The book has been published now in its first full English translation, undertaken by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the celebrated translators of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and others.

Image Svetlana Alexievich Credit... Margarita Kabakova

The book relates the stories of women on the front lines and on the home front; some were snipers, others nurses, others tank drivers. They were so young. One tells Alexievich, “We went to die for life, without knowing what life was.”

“The Unwomanly Face of War” is the product of thousands of hours of interviews. The author unearths a mostly buried aspect of Russian history. There’s a great deal that’s moving and memorable about the hardships described.

But it’s possible to read this book and have reservations about it. Because so much praise has already been heaped on Alexievich and on this volume, I’m going to place my own reservations first.

Many of the author’s interviews, in this book and others, are repetitive in their facts and their tone. An original voice is rare. Is Alexievich a gifted, probing interviewer? It’s hard to say. Her own questions are rarely included.

You consume this lumpy raw material and wonder how a pricklier historian and journalist, a Masha Gessen or an Anne Applebaum, might process and deploy it.

Alexievich provides little context for her narratives. You only occasionally know where and why events are happening. This is by design. “I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings,” she says in an introduction. “I am a historian of the soul.”