While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. Chernobyl Children International and the Clean Futures Fund are two of the charities in this effort. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster ( Russian: Чернобыльская молитва, romanized: Chernobylskaya molitva, lit. This masterly new translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait retains the nerve and pulse of the Russian, conveying the angst and confusion of the narrators -- Serguei Alex.

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. Men whose wives and children would come to share in the death, if not of life itself, but in the end of the hopes and dreams that make an ordinary existence one with some joy. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I don’t think I’ve ever come away from a single book with such a comprehensive understanding of a historical moment, as seen through the eyes of the people who experienced it. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. Alexievich assembles the previously silenced or unsung heroes into a chorus that has the power to move, stun and inspire awe. If you found the recent HBO series captivating, Svetlana Alexievich's Chernobyl Prayer provided some of the source material. In Chernobyl Prayer each interview is usually a few pages long, and reads as a monologue – which is how they are described in the contents pages. It is a catalogue of trauma – of lives which were disturbed by events so cataclysmic that the effects rippled around the whole planet.

I hope you get to Chernobyl Prayer more quickly than I’ve got to The World Without Us – it really is a wonderful book. She talked with residents of the surrounding villages, soldiers recruited to help with the cleanup efforts, politicians, academics, nuclear scientists, farmers, teachers, widows, and children in hospital wards, and what she accomplishes within this fairly slim volume is quite remarkable.The scale of the devastation and its insidious nature are perhaps beyond the power of the individual mind to imagine, which is one good reason why the polyphonic form Alexievich has made her own (and for which she won the Nobel prize for literature last year) is so appropriate. Chernobyl Prayer was first published in Russian in 1997; a revised, updated edition was released in 2013.