There are those who know how to listen to others, and not only to themselves—so far as that is possible. Perhaps such people are more permeable to the world and, paradoxically, stronger, unafraid of dissolution within the discourse of those they hear. Those who listen well are often able to say more when they speak. They acquire resources to overcome the homogenization of discourse. They engage in an unceasing process of literacy, learning to apprehend diversity within what may deceptively appear identical. These are individuals who are not easily frightened. They can tolerate paradoxes without resorting to the easy maneuver of annulment. They may even look upon human beings as the bearers, perpetrators, and victims—simultaneously—of the contradiction between Good and Evil.
Such are arduous tasks, ones that Svetlana Alexievich (Ukraine, 1948), recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, undertakes with brilliance. She demonstrates both courage and talent in writing about harsh subjects while preserving a certain kind of beauty. Her book Voices from Chernobyl is constructed from brief testimonies of people who, in different ways, were affected by the tragedy of the explosion of a reactor at the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in April 1986. The plant had been built in a bucolic region, surrounded by villages whose inhabitants had little notion of what an atom or radioactivity meant.
With poetic ears, Alexievich captures astonishment, bewilderment, and other feelings in the face of an invisible danger of immense magnitude. She gathers testimonies from peasants living in the surrounding areas, from technicians, and from laypeople who worked—almost blindly—to try to contain the damage caused by the accident. Relatively simple people, who acted like soldiers in a war, automatically obeying orders from “superiors” who, from the outset, were aware of the dimensions of the catastrophe’s destructiveness. There are moving accounts from relatives of the victims concerning the mission of fulfilling a civic duty by working at the site of the disaster.
At that same time, the Soviet Union was already undergoing the processes that would lead to the profound transformations collectively known as Perestroika and Glasnost. These changes would ultimately contribute decisively to the collapse of the world in which the heterogeneous populations of the Union’s constituent republics had lived enclosed. Since the revolution of 1917, first Russia and later the annexed countries had been gradually isolated from the rest of the planet, a process intensified with the rise of Joseph Stalin. Individuals were progressively reduced to the status of cogs in a machine. They were “corrected” or molded to better serve the determinations of Communist Party leaders who supposedly sought the common good.
It was painful for the people to cease being a people and become a mass. Submission was enforced through the creation of illusions projected into the future and through the cultivation of fear in its many guises, which almost completely annulled individual autonomy of thought and action. With Perestroika, Glasnost, and the dissolution of the USSR, shocking facts became speakable and visible. They caused perplexity and indignation, as people began to realize the deception and barbarity to which they had been subjected. Something akin to a “rebirth of the individual” seems to have occurred, with the dawning awareness of the terrifying aspects of a project clothed in such noble garments.
Devotion to the State and its leaders gradually gave way to reflections on what was truly just or unjust toward the human being, whether in singularity or in collectivity. Undeniable information emerged about the Gulags and the slow deaths of regime opponents by hunger and cold in Siberia; about the Holodomor; about mass executions such as those in the Kuropaty forest, largely instigated by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs); about maneuvers designed to sever interpersonal bonds, redirecting loyalties exclusively toward the State, and more.
The intersection between the lived experience of the atomic accident and the shattering of illusions tied to the meaning of the USSR’s existence, in the face of such harsh revelations, produced in people the sensation of living a tragedy in which it was no longer clear where the greater evil had originated. What was worse: the reproduction of atavistic violence in humanity’s attempt to dominate itself, or the calamity born of the loss of control over a technology developed to benefit life, but ultimately transmuted into a sentence of illness and death?
In collecting these testimonies, the writer does not fail to observe the most universal aspects of human nature which, despite local peculiarities and apparent circumstantiality, are also potentially present in the reader. Despite geographical, temporal, or contextual distance, the value of life is examined from more than one perspective. In sum, there is much to behold in this compelling book, which fuses the narrative aesthetics of fine literary fiction with the realist impact of outstanding journalism.
Title: Voices from Chernobyl
Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Translator: Sônia Branco
Publisher: Companhia das Letras
Estante do Justo 