Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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If you found the recent HBO series captivating, Svetlana Alexievich's Chernobyl Prayer provided some of the source material. 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. Note: I took the photos in this post myself, while visiting the Chernobyl site in the summer of 2018. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA View image in fullscreen The ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster at the Mitino cemetery in Moscow. 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.

I think it can be safely said that for the majority of Russians, over the greater part of recorded history, to have been born in that country has not been to draw one of the winning tickets in the lottery of life. It isn't an easy read, but it feels like 'eavesdropping' on a conversation we in the West were never meant to hear. A beautifully written book, it's been years since I had to look away from a page because it was just too heart-breaking to go on. Some of the numbers are just too shocking to get your head around, but the whole time I was reading this book I had one thought: how did I not know it was this bad? This book gives a voice to the anger, pain, and heartbreak, but it is seldom an easy voice to listen to, because it forces the reader to confront how little they really know about what will one day be remembered among the most significant events of the 20th century.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 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. The book relates the psychological and personal tragedy of the Chernobyl accident, and explores the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives. 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.

The heroism of the firemen at Chernobyl, their pride and sense of duty, was in stark contrast to the cynical incompetence of the government. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. But most of the book is made up of accounts from civilians who recount their thoughts and feelings as it seemed like the world was coming to and end around them. It is almost inviduous to pick out any one part of this account, but its conclusions are laid out in the words of Valentina Timofeyevna Apanaasevich, the wife of just one of a team of workers drafted by the Soviet authorities to work in the contaminated zone.

Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Chernobyl Children International and the Clean Futures Fund are two of the charities in this effort.