Testimonies
of Tragedy: Trauma and Collective Memory in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices
from Chernobyl
Dr Kavitha N
Assistant
Professor
Department
of English
All Saints’
College
Thiruvananthapuram,
Kerala
Abstract
Trauma and collective memory
intertwine both individual experiences and societal consciousness in the
aftermath of catastrophic events. This paper explores the relationship between
trauma and collective memory, focusing on how personal narratives of suffering
contribute to and are shaped by broader historical and cultural frameworks.
Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from
Chernobyl(1997) explores trauma and collective memory through the oral
testimonies of survivors of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Trauma,
whether caused by war, natural disasters, genocide, or political oppression,
often transcends the individual, becoming embedded in the collective psyche of
a community or nation. The paper examines the ways in which traumatic memories
are preserved, transmitted, and sometimes silenced within communities.The
fragmented narratives reveal a deeply personal side of tragedy, where survivors
grapple with physical suffering, psychological scars, and a sense of profound
dislocation.The Voices from Chernobyl
becomes more than a record of a tragic event, it serves as a testament to the
resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable devastation and the
ongoing struggle to make sense of collective trauma.
Keywords: Collective Memory, Survival, Testimony, Trauma
and Resilience
Traumatic
experiences can be passed down through generations, influencing the beliefs,
values, and behaviours of subsequent individuals."Trauma requires a
collective process of working through memory in order to reintegrate the lost
past into a meaningful narrative of survival."(LaCapra, 66) Collective
trauma can serve as a unifying force, fostering a sense of shared identity and
belonging among survivors and their descendants. The experience of suffering
together can strengthen social bonds and create a collective
narrative.Collective memory can play a crucial role in the healing process,
providing a space for individuals to process their experiences and find meaning
in their suffering. However, it can also be a source of ongoing pain and
trauma.
Alexievich
narrates history comprised of multiple individual stories, which are given a
strong focus through a microframework. Chernobyl is a disaster that left far,
far more survivors than it claimed victims. Those victims are traumatized
individuals. Alexievich set out to interview hundreds of people affected by the
partial meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in May 1986, collecting
those interviews together into a unique work of oral history. The novel is a reflection
of the shaken effect, indicating trauma, within narratives and interaction with
one another. As a traumatic experience, Chernobyl is placed as another secluded
space historically, geographically, and chronologically. The use of narratives
provides a micro-historical viewpoint of individual lives. Alexievich’s
narrative approach is multi-functional: the monologues set up conflicting
concepts, ideas or situations from the witnesses’ experiences.
The
individual and collective narrativesreveal the unimaginable pain, horror and
loss experienced by ordinary people exposed to a completely extraordinary
situation. The nuclear disastershatteredthousands of lives, they were uprooted,
irradiated, poisoned and subsequently experienced a living death exiled and
plagued by health problems.The 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor
is one of the best-known industrial accidents of all the time, but there has
been relatively little reporting of its human consequences. "The trauma of
Chernobyl is not just a physical wound, it's a spiritual one. It's a wound that
will never heal." (Voices from Chernobyl,123)
Chernobyl
explosion is potentially traumatic in the sense that the explosion could and
did cause physical and mental injury. Recurring traumatic images throughout the
novelinclude first impressions after Chernobyl explosion; loss of home, land
and loved ones; illness and death; radioactively contaminated land; comparisons
to war and the presence of soldiers; and government corruption and
ineffectiveness. As the narrator moves from the outset of the story to the end,
different voices from the Chernobyl disaster from different perspectives
gradually identify a memory of its breadth and depth; the depth is defined, for
the most part, by the impact of the witnesses’ experiences on their psyches.
The monologues in the novel focus on what was like that day in Chernobyl
and the first reactions, but other narrations focus on the present, then years
later. Almost all of these accounts are devastating. An invisible poison, the
radiation simply did not seem threatening enough to most, and the authorities
were unwilling to unknowingly the dangers and without the resources to do what
needed to be done. The locals continued to tend their crops and eat the locally
grown food, only occasionally forced to dispose of it, with much of the tainted
produce making its way into the general Soviet food supply.
As
a collective trauma survivor, geographically Chernobyl continues to exude a
sense of romance and adventure, a place of heroism beside death and offers a
haven. The outsiders who visit this area immediately surround the reactor and
speak of the great natural beauty, even though the traumatic effect often
captures the attention. Among the saddest testimonials are of those who fled
war-torn Post-Soviet Tajikistan and settled hue, the invisible killer here
still preferable to what they faced at home. They are frightened of humans and
not radiation. They find nuclear war better than the human war that they have
experienced.
The
novelbrings personal testimonies of tragedies, particularly the physical damage
the radiation caused, much of it because thousands and thousands of men were
sent to work in and around the disaster site under impossible conditions, with
limited safety equipment. She begins with Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of fireman
Vasily Ignatenkowhose brigade was the first to arrive at the reactor, who talks
about the total degeneration of her husband's skin in the week before his
death, describing a process so unnatural one should never have had to witness
it. The nurse at the hospital comments that her husband is not a person anymore
but a nuclear reactor. He was being photographed for further studies. He was
not being considered a human being he made her burst out, yelled at them and
pushed them all out. The work of theorists like Maurice Halbwachs emphasizes
that collective memory is not merely a collection of individual memories, but a
socially constructed framework through which societies interpret their past.
