Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Stories like this are, of course, hard to read, but Chernobyl Prayer is not just a compilation of horror. 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.

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. There is a depth and intensity to the suffering of those people affected by the Chernobyl disaster which Svetlana Alexievich has succeeded in capturing through her interviews. She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time. Chernobyl Children International and the Clean Futures Fund are two of the charities in this effort. I think it can be safely said that for the majority of Russians, over the greater part of recorded history, to have been born in that country has not been to draw one of the winning tickets in the lottery of life.The death toll is highly contested, but when we include indirect deaths from conditions associated with radiation exposure and the resulting hereditary genetic defects, it is possible the number is in the tens of thousands, and still rising.

A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget.Like many others, he fought a nuclear disaster with no protective gear at all (it becomes clear elsewhere in the book that these first responders quite literally saved Europe—if the fire had spread to the other three reactors, the consequences would have been much worse). You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) , Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013).