Russian-Language Responses to &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;/&Chachek;ornobyl&soft;: the Case of Svetlana Aleksievi&chachek; Jennifer J. Ryan-Tischler

The 1986 accident at the &Chachek;ernobyl&soft; nuclear power station in Ukraine brought about varied literary responses. Within months of the explosion, works appeared in the Soviet Union representing many genres, including novels, short stories, drama, lyric poetry, and even, according to Natalie Kononenko, at least one example of a duma, the traditional Ukrainian epic poem sung by a kobzar, or minstrel. Despite their range in genre, early literary responses to &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;, whether Vladimir Gubarev's play Sarkofag or Jurij &Shachek;&chachek;erbak's &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;: dokumental&soft;naja povest&soft;, shared an impulse to get to the truth of the accident, to retrace the mistakes made prior to and after April 26, 1986. In part, this impetus comes from the nature of the accident, in part, it is a general characteristic of literature of the glasnost&soft; period. For although the policy of glasnost&soft; predated the &Chachek;ernobyl&soft; accident by several months, it was only really put to the test in the aftermath of the disaster.

My paper examines a work not written during the heady days of glasnost&soft; and perestrojka, but rather one of the post-Soviet period: Svetlana Aleksievi&chachek;'s &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;skaja molitva, published in Moscow in 1997. In distinction to early literary responses to &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;, Aleksievi&chachek;'s work is less concerned with naming the heroes and villains of the accident and its immediate consequences, but rather the fate of those who are living in its aftermath. Moreover, whereas earlier works seem more oriented to the past in their attempt to put the events of the accident in their proper order and perspective, Aleksievi&chachek;'s book, despite the benefit of retrospection, appears more open-ended. In an interview in Literaturnaja gazeta the author admits, I write this book and it does not feel like I'm a chronicler of the past. It seem that I'm describing the future (Ri&shachek;ina 3). &Chachek;ernobyl&soft; after all, is not an event of past history, but one whose ramifications are still being felt.

Another issue I address in my paper is the tension between Aleksievi&chachek;'s own authority as a writer and that of her witnesses in &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;skaja molitva. While Aleksievi&chachek; presents a variety of voices in her work, interjecting her own voice only rarely, her authority can still be found in her selection of the interviews and their placement in the book. Aleksievi&chachek; discusses how the book was written: For more than three years I traveled around interviewing people who one way or another had been involved with &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;: scholars, medics, soldiers, liquidators, evacuees, farmers, children, the elderly, women &ellipsis;. The most difficult part is when it comes time to turn that chaos, that terror into an example of art, a testimonial about time and the enigma of a person as a whole (Ri&shachek;ina 3). Even in this work, which presents first-person testimonials, the author plays a crucial role in filtering the voices of others. Although eyewitness accounts can bring a certain amount of immediacy, and, it would seem, legitimacy, to the larger story, they can sometimes fall victim to the very object of witnessing, due to either the stress of the moment or the deliberate dissembling of others. James E. Young, who has studied the witness-diarists of the Holocaust, notes, But where the writing from within the whirlwind may be ontologically privileged insofar as it is empirically linked to events, it is not thereby more real or authentic if these terms denote factual veracity (Young 33).

Finally, I will examine questions of language policy and &Chachek;ernobyl&soft; literature, looking at the various reasons why certain works by Ukrainian and Belarusian writers were published first, or in some cases only, in Russian. The fact that Aleksievi&chachek;'s work appeared in Russian suggests some similarities with &Shachek;&chachek;erbak's novel, which was published first in Russian in 1987 and in his native Ukrainian only in 1988. In one interview, Aleksievi&chachek;, who grew up in Belarus and lives presently in Minsk, calls into question Belarusian nationalism, particularly in the aftermath of &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;: I'm a cosmopolitan by nature, as much as that disturbs our Belarusian nationalists &ellipsis; . I cannot say that I feel like a person of any one piece of land &ellipsis; . I don't understand at all how Belarusians can be nationalists after &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;. That's a real mystery to me (Igrunova 207–08).

Selected Bibliography

Aleksievi&chachek;, Svetlana. &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;skaja molitva. Moskva [Moscow]: Osto&zhachek;'e, 1997.

Goble, Paul A. Readers, Writers, and Republics: The Structural Basis of Non-Russian Literary Politics. The Nationalities Factor in Soviet Politics and Society. Ed. Lubomyr Hajda and Mark Beissinger. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990. 131–147.

Igrunova, Natal&soft;ja.

A potom ja napi&shachek;u o ljubvi &ellipsis; .
Interview with Svetlana Aleksievi&chachek;. Dru&zhachek;ba narodov 10 (1993): 203–208.

Kononenko, Natalie.

Duma Pro &Chachek;ornobyl&soft;: Old Genres, New Topics.
Journal of Folklore Research 29.2 (1992): 133–54.

Ony&shachek;kevy&chachek;, Larissa M. L. Zaleska. Echoes of Glasnost: Chornobyl in Soviet Ukrainian Literature. Echoes of Glasnost in Soviet Ukraine. Ed. Romana M. Bahry. North York, Canada: Captus UP, 1990. 151–170.

Rishina, Irina.

&Chachek;ernobyl&soft;skaja molitva. Mne ka&zhachek;etsja, a zapisyvaju budu&shachek;&chachek;ee &ellipsis; .
Inteview with Svetlana Aleksievi&chachek;. Literaturnaia gazeta 24 April 1996: 3.

Semicvetov, Igor&soft;.

&Zhachek;izn&soft; posle Stra&shachek;nogo suda: Svetlana Aleksievi&chachek;. &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;skaja molitva.
Ogonek. 11 February 1996. 48.

&Shachek;&chachek;erbak, Jurij. &Chachek;ernobyl&soft;: dokumental&soft;naja povest&soft;. Moscow: Sovekskij pisatel&soft;. 1988.

Young, James E. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988.