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
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
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 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 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.
Goble, Paul A.
Igrunova, Natal&soft;ja.
Kononenko, Natalie.
Ony&shachek;kevy&chachek;, Larissa M. L. Zaleska.
Rishina, Irina.
Semicvetov, Igor&soft;.
&Shachek;&chachek;erbak, Jurij.
Young, James E.