The Soviet Afghan War in Nonfiction: Svetlana Alexievich's Boys in Zink and William T Vollmann's An Afghanistan Picture Show

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study of William T Vollmann’s An Afghanistan Picture Show (1992) and Svetlana Alexievich’s Boys in Zinc (1989), an ethnographic memoir and an oral history capturing ordinary people’s experiences across the front lines of the 1979–1989 Soviet-Afghan War. How does literature portray war? What makes creative nonfiction a valid historical source to be seen as a factual report of empirical reality? When official sources of information are limited or even non-existent, autobiographical prose and compiled witness testimonies become significant contributors to historical knowledge. The war lasted for an entire decade and became one of the causes of the collapse of the USSR, yet its media and scholarly coverage are relatively limited. A late postmodern American “hybrid” novelist’s and a late Soviet Belarusian Nobel Prize-winning documentary writer’s account of their interviewees’ and their own personal experiences may have little statistical significance, but literature communicates past human lives importantly beyond quantitative data. This thesis analyses the two authors’ narrative strategies in organising and communicating the fundamentally incomplete picture of the war and reflects on the advantages and limitations of documentary prose as a source on what it was and felt like.