“The solitary human voice” as the main character of Alexievich’s books

photo by dw.de

Alexievich treats the Chernobyl disaster itself as a warning to mankind whose boundless pride and blind faith leads towards self-destruction, writes Joanna Bernatowicz.

When exploring the acclaimed Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, a good starting point is Voices from Chernobyl. This book is neither a history of the disaster, nor, given its documentary nature, a story about “ordinary people” and how they survived April 26th 1986 and the months which followed: evacuating their towns and villages, the cleanup after the disaster, and the illnesses and deaths of close relatives. Of course, all these threads are present in the book, but what Voices from Chernobyl presents is a picture of the world after the Chernobyl disaster. The image which emerges is from the stories told by the “people in whom everything is poisoned by Chernobyl”.

For these people, and for Svetlana Alexievich herself, the disaster and what came after became the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the world. For the first time the world saw nuclear energy gone awry on such a mass scale. Man was exposed to inconceivable danger: an invisible enemy soaking into the environment and the body, interfering with organs, blood, and genes, as well as – and this is what Alexievich’s book is mainly about – sweeping over the consciousness. If it is possible to sketch a portrait of the main character of the book, it would be humanity forced to face the unknown and crippling death on a cosmic scale.

The Star Wormwood

When the cursor on a map is moved south-east from Belarus towards the Chernobyl exclusion zone, it points to a clear green mark: the Polesie State Radio-Ecological Reserve. According to Sergey Kuchmel, who leads the ecological research department in the area of more than 2,162 square kilometers, the presence of several species of amphibians, reptiles and over two hundred species of birds was reported. The overview of mammals inhabiting the reserve is impressive: European bison, Przewalski's horses, lynxes, badgers, wolves and bears. So the reserve lives in the shadow of the disaster as part of the Chernobyl “laboratory of the future” (Alexievich’s subtitle, not by accident, is the Chronicle of the future). From interviews conducted by the author with people affected by the disaster, a common belief emerges: that they became guinea pigs, living flight recorders storing a record of the disaster for future generations. Two out of ten million Belarusians still live on contaminated land: “The natural laboratory ... and they come here from everywhere, from all over the world ... because they are scared of the future,” in the words of one of Alexievich’s characters.

The apocalyptic vision of Chernobyl, whose echoes are felt in monologues delivered by the characters of Voices, is unique for Belarusian literature. The perception of the disaster in Belarus was greatly affected by writer and literary scholar Ales Adamovich, whom Alexievich regards as her teacher and mentor. Towards the end of the 1980s and 90s, Adamovich became involved in helping the victims of the disaster. He was active as a journalist, undertaking social activities and writing letters to Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as appealing to the international community in his attempt to seek help for Belarus.In 2006 Adamovich published a bulky volume entitled This Star's Name is Chernobyl – a collection of journalism, letters, notes, lectures and literary works about Chernobyl. His recurrent opinions expressed on the pages of this volume are unambiguous. “We will never get out of Chernobyl. This is a new state for the planet, for humanity.” In a lecture delivered in the United States in 1990, he said: “Belarus has again been covered by the shadow of the Apocalypse … Chernobyl is still ahead of us. We are going to live and die with it for decades and even centuries.”

The title of this collection is an important archetype in Belarusian literature on Chernobyl: “The Star of Chernobyl”, often appearing in Belarusian texts (especially in poetry) as the “Star of Wormwood” which refers to the biblical apocalypse in Revelation 8:10. The etymology of the name “Chernobyl”, which in Ukrainian and Belarusian, comes from a sort of wormwood (artemisia), and in the following verses from Revelation we read: “… and there fell from heaven a great star, burning as a torch, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of the waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” The metaphor of the “Star Wormwood” took root in Belarusian culture and has been used in various anniversary memorials, exhibitions and topical lessons in schools.

Alexievich treats the Chernobyl disaster itself as a warning to mankind whose boundless pride and blind faith leads towards self-destruction. After the disaster at the Fukushima power plant in an interview for the French newspaper Liberation, Alexievich said that during her visit to Japan she met with the workers of the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant, who asked her to tell them about Chernobyl. They listened to her with polite smiles expressing sympathy. For them there was no doubt that totalitarianism and “Russia's negligence and the Soviet mentality” were to blame for the tragedy of Chernobyl.

With the shovel against the atom

The problem of explaining the causes of the Chernobyl disaster and the lie surrounding it takes up a lot of space in the narratives of Alexievich’s book. I don’t mean the immediate causes of the accident, for Chernobyl achieved the status of a symbol of the Soviet system and its operating mechanisms. The conclusions of one of the interlocutors in the book, historian Alexander Revalsky, that “Chernobyl is the catastrophe of the Russian mind-set,” resulting from the Russian man’s intense contempt, thrown into the rapid and chaotic cogs of industrialisation, are very interesting. Striking are the words of an evacuee who remembers with fondness: “We had no idea about the atom ... And we lived next to the nuclear plant, 30 kilometres as the crow flies ...You could buy a ticket and go there – they had everything, like in Moscow. Cheap salami, and always meat in the stores. Whatever you want. Those were good times!”

