Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Men whose wives and children would come to share in the death, if not of life itself, but in the end of the hopes and dreams that make an ordinary existence one with some joy. Chernobyl is often remembered as a Russian incident, but 70% of the radioactivity fell upon Belarus, causing everything from the long-term poisoning of a quarter of the country’s farmland to an 64-fold increase in the rate of cancer. Ya que son entrevistas, la forma en que está escrito evidencia que no es un autor profesional a quien estás leyendo sino gente que no nació para narrar historias, que no sabe estructurar, sin gran vocabulario… Es extremadamente repetitivo, obviamente la mayoría de la gente vivió experiencias muy similares, habiendo escuchado unas cuantas ya lo escuchaste todo.

The heroism of the firemen at Chernobyl, their pride and sense of duty, was in stark contrast to the cynical incompetence of the government. Note: I took the photos in this post myself, while visiting the Chernobyl site in the summer of 2018. Not once do you forget that these are real people who experienced a physical and psychological upheaval unlike anything most of us can imagine. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.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.

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). 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. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.The bulk of the book is given over to monologues (and occasionally choruses) by people who lived near Chernobyl, worked on the cleanup, saw loved ones die from radiation, etc.