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  • Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich
  • Julie deGraffenried
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. By Svetlana Alexievich. Trans. Keith Gessen. New York: Picador, 2005. Xiii, 236 pages. Paperback, $16.00.

Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and author of seven books, was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of her "polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time" (Nobel Media AB, "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015," available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/). In describing Alexievich's award and body of work, the Swedish Academy could have been describing Voices from Chernobyl, as it encapsulates what she is best known and admired for: capturing voices of all kinds of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Voices from Chernobyl is a testament to the people (the living and the dead) who experienced, endured, and coped with the tragic, and often infuriatingly incompetent, events surrounding the devastating nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 and its aftermath. [End Page 144]

Alexievich's approach to this tale of Chernobyl is apparent from the beginning. She opens with "Historical Notes," relying on a combination of five outside sources, such as the New York Times or the entry "Chernobyl" in Belaruskaya Entsiklopedia (Belarusian Encyclopedia; unfortunately, she provides no publication details for this particular source), to explain to the uninformed reader both the Chernobyl incident itself and the current political atmosphere of Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus. To follow, she chooses to highlight an account given by a woman who lost her fireman-husband to radiation poisoning, one of the most unforgettable testimonies of human love, horror, and loss I have ever read, setting it apart from the rest of the book as a prologue entitled "A Solitary Human Voice." Thus, Alexievich introduces the reader to the combination of "fact," raw emotion, politics, human suffering, agency, and reflection that dominates the entire work.

Voices is divided into three roughly equal parts. Eight chapters in part 1 chronicle "The Land of the Dead," in which we hear from people dealing with, articulating thoughts about, and testifying to the death that followed in the wake of the explosion—the death of loved ones and strangers, the death of the land and its animals, the death of a home and a homeland. The seven chapters in part 2, "The Land of the Living," focus on those living with the aftereffects of Chernobyl, from birth defects and infertility to spiritual or mental crisis and the stigma of being a "Chernobylite." Finally, part 3, "Amazed by Sadness," contains eighteen shorter chapters of reflections on the accident and its legacies by people from a variety of stations and occupations. Alexievich's hand is evident in the ordering and style throughout, even though each chapter is presented as a first-person monologue. Sometimes a monologue has a beautiful narrative flow, like a short story, while in other instances, the monologue is clearly a brief fragment of conversation or even a series of disjointed, not necessarily related quotes. Occasionally Alexievich includes details like setting, body language, and nonverbal cues, but more often omits them.

Throughout, in their own voices, those affected by Chernobyl try to make sense of the nonsensical, often expressing themselves in terms of the equally inscrutable, whether that be God, modern bureaucracy, war, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Alternately hopeless (almost unbearably so), humorous, maddening, and weary, Alexievich's human sources provide an unparalleled look into the lives of people for whom Chernobyl represents a massive rupture in the everyday. The Soviet legacy looms large here, whether as anger or confusion over official inaction and denial, the accident as the work of "enemy diversion," or unquestioning obedience to the "call of the motherland" (144, 156). Many witnesses invoke the Soviet experience in World War II, the last tragedy of this magnitude that could be used to provide a useful comparison. Others talk about evacuation from their homes or resettlement in the Zone, expressing incomprehension and rootlessness clearly compounded by the end of the Soviet Union [End Page 145] five years after Chernobyl. Further, that a new identity has emerged is...

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