Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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gittikten sonra o ölü bölgede geriye ne kaldı? Eski kabristanlar ve biyo-mezarlık olarak adlandırılan hayvan mezarları. İnsan sadece kendisini kurtardı, kendi dışındakı tüm canlılara ihanet etti.Köyler boşaltılır boşaltılmaz gruplar halinde bölgeye gelen silahlı asker ve avcılar hayvanları vurdu. Oysa o köpekler insan sesine koşuyor...Kediler de...Atlar da.... Until now, and reading Alexievich's book, the only image that was strong in my mind is of the abandoned bumper cars from the visiting fair, rotting away in a mechanical graveyard. Coro de niños...: ¡Mamita, no puedo más! ¡Es mejor que me mates! ...Los médicos han dicho que me he puesto enferma porque mi padre trabajó en Chernóbil. Y yo nací después de aquello. Yo quiero a mi padre... Nos moriremos y nos convertiremos en ciencia —decía Andréi...Nos moriremos y se olvidarán de nosotros —así pensaba Katia...Cuando me muera, no me enterréis en el cementerio; me dan miedo los cementerios, allí solo hay muertos y cuervos. Mejor me enterráis en el campo—nos pedía Oxana...—Nos moriremos —lloraba Yulia...Para mí el cielo está ahora vivo, cuando lo miro. Ellos están allí.” In a series of heartrending monologues the people of Chernobyl describe what happened to them and their families. These stories are not easy reading; they can only be read slowly, seriously and with deep sorrow.

Ma nonostante migliaia di addetti siano tuttora impiegati, è impossibile una messa in sicurezza certa e completa. Bewilderment was universal. Alexievich says she watched one officer escorting an old lady to bury her basket of eggs in the ground, both with “wild-eyed faces”; peasants were entombing their own milk and bacon, and hosing down firewood and the roofs of their wooden homes. “You couldn’t see radiation with your eyes. You couldn’t smell it. It was intangible,” she says. “Humanity was unprepared for this.”Many of the passages are almost unbearable to read like this quote from a solider on clean up duty. Overall, it's an eye-opening, honest work that's very different in approach. How do people feel, think, live, after being confronted with this terrifying catastrophe. Desperately important and impossible to put down. It is timeless and has sparked so much thought about infinity, sacrifice, love and unspeakable grief. . . what shines clear from the testimonies is love - love which can make you do the most spectacular things Sheena Patel, Observer Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster ( Russian: Чернобыльская молитва, romanized: Chernobylskaya molitva, lit.'Chernobyl Prayer'), published as Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future in the United Kingdom, is a book about the Chernobyl disaster by the Belarusian Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich. At the time of the disaster (April 1986), Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Alexievich interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, liquidators (members of the cleanup team), politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens over a period of 10 years. The book relates the psychological and personal tragedy of the Chernobyl accident, and explores the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives. [1]

A more interesting choice for the prize, however, was the previous year’s winner, Svetlana Alexievich, a Belorussian journalist. This was odd, not because she was a journalist – although it is unusual for journalists to aspire to ‘literature’ – but because hardly a line of what Alexievich writes is her own. More often, however, we are given to believe that the three men who were put on trial—and especially one of them, a particularly unattractive villain by the name of Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter)—are to blame. We see him strong-arming younger, better men into actions that will ultimately lead to catastrophe. All because, it seems, he wants a promotion. In fact, it wasn’t the carrot of a single promotion, or even several promotions, and it wasn’t one nasty and abusive boss. It was the system, made up primarily of pliant men and women, that cut its own corners, ignored its own precautions, and ultimately blew up its own nuclear reactor for no good reason except that this was how things were done. The viewer is invited to fantasize that, if not for Dyatlov, the better men would have done the right thing and the fatal flaw in the reactor, and the system itself, might have remained latent. This is a lie. We’re all—peddlers of the apocalypse. Big and small. I have these images in my mind, these pictures." 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. (Our dose started arriving on 1 May.)

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This is what pulls you through the book: the iterations of wisdom and bravery from its speakers. “Man is crafty only in evil, but he’s so simple and honest in his plain words of love,” says one. Another, quoting the Bolshevik slogan “with an iron fist we shall herd the human race into happiness”, calls it “the psychology of the rapist”. Alexievich serves no ideology, only an ideal: to listen closely enough to the ordinary voices of her time to orchestrate them into extraordinary books Philip Gourevitch, New Yorker Nei tre stati maggiormente coinvolti tra i 7 e i 9 milioni di persone vivono in territori dichiarati contaminati. In Bielorussia si registrano ogni anno diecimila nuovi invalidi per le conseguenze dell’incidente nucleare. Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster is a book about the Chernobyl disaster by the Belarusian Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich.