Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich

Author:Svetlana Alexievich [Alexievich, Svetlana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241270547
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Monologue on our having long ago come down from the trees but not yet having come up with a way of making them grow into wheels

‘Do sit down. A bit closer. But I’ll be perfectly frank, I don’t like journalists, and they give me a hard time.’

‘Really? Why is that?’

‘Haven’t you heard? Nobody got round to warning you? That explains why you’re here, in my office. I am deeply suspect. That seems to be the consensus among your journalist colleagues. Everybody is shouting that it’s not possible to live on that land, but I say it is. We need to learn how to live on it. We need to have courage. Should we seal off the contaminated area, put barbed wire round a third of our republic, abandon it, run away? After all, there’s plenty more land in Russia. No! On the one hand, our civilization is antibiological. Nature’s worst enemy may be man but, on the other, he is a creator. He can transform the world. You’ve only to look at the Eiffel Tower, or a spacecraft. But progress calls for sacrifices, and the more we progress, the more victims it calls for. No less than war. That’s clear now.

‘Pollution of the atmosphere, contamination of the soil, holes in the ozone layer … The earth’s climate is changing. We’re horrified, but we can’t blame knowledge as such – or consider it a crime. Who is to blame for Chernobyl, the reactor or man? There are no two ways about it: man. He serviced it incompetently. There were outrageous errors, and the disaster was the sum of those errors. We won’t delve into technical matters, but it’s a fact. That’s the conclusion reached by hundreds of commissions and experts. The largest man-made disaster in history. Our losses have been astronomical. The material losses we can more or less calculate, but what about the non-material damage? Chernobyl has blighted our imagination, our future. We are running scared of the future. But if that’s the best we can manage, why did we bother coming down from the trees? Or perhaps we should have come up with a way of making them grow into wheels by themselves and cut out the middleman? In terms of casualties, it isn’t the Chernobyl disaster that occupies the top spot in our world, but the motor car. Why is no one demanding a ban on the manufacture of cars? It’s far safer to ride a bicycle or a donkey. Or in a cart.

‘This is where they fall silent, my opponents.

‘They ask me, “How do you feel about the children there drinking radioactive milk and eating radioactive berries?” I feel bad about it. Awful, actually! But I don’t overlook the fact that those children have mummies and daddies, and that we have a government, and that it’s their job to think about this. One thing I do get angry about, is when people who have forgotten, or never knew, Mendeleyev’s periodic table try telling us how to live our lives.

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