I remember, though, the evening after one battle – there had been losses, men killed and men seriously injured – we plugged in the television to forget about it, to see what was going on in the Union. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Usually I’d have been really pleased – I’d have kissed them – but this time they just made me wonder how much longer I was going to have to wait for him.

The war in Afghanistan lasted twice as long as the Second World War, but we know only so much as it is safe for us to know. I got a few more letters and then there was silence, such a long silence I wrote to the commander of his unit. As boys, the soldiers heard gargantuan tales of heroism from 1941 which provided a mythical masculinity, but the daily submission of Soviet life offered them little chance to emulate it, so when the Motherland spoke of “sacred duty” in Afghanistan, many were desperate for a chance at glory.I’d never so much as seen a real knife fight, and here I was, driving along on the back of an armoured personnel carrier. Weaving together their stories, Svetlana Alexievich shows us the truth of the Soviet-Afghan conflict. Not at all what I expected, the book consists of a series of interviews of the Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and of the mothers of those who died there. The previous day his unit had been on a fifty kilometre forced march and there hadn’t been any size forty-six boots, so they had given him forty-fours. When it was first published in the USSR in 1991, Boys in Zinc sparked huge controversy because of its unflinching, harrowing insight into the realities of war.

Even when finally making it home they found, like their American cousins, that the attitudes of those who did not go, and therefore could not understand, levied a further burden that more than resentments. When it was time for him to get the plane he missed it deliberately so we would have an extra two days. Quello che colpisce e risponde a verità è che molti sono tornati a pezzi nel corpo e anche nell'anima. Boys in Zinc presents the honest testimonies of soldiers, doctors and nurses, mothers, wives and siblings who describe the lasting effects of war.He’d got hepatitis, malaria and everything else rolled into one but he warned his sister not to tell me. As one veteran tells Alexievich, the war proved we’re simply animals “overlaid with a thin coating of culture”. In the process, she wrote artfully constructed oral histories [11] of several dramatic events in Soviet history: the Second World War, [12] Afghan War, [13] dissolution of the Soviet Union, [12] and the Chernobyl disaster. Alexievich was not interested in conventional responses, the kind of thing people say to journalists when they are shy, afraid of controversy or anxious to please.

The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. The paper further proposes that conflicts between the preternatural and the material, and between elite and non-elite voices--key themes of the works studied – are vital to understanding the age of change which Alexievich, through her use of extensive interviews, was seeking to record. After the great wars of the twentieth century and the mass deaths, writing about the modern (small) wars, like the war in Afghanistan, requires different ethical and metaphysical stances. The trial, while apparently defending the honour of the army and veterans, is widely seen as an attempt to preserve old ideology in post-communist Belarus. Archived 2019-06-23 at the Wayback Machine [Alexievich, Antonchyk, Arlou, Haretski, Shushkevich Awarded with the BDR Centenary Medal] - Radio Svaboda, 18 June 2019.The title refers to the coffins used to ship dead soldiers back to Russia from Afghanistan, and the whole thing is about waste and loss.