"Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth."
On the morning of April 26, 1986 an ill-conceived
maintenance test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine set off a
disastrous chain reaction in the core of Reactor No. 4. The uranium fuel rods
were ruptured and a steam explosion blew the roof off the reactor, chucking
uranium and graphite into air. As a result more than 50 tons of radioactive
particles were released into the atmosphere, first blanketing the nearby city
of Pripyat. In the next few days the radioactive cloud drifted over Europe and
eventually it appeared in every corner of the world. What was more harrowing
about the Chernobyl disaster was the response from Soviet regime: total silence
and concealment. It was only when the Swedish nuclear plant and monitoring
stations across Scandinavia reported abnormally higher levels of radioactive
particles, which were traced back to Ukraine-Belarus border that the calamitous
nature of the Chernobyl mishap was known to the world. Moreover, only three
days after the explosion, Soviet news agency TASS issued a brief statement
acknowledging the accident at the nuclear plant.
Scientists, journalists, environmentalists and activists who
have closely followed the Chernobyl disaster and its survivors don’t see it as
an event like the unprecedented floods or planned terrorist attacks. The scale
of devastation in Chernobyl isn’t limited by time. It could be understood when
you learn that the Cesium in the soil around the Zone [a forbidden 30-kilometer
landscape close to the nuclear power plant] and beyond will be reduced by half
in 180 to 320 years. Subsequently, it was predicted that the contaminated area
would become totally habitable for humans in 20,000 years. Belarus received
70 per cent of the fallout of iodine, cesium, strontium and plutonium radionuclides.
Meanwhile, the people clinging to the
land in and around Chernobyl are putting up a tough fight with their long-term
toll.
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| Svetlana Alexievich |
There has been lot of detailed and definitive version of the
explosion and its aftermath in Chernobyl. Novels have been written by mythologizing
the event. But no other work about Chernobyl in literary circle gained as much
attention as Belarusian writer/journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a
Nuclear Disaster (published in 1997, the English translation by Keith Gesson
was released in 2005). Svetlana Alexievich, who won Nobel Prize for Literature
in 2015, was best known for recording history by collecting stories from
ordinary people. Her literary method gets as close as possible to carry actual
human voices and confessions, worn down by suffering and oppression. The chorus
of individual voices exhibited by Alexievich creates a kind of strong cumulative
effect which allows us to glimpse into the profound agony of an alienated
society, unlike any reiteration of fact and evidences. “I often thought that
the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague
feeling, rumor, and vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings.
The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the
facts, is what fascinates me. I try to find them, collect them, and protect
them”, writes the author whose literary method forges a bond between survivor
and reader.
‘Voices from Chernobyl’ is divided into three parts, each
part consisting of multiple monologues [which are actually transcribed
interviews between the author and individuals whose life are irreparably
changed/damaged by the Chernobyl disaster]. Alexievich’s book starts and ends
with an unsettling testimony of two widows. One was the young wife of a
firefighter who went to the nuclear plant to put off the fire at the
reactor. The other is the wife of a liquidator (one of the 600,000 men drafted in
to do the dangerous task of burying the topsoil and to kill every animal in the
zone). The fate of firefighter particularly disturbed me, especially when his
wife (Lyudmilla Ignatenko) says, “I pick him up, and
there are pieces of his skin on my hand, they stick to my hands……I clipped my
nails down till they bled so I wouldn’t accidentally cut him” (the man got
1,600 roentgen -- unit of radiation exposure – when 400 roentgen
is considered a lethal dose; even the burial site of the firefighters at a
Moscow cemetery remained radioactive).
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| Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Reactor 4) |
Other monologues describe the incompetence
and corruption of Party Bureaucrats, the denying plus distracting tactics of
Kremlin, the heroism and subsequent torment of unsuspecting soldiers,
liquidators, scientists, etc. The voices of ordinary citizens-turned-survivors explore
the terrible human cost of the catastrophe. What Alexievich’s expertly
collected monologues avoid is the gaze of a tourist. She avoids taking
advantage of Chernobyl myth to give us tall tales of gallantry and villainy. The
monologues even include people, who are skeptical of the written word to
describe Chernobyl [“There’s nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer’s
pen”, says a cynical liquidator]. In between the monologues of grief and death,
Alexievich also captures certain perspectives that are too shocking so as to
generate a surreal feeling. For example, the bikes, tractors and household
objects smuggled out of zone, the liquidators working on top of the reactor for
hours to clear the graphite, the testimony of a man who has killed many animals,
but only remembers burying a poodle alive since his whole group lacked a bullet.
Most outlandish was the belief carried by clean-up crews that vodka offers some defense against radiation. While many survivors convey the devastation of the
accident caused on next generation of children (from leukemia to all sorts of
birth defects), some observe how the place still managed to be ordinary [“The
men drank vodka. They played cards, tried to get girls”]. Amidst the
distressing tales of loss also remain little spots of dark humor: for example,
a scientist reminisces on the disaster like this: “the era of physics ended at
Chernobyl”, or when presenting the death-bed conversation between a wife and
her ailing husband: “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.”
Chernobyl is full of inscrutable extremes and unknowns. In
general perspective, it not only evokes tragedy, but also generates a kind of
awe or morbid fascination. Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl invokes
the deep pain and complexity, pertaining to the man-made catastrophe without
harboring a hint of misguided enthrallment. The expression of these people,
burdened with intolerable hardships, may be fragmented and lack the strong
literary cadence. Yet it resonates with truth and pain which inundates our eyes
with tears and plagues our mind with questions.
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