A Chronotopic Study of Women’s War Experience as Reflected in the Works by S. Aleksiyevich, an Anonymous Author, and I. Grekova

This article studies the women’s perspective on war and its effects on the female characters in three significant works written by women, namely “The Ship of Widows” (1994) by I. Grekova, “A Woman in Berlin” (2011) by an Anonymous author, and “U vojny ne zhenskoe litso” (2013) (“The Unwomanly Face of War”) by S. Alexievich. The purpose of this research is to display, for the first time collectively, how women’s perspective on war is narrated not by men but by women themselves who have experienced WWII or its aftermath effects in their lives. Despite a significant literature/bibliography on WWII, the latter primarily reflects the male view, making the three selected books exceptional. Furthermore, unlike the previously available articles on the aforementioned texts, our article originally conducts a collective and comparative study of them. Women’s studies have separately dealt with these three literary works, highlighting the women’s experiences and ordeals of war. Instead, we focus on the setting of the stories. The communal buildings in the first two works and the war front in the third one gain a significant historical and personal dimension that can be framed and explained by Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, where according to Lefebvre “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history”(1994 p.84). In terms of explaining the nature of the spatiality in these literary oeuvre, H. Lefebvre’s concepts of “dominated space” and “appropriated space” are employed.