Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl begins and ends with two monologues by women whose husbands were killed by radiation poisoning as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear disasters. Lyudmilla Ignatenko's husband was a fireman; Valentina Pasanevich's, a liquidator--those tasked with cleaning up the disaster, and whose roles ranged from disposing of tons of radioactive graphite at the reactor site to shooting the dogs and cats abandoned in the evacuated town of Pripyat. Their stories are mirrors of each other: their husbands conscribed by duty, then subjected to horrible death. Ignatenko describes her husband's skin sloughing off like a glove; Pasanevich, rivers of blood that pour out like holes in a milk bucket. Ignatenko's husband died within weeks of the disaster; she hid her pregnancy from the doctors and nurses because she knew she wouldn't be allowed to see him; her daughter was stillborn. Pasanevich's husband died years later, the last of his squadron to do so, the cancer having disfigured his face so badly as to be unrecognizable.
Sometimes, words fail the women, but more miraculously, words come. Famously, Alexievich is the standard-bearer for the oral history, a collection of first-person monologues around a central topic or event. What is so remarkable about Voices from Chernobyl, I think, is just how eloquently the "normal people" Alexievich interviewed are able to speak about their experiences--Ignatenko calling her stillborn daughter a "lightning rod," or the way one speaker remembers the puddles of yellow and green water from acid rain, like paint. The amount of trust, and humility, required for a writer to give their project over like that must be immense. What emerge are stories that have been told and retold, but also stories that have been suppressed and ignored, as if the "Chernobylites" have been waiting behind the veil of the reactor's zone of exclusion for a chance to say how it was.
They are firemen and liquidators, but also ordinary peasants and farmers living in the contaminated area from Ukraine to Belarus, scientists, photographers, politicians. In some of the most powerful sections, Alexievich interviews refugees from war-torn Soviet republics like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan who had to flee, with nowhere to settle but the ruined land of Chernobyl no one else would occupy. Alexievich herself seems to disappear within the text, feeding questions, perhaps, that are erased, leaving the impression of unbroken monologues. When an interviewee does turn their attention to Alexievich, it creates a sense of shock, so thoroughly have we forgotten she's there: "Can you help?" one enraged subject asks. "No! Then why did you come here? To ask questions? To touch us? I refuse to trade on their tragedy. To philosophize. Leave us alone, please. We need to live here."
Like the HBO series Chernobyl, which drew heavily from Alexievich's book, Voices from Chernobyl suggests that the tragedy of the disaster was an especially Soviet one. Dozens of the liquidators describe feeling unable to say no to the bureaucrats who sent them in to "the Zone" to get sick and die; partly they desire to become heroes of the Soviet Union, but partly they describe a feeling that the State is more important than an individual life, and that the idealism of Communism mean their lives were forfeit to a "greater good." They describe a bureaucratic state expert only at keeping secrets, more concerned with stamping out panic than saving the millions who live in the path of the radioactive cloud from its life-altering harms.
But I was struck by how much these stories resonate with our own American response to COVID. (I said this about White Noise, too, but in many ways White Noise's "Airborne Toxic Event" reads eerily like a prediction of Chernobyl's radioactive cloud, which emerged a year after it was published.) Our American individualism isn't much like the Soviet ideology of collectivism, but similar themes emerge: the insistence on maintaining a "normal life" in the face of a disaster that can't be seen, the sense that victims have of being ignored and distrusted. I was struck, too, by how deeply the response to Chernobyl was shaped by two wars--World War II, for older "Chernobylites," and the war in Afghanistan, in which many of the young liquidators served--and how the metaphors of war and heroism warped the ability of the Soviets to understand what was happening. (More than one interviewee tells Alexievich something along the lines of, "We don't even know what Chernobyl was.") In much the same way, I think, American myths about our wars--World War II, yes, but also our post 9/11 insistence that maintaining normality was itself a victory over Islamic terrorism--warped our ability to confront our own disaster, our own lethal cloud.
The presence of a writer can give us a sense of detached safety, a barrier between us and the terror of the world, someone who will shape the facts and filter them through a reassuring consciousness, and prevent us from having to do it ourselves. The radical power of Voices from Chernobyl, I think, has to do with the sensation of unfiltered experience--unfiltered grief, unfiltered fear, unfiltered pain, unfiltered anxiety, unfiltered love. It was, at times, so intense I had to close the book while reading it on the train to keep myself from being overwhelmed.
I had a vague sense that Chernobyl had deleterious effects all throughout Europe. but I didn't realize how close it was to the Belarussian border and how intensely, therefore, it affected Belarus as well as Ukraine--in fact, 70% of the fallout drifted to Belarus, Alexievich's home country. With the addition of Belarus, my "countries read" list is up to 64.
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