The monologues in which Alexievich’s characters, especially intellectuals (engineers or teachers), try to grasp the hidden meaning of the events and strive to come to terms with the past, lead to surprisingly similar conclusions. The president of the board of the Children of Chernobyl Relief Fund, Gennady Grushevoy, says that Soviet socialism was a cross between a kindergarten and a prison, it offered its citizens a childish and simplified view of the world: “You gave it your soul, your conscience, your heart and you got a food ration card in return.” It is only in this context that you can understand the problem of war and heroism, which is actually the main topic of Alexievich’s writing. From the first days after the disclosure of the disaster, the recovery process in Chernobyl was accompanied by war rhetoric. Here begins the “heroic fight with the reactor,” and the landscape turns into a battlefield.

One of the recovery workers, whose account was recorded by Alexievich, wonders: “We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? Space?” Troops with automatic weapons and heavy military equipment were sent to Chernobyl. There were rumours about spies, saboteurs or an American conspiracy. Disinformation reached its peak. Journalists, and only a few of them were let in, were closely monitored, and the Soviet obsession with military secrets, or covering up and withholding information, eventually turned into one unimaginable lie. As one of them admits, “Everyone here talks about spies and saboteurs, and nobody says a word about iodine protection. Any unofficial piece of information is regarded as foreign ideology.”

In the interview for Liberation mentioned above, Alexievich formulates a controversial theory that in the case of Chernobyl, totalitarianism “saved the world”. The writer claims that, “If it weren’t for the totalitarian state, the disaster would have covered the world. Therewouldn’t have been considerable human resources and an army of recovery workers. Ukraine, independent of Belarus and Russia, wouldn’t have been able to handle the situation. And people ready to work with their bare hands were already gone.”

Totalitarianism, as a beneficial factor, means unlimited possibilities of making use of “resources” – that is, when a human life is worth nothing, when you can dispatch soldiers from Afghanistan to Chernobyl, and miners from Tula, when people volunteer because they dream of heroic deeds, when people can be changed into “bionic robots”. In this heroic frenzy there are two features that paradoxically stand out: courage and reason. When an engineer, despite the bugged phone, calls his friends about instructions on the necessary preventive measures, and a doctor tells people the truth.

Children of a great illusion

Soviet totalitarianism glorified war. Alexievich repeatedly emphasises, in public statements on her own writings and in the words of her characters, that the Soviet man lived in constant readiness, always prepared for war; he sensed it and he was eager to fight. This state of readiness, eagerness and zeal can often be traced in the words uttered by the women in Alexievich’s book War’s Unwomanly Face. Of course, this can be treated as evidence of the power and effectiveness of the regime propaganda. But behind it there is another diagnosis that Alexievich puts forward in an interview: “They taught us how to die.”

Until the mid-1980s, the war’s patriotic ritual stuck firmly in ceremonies was part of the Soviet canon. Alexievich writes that the Gorbachev era reveals the painful cracks, when the Russian mythology crumbled and broke apart. In the introduction to her book Enchanted with Death, about the people who committed suicide after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the writer desperately seeks to answer the question: “Who are the survivors: children of the great illusion or victims of a widespread mental illness?” One thing is certain – they are people unlike any other, with their own language, world of ideas and values.

The toughest blow to the shell of Soviet heroism came with the book Zinky Boys on the Soviet Afghanistan War. It is a collection of monologues delivered by soldiers fighting in this war, their mothers and wives who received the infamous “Cargo 200” (dead bodies transported in metal containers) in zinc coffins. In 1993 the characters of the book themselves filed a lawsuit against Alexievich in Minsk. They were shocked and outraged that their testimonies had not been processed to match the current vision of heroism. People who are used to the fact that writers process the truth in order to serve the current ideology expected a pompous picture of the war in Afghanistan. The unadorned material of the brutally honest accounts given without self-censorship surprised even the characters themselves.

In her war reports and discussions, Alexievich uncovered the uncomfortable truth that the war often had a devastating impact on the lives of the people who rushed onto the battlefield. At that time in the Soviet Union, no one had ever heard of post-traumatic stress disorder, and people returning from the war continued to suffer nightmares, struggling with illness, mental disorders and other severe effects of war trauma for the rest of their lives.

