Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

£4.995
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Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Other volumes deal with different aspects of Russian life: from the war in Afghanistan ( Zinky Boys – the title refers to the zinc coffins dead soldiers were sent back to the motherland in) to life during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union ( Second-Hand Time, to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions next month). 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.

What complicates the story is that Lyudmila is pregnant with their first child, and she knows that being with her husband will damage both herself and the baby. The death toll is highly contested, but when we include indirect deaths from conditions associated with radiation exposure and the resulting hereditary genetic defects, it is possible the number is in the tens of thousands, and still rising. For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels.

The HBO television miniseries Chernobyl often relies on the memories of Pripyat locals, as told by Svetlana Alexievich in her book. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) , Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013).

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. It is timeless and has sparked so much thought about infinity, sacrifice, love and unspeakable grief. The heroism of the firemen at Chernobyl, their pride and sense of duty, was in stark contrast to the cynical incompetence of the government.

It begins with the story of the young, pregnant wife of one of the first fire fighters, who responded to the fire at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and of his slow, untimely death. Note: I took the photos in this post myself, while visiting the Chernobyl site in the summer of 2018. The description of his death from radiation poisoning – two weeks of increasing agony – was so harrowing that I wondered if I would be able to proceed. Chernobyl Prayer is an oral history compiled by Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich from several years of interviews that she conducted among the people who experienced the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant firsthand. In this chapter, Svetlana Alexievich makes it clear that this is not a book about the details of what happened at Chernobyl, why the reactor failed, who was to blame, etc.



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