It sometimes felt to me as if I were recording the future.Translated from Russian by Nino BekishviliĢ015 Nobel Prize winner in Literature Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian author, who writes in Russian and is widely translated and respected in numerous countries across the world. The roads going nowhere, the cables leading nowhere. The authorial presence is invisible, except when she interviews herself on the significance of the disaster: “We cannot go on believing, like characters in a Chekhov play, that in a hundred years’ time mankind will be thriving,” she says, adding, “What lingers most in my memory of Chernobyl is life afterwards: the possessions without owners, the landscapes without people. Chernobyl kills’Īlexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so – but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book.

Svetlana Alexievich: ‘Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Other volumes deal with different aspects of Russian life: from the war in Afghanistan ( Zinky Boys – the title refers to the zinc coffins dead soldiers were sent back to the motherland in) to life during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union ( Second-Hand Time, to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions next month).

Another, quoting the Bolshevik slogan “with an iron fist we shall herd the human race into happiness”, calls it “the psychology of the rapist”.Ĭhernobyl Prayer, first published in 1997 and then revised in 2013, is part of a project collectively entitled, with some irony, “Voices from Utopia”, which Alexievich has been working on since 1985. “Man is crafty only in evil, but he’s so simple and honest in his plain words of love,” says one. This is what pulls you through the book: the iterations of wisdom and bravery from its speakers. What kept me going was the strength of her love for her husband, and the child she was carrying the baby seemed to absorb the radiation meant for her as it was born dead. The description of his death from radiation poisoning – two weeks of increasing agony – was so harrowing that I wondered if I would be able to proceed. Only the voice of the witness can do the events justice, and, in Chernobyl Prayer, after some useful facts about the explosion and its aftermath (“travelling through the villages, one is struck by the overspill of the cemeteries”), we launch into the testimony of the widow of one of the firefighters called in to deal with the explosion. The scale of the devastation and its insidious nature are perhaps beyond the power of the individual mind to imagine, which is one good reason why the polyphonic form Alexievich has made her own (and for which she won the Nobel prize for literature last year) is so appropriate.

Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich