The people of Chernobyl: a community of loss in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Chernobyl Prayer

Abstract

Svetlana Aleksievich conducted hundreds of interviews with those affected by the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine and her native Belarus and assembled them in her 1997 novel Chernobyl Prayer. A Chronicle of the Future. Aleksievich, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, created a complex, polyphonic blend of oral history and literature and provided a fragmentated and diverse narrative of memory, trauma, and victimhood. The article examines Aleksievich’s rendition of the ways in which “the people of Chernobyl” convey their own understanding of this identity. The many voices of Aleksievich’s novel coalesce to speak for what Serguei Oushakine calls a community of loss. The article traces the articulation of their identity: from the frustrated search for appropriate discursive tools and points of reference, to the explicit sense of having formed a unique social entity, a community. This transition is also a progression, through the process of articulation and analysis, from a negative identity, defined by loss and a radical change in status, to one enhanced by philosophical and environmental awareness. This is also a shift from the mainstream Soviet worldview and identity to other more complex, albeit less comforting perspectives.