The Impacting "Voices from Chernobyl" by Svetlana Alexievich

Today I want to tell you some details about one of the most deserved Nobel Prizes in Literature in the recent years: Svetlana Alexievich and one of her books that impacted me a lot, "Voices from Chernobyl".

In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time". After reading some things about the author (a very discrete and private person), one has to wonder how her own experiences translate into her books. I hope to read one day her biography written by someone at least half as talented as she is!

Svetlana Alexiyevich is a Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer who writes in Russian. She has never made any public statements about her personal life, so writing any detailed note about her is very difficult. She was born 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into the family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother - Ukrainian. When the father had completed his military service, the family moved to Belarus, and settled in a village where both her parents worked as schoolteachers. Also, the father's grandfather was a rural schoolteacher, so in a way it became a family tradition. In many interviews she talks about life there as life without man: "one could hear just voices of women and their laments". She grew up hearing about death and war.

Already in her school days she wrote poetry and contributed articles to the school newspaper. After finishing school Alexiyevich worked as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl, Gomel Region. At that time she needed two years work record (as was the rule in those days) in order to enroll in the Department of Journalism of Minsk University, entering it in 1967. She studied journalism at the University of Minsk between 1967 and 1972. During her university years she won several awards at the republican and all-Union competitions for scholarly and students' papers. After her graduation, because of her oppositional views, she was sent away from Mins and referred to a local newspaper in Brest near the Polish border. At the same time, to make a living, she taught at the local school. She was torn between various career options: to continue the family tradition of school teaching, scholarly work, or journalism. But after a year she returned to Minsk and began an employment at the newspaper Rural Newspaper. For many years, she collected materials for her first book "War's Unwomanly Face", which is based on interviews with hundreds of women who participated in the Second World War. This work is the first in Alexievich's grand cycle of books, "Voices of Utopia", where life in the Soviet Union is depicted from the perspective of the individual. Several years later she took the job of a correspondent for the literary magazine Neman and was soon promoted to the head of the section for non-fiction.

She tried her voice in various genres, such as the short story, essay, and reportage. It was the famous Byelorussian writer Ales Adamovich who made a decisive influence on Svetlana's choice, particularly his books "I'm from the Fiery Village" and "The Book of the Siege". He wrote them jointly with other authors but the idea and its development was entirely his, and it was a new genre for both Byelorussian and Russian literature. Adamovich was looking for the right definition of the genre, calling it "collective novel", "novel-oratorio", "novel-evidence", "people talking about themselves", "epic chorus", to name a few of his appellations. Alexiyevich has always named Adamovich as her main teacher, who helped her to find a path of her own.

In one of her interviews she said: "I've been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So, I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world - as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher."

In 1983 she completed her book "The Unwomanly Face of the War". For two years it was sitting at a publishing house but was not published. Alexiyevich was accused of pacifism, naturalism, de-glorification of the heroic Soviet woman. Such accusations could have quite serious consequences in those days. All the more so since already after her first book I've Left My Village (monologues of people who abandoned their native parts) she has already had a reputation of a dissident journalist with anti-Soviet sentiments. On order of the Byelorussian Central Committee of the Communist Party Alexiyevich's already composed book was destroyed and she was accused of anti-Communist and anti-government views. She was threatened with losing her job. They told her: "How can you work on our magazine with such alien views? And why are you not yet a member of the Communist Party?"

Deemed unpatriotic by authorities, her early works remained unpublished until the political reformation in the mid-1980s initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalizing policy of perestroika. In 1985 The Unwomanly Face of the War came out simultaneously in Minsk and in Moscow. In subsequent years it was repeatedly reprinted; all in all more than two million copies were sold out. This novel, which the author calls "the novel-chorus", is made up of monologues of women in the war speaking about the unknown aspects of the Second World War that had never been related before. The book was hailed by the war writers as well as the public. In the same year her second book came out: "The Last Witnesses: 100 Unchildlike Stories", which has also languished unpublished for the same reasons (pacifism, failure to meet ideological standards). This book also ran into many reprints and was acclaimed by numerous critics, who called both books "a discovery in the genre of war prose". The war seen through women's and children's eyes opened up a whole new area of feelings and ideas.

The 40th anniversary of the war was marked by the theatre production of "The Unwomanly Face of the War" at the renowned Taganka Theatre (staged by Anatoly Efros.) The Omsk Drama Theatre received the State Prize for the very same production. The play based on this novel was running in many theatres around the country. A cycle of documentary films was produced on its basis. The film cycle was awarded with the State Prize, and received the Silver Dove at the Leipzig Festival of Documentary Films. Alexiyevich also received many other prizes for this work.

