The first Belarussian writer to challenge this vision of the recent past was Vasil Bykau, a novelist — he was himself said to be on the Nobel shortlist in 2001, not long before his death — and World War II veteran. In 1965, the year Alexievich graduated from high school, Bykov published his war novella, “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” which was immediately banned from further publication. The reason: slandering of a heroic Soviet soldier. His characters stubbornly stand outside the Soviet national myth. They are cowardly as often as they are brave; they betray and are betrayed; they are not always sure that victory over fascism or capitalism justifies their deaths. In other words, they are human, and the pants of the iconic Soviet hero are often too big for them.

An eager admirer of Bykau, Alexievich — the voices of bench-women still ringing in her head — wanted to write about war. More specifically, she wanted to capture the voices of female soldiers and military nurses, women who went from the hearth to the battlefield. What made Alexievich a different and new kind of a writer is that she didn’t want to write a novel. Instead, she traveled across the Soviet Union, equipped with a recorder, listening, collecting the material that would constitute her first book, which appeared in English as “War’s Unwomanly Face” (an unfortunate translation; it could be better and more accurately rendered as “War Doesn’t Look Like a Woman”).

Rather than subsuming her interviews in a narrative told in her own voice, Alexievich rendered them as uninterrupted blocks of speech. That is to say, “War Doesn’t Look Like a Woman” is a book made out of other people’s voices. Alexievich’s gift is in coaxing her interlocutors into speaking about themselves in intimate terms. She sieved through hours and hours of material, looking for moments when her subjects deviated from the official myth. Here is Anastasia Ivanova Medvedkina, a machine-gunner during the war, trying to describe combat:

How could I find words? Of shooting, I can tell you. Of crying, I cannot. It will remain unsaid. I know one thing: War makes a man frightening and impenetrable. How to understand him? You are a writer, so think something up. Something beautiful. Without lice and dirt, without vomit… Without the smell of vodka and blood… Something less frightening than life.

Elsewhere in the book, Zinaida Vasilievna Korz, a medical instructor with a cavalry squadron, describes life in the years that followed the war:

For my medals and decorations I was given special stamps to go to a military store and buy myself something. I bought cute rubber boots, the latest fashion, a coat, a dress, a pair of shoes. Then I thought I’d sell my military trench coat. I went to a market… In a light summer dress… With a pin in my hair… What did I see there? Young guys without arms, without legs… Our former soldiers… Wearing their decorations, their medals… The one who still got his arms is selling handmade spoons. Bras, women’s underwear. The other one… No arms, no legs… Sits there crying. Asking for some change… Nobody has wheelchairs — just wood planks that they push with their hands. … Those that have hands. Drunk. Singing songs. You get the image. … I left, decided not to sell the coat after all. In the next five years I spent in Moscow, I never went to the market again. I was scared that one of them would recognize me and scream at me: “Why did you get me out of that fire? Why did you save me?” I thought of one particular young lieutenant. … His legs… One was cut off by a shell, the other one was sort of hanging. … I was strapping him up. … Under fire… And he kept screaming: “Stop pull me! Finish me! Finish me! It’s an order. … ” Do you understand? You see, I was so scared of running into that lieutenant. … ”

These are real people, whose voices give the lie to both foreign stereotypes of the Soviet experience and local heroic myths. In addition to Bykov, Alexievich’s style owes something to the Belarussian writer Ales Adamovich, who together with Yanka Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik, published in 1975 “I’m From Fire Village,” what he called a “collective novel”: a genre — Adamovich claimed it as uniquely Belarussian — that consists solely of real people’s voices, a memory book about those who, along with their families, were set on fire inside their villages by the Nazis but miraculously managed to survive.

The polyphonic method of “I’m From Fire Village” heavily influenced “War Doesn’t Look Like a Woman”; each is presented as a series of interviews, in which the writer works primarily as a listener and a transcriber. In a 2013 speech, Alexievich said that when she was asked if people really speak as beautifully as they do in her work, she replied: “People always speak beautifully when they are in love or close to death. We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs. Peculiar relationship with death.”

The official reception of Alexievich’s first manuscript for “War Doesn’t Look Like a Woman” in 1983 echoed the outcry over Bykau’s fiction: She was accused of tarnishing the image of the Soviet woman. In a few years, however, with the arrival of the political and economic reforms known as perestroika, “War Doesn’t Look Like a Woman” was published and sold around two million copies. It was followed over the next three decades by four more myth-dismantling works: “Last Witnesses” (1985), “Zinky Boys: The Record of Lost Soviet Generation” (1992), “Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of Nuclear Disaster” (2006) and “Secondhand Time” (2013, to be published in English in 2016).