In the United Kingdom, her best-known book, which inspired the award-winning HBO mini-series Chernobyl, is sold under the title Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future. Even the simple label of “writer,” however, seems a poor fit for what Alexievich does, since her work is not writing in the traditional sense (though one would be hard-pressed to claim that it is anything but).
Her admirers variously call Alexievich a journalist, an essayist, an oral storyteller, a memorialist, a purveyor of “polyphonies,” and a portraitist. Those whose lives she documents seem to come out of nowhere and to speak into the void. Similarly, if we sometimes come to suspect that she must dictate the flow of the conversation, asking productively open-ended questions, her texts are silent about how or when she might do this, recording only the answers that are spoken back to her. But we only become aware of this behind the scenes maneuvering in her interviewees’ rare outbursts, which she faithfully records alongside their tics and mannerisms. At times, she seems to nudge her interlocutors, provoking them, asking them questions or contradicting them. Rather, in the literary equivalent of collage, Alexievich writes by arranging others’ words. Hardly ever does she allow her authorial voice to make itself heard. Hardly any of the words in the books that bear her name are her own. It is difficult to explain what makes Svetlana Alexievich’s work so moving. As one says, you did not die on the battlefield, only later when you got home. (Some residents thought world war had broken out.) But the soldiers were fighting a war against an invisible enemy. When the army arrived, the place looked like a war zone.
The men were oblivious to their lack of protection, which even if it had been available would not have saved them. The heroism of the firemen at Chernobyl, their pride and sense of duty, was in stark contrast to the cynical incompetence of the government. Reviewed by Christian Tyler in Slightly Foxed Issue 60. Chernobyl Prayer is a chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future. Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors, crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come, while officials tried to hush up the accident. In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
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