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7.12.2019

2015 • Svetlana Alexievich • Voices from Chernobyl


Up until recently my knowledge of Chernobyl was pretty fuzzy. I remembered that there was a disaster when I was a kid and more recently seeing some articles (or maybe even listicles on Buzzfeed) about the abandoned schools and government buildings that had now been taken over by nature.

After all 1986 was a busy news year. There was the Challenger Disaster in January - which pretty much traumatized every school kid in the US as most of us watched it all on live tv - and that whole year America was celebrating the Centennial of the Statue of Liberty. There was lots going on and I was only 12 years old anyway.

So in the back of my head, I knew something bad had happened in Chernobyl but didn’t think much of it. That is until I started watching the recently aired tv series “Chernobyl”. It was only then that I realized how close the world - with Europe in particular - had come to utter devastation.

After watching the first episode, I remembered that I’d once worked on a book about Chernobyl, back in my publishing days. I worked over in the production side and had been tasked with ordering a reprint of “Voices from Chernobyl” by Svetlana Alexievich. Those of us saddled with doing reprints would automatically receive a copy of each reprint done by our printers, which meant that for some titles, we’d have multiple copies of each book laying around. We’d quickly run out of space so we’d donate the extras to organizations, or to friends, or to ourselves.
A quick glance through my bookshelves and I spotted my paperback copy, still in pristine condition after 13 years and 3 apartment moves - including one across the Atlantic ocean!

I decided to read it whilst I watched the tv series and soon spotted that some of the series had been directly based on Alexievich’s book.

Most of the Nobel Laureates of Literature have been novel writers or poets or playwrights. Not a lot of non-fiction writers in the 100 plus list.

“Voices from Chernobyl” subtitled “The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster”, is Alexievich’s non-fiction account of what actually happened to the “liquidators” - workers sent in to “clean up” the disaster - and their families, what the government did (and didn’t do), and how great the suffering was (and continues to be).

I was going to write that it’s the kind of book that needs to be read little bits at a time, lest we become overwhelmed by the unimaginable tragedy and obscenity contained within its pages. But this is a one of a kind book. Uniquely told by the people who lived through Chernobyl, their own words, their own excruciating feelings. The only book that I know of that even compares is “Hiroshima” by John Hersey. But that’s a tiny slim book - it was originally published as an article in The New Yorker after all. It can be read in one sitting, even though it’s cruel and terrible and life-changing.

But this book can’t - and shouldn’t - be read in one sitting. Time is needed to ponder what one has read. There were many times that after reading one particular section, I was left completely shaken by the terror that some people went through.

There’s a tendency in our western culture to watch horror films for fun. Every time we go to the movies, there seems to be a horror-du-jour flick playing alongside the latest dramas and cartoons. Our culture seems to enjoy being scared, to be titillated by criminal doings and gore.

This book eclipses the worst imaginable in all of those. Except it all happened, it was all true.
Europe came very close to becoming a permanent wasteland and millions of people came very close to dying.

The Soviet Union was to blame for the disaster - through incompetence, and cronyism, and laziness - but they were also the ones who saved everyone in Europe, by sacrificing countless young men to their likely death in order to bury all of the contaminated ground.

There’s imagery here that will stay with you forever:

Bands of hunters engaged to “liquidate” any and all family pets left behind in the exclusion zone.

A liquidator suffering from radiation sickness whose own wife calls a “monster”, such is his face so terribly transformed - even war-experienced nurses refusing to help him.

The liquidator that brings back his work cap and thoughtlessly gives it to his young son to play with and ensures his boy’s early death.

The children born without eyes.

The children who aren’t born at all.

The old ladies who refuse to leave their land because they can’t see the radiation and besides, they’re old anyway.

The low level bureaucrats that daren’t do anything outside of their wheelhouse.

The scientists that defied punishment in order to warn friends and family of the coming carnage…and weren’t believed.

It’s all a litany of horrors. 

But Alexievich brings it all to life, exquisitely performing the duty of storyteller, that of an impartial witness, to preserve for the ages all that these people went through. So that hopefully next time - and surely there will be a next time - we can all remember some of what was told and in this way help to prevent some future suffering.

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Voices of Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
written by Svetlana Alexievich
translated into English by Keith Gessen
published in the US by Picador, May 2006


The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015
Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”