Treijs, Erica (8 October 2015). "Nobelpriset i litteratur till Svetlana Aleksijevitj"[Nobel Prize in literature to Svetlana Aleksijevitj]. Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish). Archived from the original on 18 November 2015 . Retrieved 8 October 2015. German prisoners, exhausted by hunger, go toRussian village. On the roads that they had been trying to burn for five years, to wipe them off the face of the earth. And the Russian women peasant women come out to meet them and offer bread, potatoes, everything they have. In the present they have a ruined house, in the future - beggars after the war. And life without men who have not returned. But even this could not destroy compassion in the women's hearts.