Quotes from book
Voices from Chernobyl

Name: Voices from Chernobyl
Author: Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana AlexievichOriginal title Чернобыльская молитва, Хроника будущего (Russian, 1997)

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster is a book about the Chernobyl disaster by the Belarusian Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich. At the time of the disaster , Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Alexievich interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, liquidators , politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens over a period of 10 years. 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.Chernobyl Prayer was first published in Russian in 1997 as Чернобыльская молитва; a revised, updated edition was released in 2013. The American translation was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction.The HBO television miniseries Chernobyl often relies on the memories of Pripyat locals, as told by Svetlana Alexievich in her book.

“I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, "If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You'd have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon." When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, "Is this something I should say?" I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat. But the Zone—it's a separate world, a world within the rest of the world—and it's more powerful than anything literature has to say.”

Svetlana Alexievich book Voices from Chernobyl

Source: Voices from Chernobyl (2005), pp. 239–240

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone—the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”

Svetlana Alexievich book Voices from Chernobyl

Source: Voices from Chernobyl (2005), p. 27

“Is there anything more frightening than people?”

Svetlana Alexievich book Voices from Chernobyl

Source: Voices from Chernobyl (2005), p. 60