As it turns out, the best antidote and means of overcoming the dead language of pathos was recording the accounts of an individual. As Alexievich puts it in her book War’s Unwomanly Face, when confronted with the story of an individual: “The chemical reaction occurred instantly: the pathos dissolved in the living tissue of a human’s fate and it proved to be the most soluble substance.” Soviet heroism, when stripped of its pretension exposes a different face – it becomes the story of victims, sacrifice and martyrdom. And no wonder that in the voices of the characters talking about wars, suicides and Chernobyl, you can often spot a tone of biblical lament.

Dear Mr President

Soon after Alexievich’s books were first published, English and French translations appeared. According to the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Alexievich became one of the most published foreign authors in Germany and Japan. The French edition of Voices amounted to nearly 200,000 copies. In 2005 the American edition of this book was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. In an interview for Rossiyskaya Gazeta in 2006, Alexievich says that as many as five hundred people came to meet her when she visited the US. Surprisingly, Alexievich has become widely known in Poland only recently, and gained increasing popularity with the Polish edition of the book War’s Unwomanly Face, for which she received the Angelus Central European Literature Awardin 2011.

The labels “Central European” or “dissident” don’t work in the case of Alexievich. Firstly, she firmly places herself in the context of Russian culture and civilisation. Her opinions about Belarus are markedly different from those expressed by the majority of the opposition-oriented intelligentsia. In conversations with journalists, Alexievich often repeats that “without Russian culture we will always be backward.” In an interview for Voice of America shepoints out that Belarusians prefer to look towards the East, as the West is too distant and incomprehensible, and that “democracy or human rights are like the Chinese alphabet.” She also cherishes no illusions about the Belarusian language, for which she sees no future in the fierce competition between Belarusian and the use of Russian in Belarus.

Alexievich was indeed harshly criticised for such views. In the socio-political Belarusian magazine ARCHE, in an interesting article about the “myth”, Aliaksandra Andryjeuskaja accuses Alexievich of “recklessly discrediting the Belarusian national idea in her interviews”. Andryjeuskaja tears Alexievich to shreds, stating that her work is deeply influenced by Russian messianism, which is an “emotional imbalance, an unhealthy interest in pain and suffering, apathy, a hostile attitude towards the other, a belief in the absolute truth and flaunting simplicity and modesty”. The conclusion of the article is that Alexievich is a “phantom of the glasnost and perestroika era.”

In an open letter to President Alyaksandr Lukashenka written a few days after the 2010 elections, Alexievich writes: “I've never been your follower, but I do not believe in revolution either.” From her standpoint, the greatest tragedy of the country was deep internal divisions, the lack of free and open public debate. After the bloody suppression of the demonstrations on December 19th 2010, Alexievich saw two crying mothers in a hospital who were, “tormented by the life of a rural woman”. One woman’s son was a policeman, the other’s, a dissident. It seems that Alexievich’s literary sensitivity consists of her ability to see and feel sorry for both women.

Alexievich is not afraid to admit that the model of Belarus socialism proposed by Lukashenka works well, and makes people, including its opponents, reflect on this phenomenon. She speaks of the president’s success in a level-headed way: “If someone created Belarus, it is, unfortunately, not us, not the national intelligentsia. Unfortunately, it is Lukashenka.” Similarly to another Belarusian intellectual, Valiantsin Akudovich, Alexievich talks about the alienation of the intelligentsia, the inability to speak the same language, the wall of misunderstanding which separates it from the people.

Soviet Union with a plus

Can Alexievich be called a spectre of the perestroika epoch? Back then, in the last few years of the decaying empire, the conditions for writing the true story of “the soul of the Russian-Soviet man” were particularly favourable. The documentary genre that Alexievich had decided on can be compared to a seismograph carefully recording all the vibrations in the era of the great breakthrough. The inspiration is owed to Ales Adamovich. It was on his own initiative in the early 1970s that the documentary genre labelled “testimony in prose” came into being. Within four years, along with two other Belarusian writers, Adamovich went around Belarus looking for people who had been miraculously rescued from the ruins of villages razed to the ground, and wrote down their stories. It resulted in the book Out of the Fire, which the authors themselves call “a documentary tragedy, evoking the memory and living voices of the people”.

Alexievich has improved the method of her mentor. The main character of her books is “the solitary human voice”. It rings out as if it had emerged from darkness, like a voice in the confessional, flowing out of the depths of the human conscience, a silent prayer or a cry of despair which turns into a whisper. Alexievich still uncompromisingly puts the plus sign next to the Soviet man, who is naive like a child trapped in a system which is a cross between a kindergarten, a prison and a giant laboratory. After all, he has become an involuntary participant in the “field research of the communist ideas” experiment, as Alexievich puts it. Letting her characters speak, Alexievich records only the common, human and the banality of evil.

The review was originally published at New Eastern Europe