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Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The book also ends with another heartbreaking testimony, again from a widow. The long-term suffering of her husband is horrifying. The accident at Chernobyl happened in the USSR, a state not known for being open with information, and one fact most people can agree on is that the Soviet government initially tried to cover up the severity of the damage. Several of the people most closely involved – Alexander Akimov and Leonid Toptunov in particular – died in hospital a few weeks later. Others passed away in later years, and may or may not have lied or gone into a state of denial to protect themselves anyway, like Dyatlov. One of the series’ main sources, Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Chernobyl Prayer: Voices From Chernobyl, was collected ten years after the accident, and most other histories of the incident are more recent than that. Human memory is not a perfect thing, and if you ask four different people what happened yesterday you are likely to get four different answers, so after ten years, a certain level of unreliability creeps in.

A collage of oral testimony that turns into the psycho­biography of a nation not shown on any map... The book leaves radiation burns on the brain Julian Barnes, Guardian Herein lies one of the series’ biggest flaws: its failure to accurately portray Soviet relationships of power. There are exceptions, flashes of brilliance that shed light on the bizarre workings of Soviet hierarchies. In the first episode, for example, during an emergency meeting of the Pripyat ispolkom, the town’s governing council, an elder statesman, Zharkov (Donald Sumpter), delivers a chilling, and chillingly accurate, speech, urging his compatriots to “have faith.” “We seal off the city,” Zharkov says. “No one leaves. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor.” This statement has everything: the bureaucratic indirectness of Soviet speech, the privileging of “fruits of labor” over the people who created them, and, of course, the utter disregard for human life. Desperately important and impossible to put down. It is timeless and has sparked so much thought about infinity, sacrifice, love and unspeakable grief. . . what shines clear from the testimonies is love - love which can make you do the most spectacular things Sheena Patel, Observer I can’t write anything more meaningful than what the sufferers themselves have already said. Please listen to their voices: Born in 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, in modern-day Ukraine, Alexievich grew up in southern Belarus. Her parents’ village was “100-odd” kilometres away from Chernobyl. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian; for four generations her family were village schoolteachers. “My father was an important person, the director of the school. He could talk to anybody – simple or educated. He liked chess, fishing and beautiful women,” she says. I ask if her flair for happiness – it breathes through her work – comes from her childhood. “It’s the sum of our genes,” she says.Is there, I wonder, hope that Russia and Belarus might one day reform? “It’s a long journey,” she replies. “You don’t step out of the gulag and then immediately become free”. She cites Varlam Shalamov, “my favourite great writer of the 20th century”, who spent 17 years in Stalin’s camps. “He said the system perverts the perpetrators and the victims. We now have a society where the two are mixed up.” Alexievich adds that another cold war with the west has started. She says she is afraid someone more evil than Putin might emerge and take Russia to “de facto fascism”.

You’re a normal person! And then one day you’re suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone’s interested in, and that no one knows anything about. You want to be like everyone else, and now you can’t." Other witnesses recount how they were evacuated from their homes but instructed to leave behind their animals, crops and belongings. Some recall being stoic (“We survived Stalin, survived the war!”), others feared the worst. Particularly fascinating are the accounts of soldiers tasked with the clean-up operation – a job which came to include shooting pets, felling trees, catching looters and burying food, houses and sometimes whole villages. Alexievich lets the eyewitness accounts speak for themselves, with very little editorial voice. Occasionally, she clarifies the emotions or the reactions of the interviewees, but for the most part she lets them speak in their own voice. She does not preach or editorialize, and that makes the book more poignant. Mi hija cumplió seis años. Los cumplió justo el día del accidente. La acostaba y ella me susurraba al oído: «Papá, quiero vivir, aún soy muy pequeña»… Y aún quieren de nosotros que callemos… Apunte al menos que me hija se llamaba Katia...Katiuska. Y que murió a los siete años.” Una ucraniana vende en el mercado unas manzanas rojas, grandes. Y grita: « ¡Compren mis manzanas! ¡Manzanitas de Chernóbil!». Y alguien le recomienda: «Mujer, no digas que son de Chernóbil. Que nadie te las comprará». « ¡Pero qué dices! ¡Las compran y cómo! ¡Unos, para la suegra; otros, para su jefe!»”

Veías a una mujer joven sentada en un banco junto a su casa, dándole el pecho a su hijo. Comprobamos la leche del pecho: es radiactiva.”

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster needs its Maus if only because so many young people in America have never even heard of it. (I actually asked a bunch.) There’s been documentaries, novels, nonfiction accounts, and even a horror movie, but none carry the gravitas of a really important historical retelling.In another section a soldier describes killing the household pets left behind in villages that had been evacuated. The animals were radioactive and residents weren’t allowed to take them. Chernobyl is the catastrophe of the Russian mind-set… it wasn’t just the reactor that exploded, but an entire system of values." gittikten sonra o ölü bölgede geriye ne kaldı? Eski kabristanlar ve biyo-mezarlık olarak adlandırılan hayvan mezarları. İnsan sadece kendisini kurtardı, kendi dışındakı tüm canlılara ihanet etti.Köyler boşaltılır boşaltılmaz gruplar halinde bölgeye gelen silahlı asker ve avcılar hayvanları vurdu. Oysa o köpekler insan sesine koşuyor...Kediler de...Atlar da....

For War’s Unwomanly Face, Alexievich interviewed hundreds of women who had fought with the Red Army between 1941-1945. Their testimony was previously unsought. Some were mere teenagers at the time; they had served at the front as snipers, drivers and pioneers. The book, published in 1985, sold 2m copies, and made Alexievich a Soviet household name. Es imposible contar esto! ¡Es imposible escribirlo! ¡Ni siquiera soportarlo!... ¡Lo quería tanto! ¡Aún no sabía cuánto lo quería! Justo nos acabábamos de casar... Aún no nos habíamos saciado el uno del otro... Él empezó a cambiar. Cada día me encontraba con una persona diferente a la del día anterior. Las quemaduras le salían hacia fuera... El color de la cara, y el del cuerpo..., azul..., rojo..., de un gris parduzco. Y, sin embargo, todo en él era tan mío, ¡tan querido!!” The Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich spent three years interviewing people who had been involved in Chernobyl: villagers from the surrounding area, "liquidators" (members of the cleanup squad), widows and children, nuclear scientists, politicians, even people who, incredibly, had moved to Chernobyl after the accident. She presents their words almost without comment. Sometimes she adds a [Laughs]; sometimes [Stops]; sometimes [Starts crying]; sometimes [Breaks down completely]. I am not sure I have ever read anything quite as horrifying. It is like a very well written post-apocalyptic novel in many voices, and it's all true. Here are some extracts. The Swedish Academy cited Alexievich for her “polyphonic writings, monuments to suffering and courage in our time”. Why, I wonder, doesn’t non-fiction win the Nobel more often? Alexievich praises the academy for its far-sightedness and says that we live in a fast-changing reality. There are new artistic forms. “Nobody now would question that installations are art. Why shouldn’t literature change? The boundary between non-fiction and fiction is blurring.” Her conversations “go deeper” than mere reporting, she says: they are the best method of capturing our protean modern selves.After a career of meticulously recording horror, Alexievich says she can no longer face writing about conflict. “I’d find it impossible to go to a warzone. I’ve run out of reserves to protect myself from pain. I have grown tried of these atrocities,” she says. One can understand this. Second-Hand Time features terrible accounts of the inter-ethnic pogroms that accompanied the end of the USSR, in Tajikistan, Abkhazia and Baku, with murder, rape and neighbour v neighbour.

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