Published in 1989, "Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War" exposed the hidden, undocumented futility of the Soviet intervention (1979–89) in the Afghan War (1978–92) and served to demystify the role of nationalism and Soviet autonomy. The title referred to the zinc coffins used by the military to return the dead. To collect material for the book Alexievich was traveling around the country for four years to meet war victims' mothers and veterans of the Afghan war. She also visited the war zone in Afghanistan. The book was a bombshell and many people could not forgive the author for de-mythologizing the war. In the first place the military and Communist papers attacked Alexievich. In 1992, court proceedings have been opened against the author and her book in Minsk. The democratically minded public rose in defense of the book. The case was closed. Later several documentary films and plays were based on this book.

In 1993, she published "Enchanted with Death", a book about attempted suicides as a result of the downfall of their socialist mainland. They were people who felt inseparable from the socialist ideals, who were unable to accept the new order, the new country with its newly interpreted history. The book was adapted for the cinema (The Cross).

In 1997 she published "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster", the book that impacted me so mucha sa to research some more about the author. It confronted the devastating consequences of the Chernobyl disaster as told by witnesses and victims of the catastrophic nuclear power station accident. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, is a very personal matter for the author: her sister was killed and her mother was blinded by that catastrophe. After that she adopted her niece and lives with her.

Neverthless, Alexievich said that “Voices from Chernobyl” was her easiest book to write: nothing like those events had happened before, “so people had no culture to protect them.” She began researching the book almost immediately after the disaster, in 1986, so she was able to capture raw feeling on the page. “I realized you have to follow history,” she said. “This genre works for epic stories only.” Still, the events serve to get at the hidden heart of a person. “I work to create an image of time and the person who lived through it.”

For those of you who don't know much about the accident in Chernobyl, the Belaruskaya entsiklopedia oh 1996 describes it like this:

"On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58 A.M., a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technical disaster of the twentieth century. . . . For tiny Belarus (population: ten million), it was a national disaster. . . . Today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom seven hundred thousand are children. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birthrates by twenty percent." (“Chernobyl,” pg. 24).

The Soviet authorities concealed the disaster. Three days later, workers at a nuclear plant in Sweden were found to have radioactive particles on their clothing. Finding no leak at their plant, the Swedes traced the particles back to the Ukraine-Belarus border. Here, the contamination that was not carried on frisky winds around the world fell immediately on fields, forests and villages and will, allowing for two half-lives of plutonium, leave the area radioactive for 48,200 years.

In this book, Alexievich explores the terrible human cost of the catastrophe through the voices of more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, members of the cleanup team, politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens, over 10 years.

As in the rest of her Nobel Prize-winning prose, in Voices from Chernobyl, Svetlana Aleksievich uses oral history to create polyphonic reflections on an unprecedented event in Soviet history. The nature and structure of this narrative, however, stand out among Aleksievich’s other works, and resemble a continuous, collective mourning, which renders the book comparable in genre to the Slavic death lament. The analysis of Aleksievich’s Chornobyl' narrative through the lens of the Slavic death lament helps determine the text’s compositional structure, performative effects, and central imagery, demonstrating the book’s reliance on literary devices.

The narration of the catastrophe is divided into three parts: 

In the first part of the book, “Land of the Dead,” Alexievich informs the reader that nearly two million Russians and Belarusians live in on the contaminated land left in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that took place on April 26, 1986. Despite the toxic environment, the locals continue to grow crops and eat the food grown near the blast site. In the second section, “The Land of the Living,” Alexievich’s interviews deal with the harsh aftermath of the event. No one in the region was prepared for such a lingering effect, either deliberately misled about or unaware of the dangers that would follow. The people trusted their government to protect them, but widespread corruption and incompetence followed.

In the third section, “Amazed by Sadness,” Alexievich gives voice to those who feel stigmatized as a “Chernobylite.” Additional interviewees include children at the time of the blast who have since grown up, “liquidators,” soldiers responsible for extinguishing the nuclear fires, village peasants, doctors, teachers, journalists, scientists, political officials, and normal citizens.

The book begins and ends with the testimony of two widows; one the young wife of a Pripyat firefighter who went at night to fight the blaze in his shirtsleeves, the other the wife of a "liquidator", one of the 600,000 men drafted in to bury the topsoil and shoot every animal in the zone. He is the last in his platoon to die. When he can no longer speak, she asks him, "Are you sorry now that you went there?" He shakes his head no and writes for her, "When I die, sell the car, and the spare tyre, and don't marry Tolik." Tolik is his brother. She doesn't marry him.

