Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist, and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich was born in 1948 in western Ukraine to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother. Voices from Chernobyl is one of six works of “documentary literature” she has published. In these works, she uses personal testimony to craft oral histories. In addition to the Chernobyl disaster, they include books on women in World War II, the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989), and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Each book is based on interviews with 500 to 700 individuals. On her website, she describes her hybrid literary-documentary genre:

I don’t just record a dry history of events and facts, I’m writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced. This is impossible to imagine or invent, at any rate in such multitude of real details. We quickly forget what we were like ten or twenty or fifty years ago. Sometimes we are ashamed of our past and refuse to believe in what happened to us in actual fact. Art may lie but document never does (Alexievich, Svetlana. “A Search for Eternal Man: In Lieu of a Biography.