Voices from Chernobyl
by Svetlana Alexievich
Summary
Alexievich spent years interviewing the people the Chernobyl disaster happened to, and then removed herself from the result. What remains is a book of monologues: firefighters' widows, evacuated villagers, soldiers sent to shoot abandoned pets, scientists who knew and officials who did not want to, children explaining what they have understood.
She opens with the account that most readers never forget, given by a woman whose husband was among the first firefighters at the reactor, describing what happened to his body over the following two weeks and what she did about it. Nothing after that is an anticlimax, because Alexievich has arranged the voices so carefully.
There is no narrator, no framing argument and almost no explanation of the physics. She has said she is writing a history of feelings rather than of events, and the method means the reader is never told what to conclude and cannot avoid concluding something.
It is short and it is very hard to read continuously. Most people manage it in pieces over a week. What it does better than any account of the disaster is convey the specific horror of an invisible catastrophe: people cannot see it, cannot smell it, are told it is fine, and go on eating the food and digging the gardens. It is one of the essential books of the last century and it asks a great deal of whoever picks it up. Read it because it is the closest anyone has come to recording what a nuclear accident does to ordinary lives, and not because you expect to enjoy it.
Historical Context & Significance
Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, for her polyphonic writings, described by the Academy as a monument to suffering and courage in our time. The prize was for her whole body of work rather than for this book, though Voices from Chernobyl is the volume most readers reach first.
The Academy's own note on her work singled out her method, calling it a carefully composed collage of human voices by which she deepens our comprehension of an entire era. It was an unusual award in that Alexievich is a journalist by training and her books are built from other people's speech, and the choice was read at the time as an argument about what counts as literature.
She is Belarusian and has written a sequence of oral histories covering the Soviet century, including accounts of the Second World War, Afghanistan and the collapse of the Union. This book also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.