In between these desperate griefs are stories of cynicism and surreal moments of greed and confusion. Radioactive tractors, motorbikes and fur coats smuggled from the zone have, it seems, been sold all over what was the Soviet Union. But possibly the strangest element of the disaster is the happiness it produces. Where man is no longer a predator, elk, wolves and boar return. A cameraman says, "A strange thing happened to me. I became closer to animals. And trees, and birds." 

Labeled a dissident journalist with anti-Soviet sentiments, Alexievich experienced intimidation as well as harassment: her writing was subjected to censorship or banned from publication, she was publicly denounced for “defamation” and “slander,” and her opposition to the political regime in Belarus forced her into an extended period of self-imposed exile. She has periodically lived abroad, in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden, among other places. For much of her adult life, though, she has lived in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in a nine-story concrete apartment bloc in central Minsk. Its standard-size kitchen—which is to say, quite small—is outfitted with a couch, because it’s the room where, in keeping with the Soviet intelligentsia tradition, all the important conversations happen. When Alexievich is there, her kitchen is indeed the site of many important conversations. In a 2013 interview with German television, she said she hoped the international attention would give her “a degree of protection” in Belarus, where press freedom is under constant threat.

She returned to Minsk a couple of years ago, admitting that her plan to wait out the reign of the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, had failed. This project proved too long, even for her.

Nevertheless, she persisted on her chosen path. She enlarged the scope of her creative vision with the publication in 2013 of “Secondhand Time”, which examined the legacy of communism in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union.

"If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath. An eternal dialogue of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the gulags, the Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan war hidden from the people, the downfall of the great empire, the downfall of the giant socialist land, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions - Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man."

Alexiyevich's book have been published in many countries: USA, Germany, UK, Japan, Sweden, France, China, Vietnam, Bulgaria, India -- 19 countries in all.
She has to her name 21 scripts for documentary films and three plays, which were staged in France, Germany, and Bulgaria.

Alexiyevich has been awarded with many international awards, including the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for the "Courage and Dignity in Writing" (the Swedish PEN), the Andrei Sinyavsky Prize "For the Nobility in Literature", the independent Russian prize "Triumph", the Leipzig Prize "For the European Mutual Understanding- 1998", the German prizes "For the Best Political Book" and the Herder Prize.

Alexiyevich has thus defined the main thrust of her life and her writings: "I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being, and how I can protect this humanity in a person."
These questions acquire a new implication in connection with the latest events in Beloruss where a military-socialist regime is being restored, a new post-Soviet dictatorship. And now Alexiyevich is again unwelcome to the authorities in her country because of her views and her independence. She belongs to the opposition which also includes the country's finest intellectuals.

Her books add up to a literary chronicle of the emotional history of the Soviet and post-Soviet person. She continues to develop her original genre. In each new book it is employed in a new way. One can't help recalling Lev Tolstoy's maxim to the effect that it is more interesting to follow real life than to invent it. "Many things in man still remain a riddle for art," says Alexiyevich.

For her 50th anniversary a two-volume collection of her works came out. In the introduction the critic Lev Anninsky says: "This is a unique work, which has probably been undertaken for the first time in Russian, or rather in Soviet and post-Soviet culture: the author has traced and recorded the lives of several generations of Soviet people, and the very reality of the 70 years of socialism: from the 1917 Revolution through the Civil War, the youth and hypnotism of the great utopia, Stalin's terror and the gulags, the Great Patriotic War, and the years of the downfall of the socialist mainland up to the present times. This is a living history told by the people themselves and recorded and selected by a talented and honest chronicler."

Her last published book is The Wonderful Deer of the Eternal Hunt made up of love stories. Men and women of different generations tell their personal stories. "It occurred to me that I've been writing books about how people kill one another, how they die. But this is not the whole of human life. Now I'm writing about how people love one another. And again I ask myself the same question, this time through the prism of love: who are we and what country we are living in. Love is what brings us into this world. I want to love people. Although it's increasingly hard to love them. And getting harder."

SOURCES:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2015/alexievich/facts/
http://alexievich.info/en/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/21/svetlana-alexievich-interview
https://www.dw.com/en/nobel-prize-laureate-svetlana-alexievich-at-70-reality-has-always-attracted-me-like-a-magnet/a-18768298
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/interview-svetlana-alexievich-a-melody-of-voices
https://granta.com/boys-in-zinc/