Review of Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

*Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster,* translated by Svetlana Alexievich (2006). Published by Picador.

I’ve been meaning to read Voices from Chernobyl for the longest time. It was one of those books that i knew about through a book YouTuber whose recommendations often aligned with mine in general. I’ve learned how to curate what kind of social media when it comes to books lately, as I find the generic TikTok books aren’t up my alley.

Anyways, I heard about it through this YouTuber and then just never read the book for a while. I kept looking it up at my local library, but then they never got a copy of the book in, and for some reason I never thought to request it through their library services.

So one day I ended up asking my mother for it for Christmas, and then I had a shiny brand new copy of the book in my stocking that Christmas.

As I wrote my master’s thesis, which one can argue was on an equally depressing piece of world history, I picked up my copy of the book to distract me from colonial Korea and all of those forms of suffering.

Here’s my review! I don’t want to ramble too long in the introduction.

Oral histories from those impacted firsthand by the Chernobyl disaster.

So this is a book of nonfiction, which I would imagine you would know if you picked it up. If not, no worries, you’re going to probably think all of this is fiction from the sheer amount of horror that’s going to be depicted in it.

We lay the scene with people all from the surrounding villagers. There are the wives of firefighters, random villagers who were displaced from their ancestral homes, and even those who went in and had to kill all of the animals within the Chernobyl zone.

The Chernobyl disaster was incredibly horrific not only environmentally, but because of what happened to the people involved with it. Early on in the compilation of stories, we hear from one of the wives of a man who ended up working there. He, along with his coworkers, were mysteriously taken out of the area after the insane amount of exposure.

Taken into Russia, she followed him to the hospital, where he basically slowly began rotting because of the amount of radiation he had been exposed to. I won’t go into detail in this blog post, but there are some impacts of radiation that basically makes you fall apart, with your teeth and hair falling out.

They weren’t told what was going on, so they thought he was just dying. She even went into his hospital room and would be more intimate with him, and when he died, she realized after her child was born what had happened.

The kid, like so many others who were born to those impacted by Chernobyl, had a plethora of defects and was not expected to live long. Many did not even make it out of the womb.

We hear these threads throughout the rest of the stories, which are organized by themes. It’s like a chorus of people in each chapter, and we switch from narrative to narrative, with them most likely edited to fit the space limits. People do have a tendency to ramble.

That said, the most disturbing to me was when we got to the animals. Because the household pets were exposed to radiation, they were ordered to leave them behind. Soldiers and hunters would then try to shoot any animal they could come across, as they had to keep them contained within the zone.

Overall Thoughts

I have to say, there were a lot of moments during this book where I had to set it down and just contemplate life. As I said before, this was pretty horrifying to read beyond the animals and environmental impacts.

I’d never really had the chance to dive deeper into the Chernobyl incident, and I think this was a great jumping point to learn more about how and why it happened.

If you’re willing and can handle this kind of material, I highly suggest picking up a copy in which ever format you prefer. As someone who works with oral histories in general, I find this methodology critical in today’s world, which is how I could further appreciate the book.

We often don’t get translations from the Russian or Ukrainian languages here in the US, so I scramble to get ahold of these books whenever possible!

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