Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

It isn't an easy read, but it feels like 'eavesdropping' on a conversation we in the West were never meant to hear. 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.

So she stays by his side, and she helps him through the fortnight it takes him to die, as his skin starts peeling off and all his colleagues die one by one. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. There are insights, too, from atomic scientists who begged the authorities to evacuate people and from a former official who explains the institutional reasons for their inertia.But Svetlana Alexievich doesn’t intrude with facts and analysis—she lets Lyudmila Ignatenko give the full, uninterrupted account of her husband’s slow and painful death from radiation poisoning. What kept me going was the strength of her love for her husband, and the child she was carrying; the baby seemed to absorb the radiation meant for her as it was born dead. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own, distinctive non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. The HBO television miniseries Chernobyl often relies on the memories of Pripyat locals, as told by Svetlana Alexievich in her book. 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.

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. Many of the over 500 interviewees were scientists or engineers who give clear, thoughtful, insightful explanations of what went wrong and why so many of the mitigation efforts were futile. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA View image in fullscreen The ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster at the Mitino cemetery in Moscow.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. Note: this book is also published under the title Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. 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. At which point, when you consider the extent to which she has been traversing the irradiated landscape, you realise she has put herself on the line in a way very few authors ever do.

If you cannot weep for hers, and the other voices here, then you have lost your connection with what it is to be human.A true history of its people need be no more than the howls of despair of millions of voices, punctuated by moments of incredible tenderness, courage and grim humour. 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). 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.

Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) , Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster ( Russian: Чернобыльская молитва, romanized: Chernobylskaya molitva, lit. Alexievich assembles the previously silenced or unsung heroes into a chorus that has the power to move, stun and inspire awe. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget.