Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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What complicates the story is that Lyudmila is pregnant with their first child, and she knows that being with her husband will damage both herself and the baby. Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so – but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book.

You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Interviews with teachers, hunters, soldiers, clean-up workers, medics, a cameraman, a physicist and children provide diverse experiences from the days immediately following the disaster to the months and even years later when people were still getting sick. The book is a collation of testimonies from Chernobyl survivors, their loved ones, as well as professionals and other individuals affected by the disaster, personally or professionally. 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).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. One man actually reclaimed his front door – which his family had always laid the bodies of their dead relatives – snatching it in the night and taking it, like a thief, through the woods. The American translation was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction.

Stories like this are, of course, hard to read, but Chernobyl Prayer is not just a compilation of horror. What stands out from Chernobyl Prayer are the personal stories, the “missing history” of ordinary people and the wide variety of ways in which they see and experience and think about the same event. On 26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, exploded and released 50m curies of radiation into the atmosphere, 70% of it falling on Belarus, but with plenty to spare for other countries not even vaguely adjacent. Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe.In Chernobyl Prayer each interview is usually a few pages long, and reads as a monologue – which is how they are described in the contents pages. Alexievich was not interested in conventional responses, the kind of thing people say to journalists when they are shy, afraid of controversy or anxious to please.