Trauma, however, complicates this process by resisting clear representation, as
the overwhelming nature of the experience disrupts linear narratives, leading
to fragmented or silenced memories.
One of
the helicopter pilots who flew day and night over the burning reactor tells
Alexievich that the plan was to dump enough sandbags on the fire to quell the
flames. According to scientists today, this tactic only added to the
radioactive clouds. Another survivor is Sergei Sobolev, a “professional
racketeer”, now an official with a Chernobyl veterans group who helps run a
small Chernobyl museum. Though this happened during the era of Gorbachev, who
comes out very badly here, people still
looked for the truth in the behaviour of their Party bosses rather than the
media; the bosses were taking iodine tablets and, when they visited the site,
making sure they walked only on the triple layer of fresh asphalt that had been
laid for their visit. Three days passed before the sudden evacuation of the
nearest town, Pripyat, two kilometres away. Children went to school and
finished their costumes for the May Day parade. Pripyat, like the rest of the
human habitats within a 30-kilometre radius, is now home only to ghosts,
security and scientific people. Except that it’s not: “The zone” has its
category of inhabitants, “self-settlers”, refugees, thieves and residents who
have crept back, like Anna the bee-keeper and the old villager from Bely Bereg
who tells the author, “Home is where the heart is. When you’re not there, even
the sun’s not the same.” (Voices from Chernobyl,
83) "Before Chernobyl, we believed in a
bright future. After Chernobyl, we knew that nothing was certain." (Voices
from Chernobyl 205)
The
novel begins and ends with the testimony of two widows; one the young wife of a
Pripyat firefighter who went at night to fight the blaze in his shirtsleeves,
the other the wife of a “liquidator”, one of the 600,000 men drafted into bury
the topsoil and shoot every animal in the zone. He is the last in his platoon
to die. When he can no longer speak, she asks him, “Are you sorry now that you
went there?” He shakes his head no and writes for her, “When I die, sell the
car, and the spare tyre, and don’t marry Tolik.” Tolik is his brother. She
doesn’t marry him. (Voices from Chernobyl,116) Understanding collective memory and
trauma reveals the complex interplay between personal experiences of suffering
and the broader socio-political landscape that seeks to interpret and respond
to those events.
He was calling out to me constantly: “Lyusya,
where are you? Lyusya!" He called and called. The other biochambers, where
our boys were, were tended to by soldiers, because the orderlies on staff
refused, they demanded protective clothing. The soldiers carried the sanitary
vessels. They wiped the floors down, changed the bedding. They did everything.
Where did they get those soldiers? We didn't ask. But he—he—every day I would
hear: Dead. Dead. Tischura is dead. Titenok is dead. Dead. It was like a
sledgehammer to my brain. (Voices from Chernobyl,14)
In between these desperate griefs are stories
of cynicism and surreal moments of greed and confusion. Radioactive tractors,
motorbikes and fur coats smuggled from the zone have, it seems, been sold all
over what was the Soviet Union. But possibly the strangest element of the
disaster is the happiness it produces.Where man is no longer a predator, elk,
wolves and boar return. A cameraman says, “A strange thing happened to me. I
became closer to animals. And trees, and birds.” (Voices from Chernobyl
,34)Considering the horror and trauma of what
is described the calmness in many of the accounts the narrator comes across is
striking, the language the participants use at times verges at times on poetry,
and the way they relate their experiences to literature, history and culture
are incredibly powerful. A telling, reoccurring comparison that is made is
between the nuclear disaster and the Second World War. One interviewee, a
psychologist working in the zone, talks of the trauma he experienced as a child
during the war, and the terrible things he had witnessed “I thought the most
horrible things had already happened…but then I travelled to the Chernobyl
zone… the future is destroying me, not the past.” Another younger participant
speaks of Chernobyl being “her childhood” in the same way as a previous
generation of Belarussians grew up during World War II.
Chernobyl
is too traumatic for Russian culture as they rarely speak about it.Alexievich
herself says “Our land became a diabolical Chernobyl laboratory, and we Belarusians
became the people of Chernobyl.” (Voices from Chernobyl, 12) The
traumatic memories provide a sense of communion, of a shared humanity in the
face of horror. The testimonies collected and presented in the text are not
only haunting but illuminating. Andrew Meier in his column in CBS News states
thatShe sought out witnesses, “workers from the nuclear plant, the scientists,
the former Party bureaucrats, doctors, soldiers, helicopter pilots, miners,
refugees, re-settlers.” Chernobyl people suffered many health problems. There
was a single diagnosis for everything: Chernobyl. There, animals were ‘walking
ashes’, and people were ‘talking dust’. Some of them lose their senses because
the body reacts to high radiation levels by blocking certain senses. They
buried earth in the earth, for them loving became a sin and horror was their
natural habitat. Some people migrated to Belarus after the disaster. For the
journalists, they were committing suicide and killing their children. But for
them, it is the men and the guns frightened them, not the radiation.
"Survivors not only endure the trauma but are tasked with finding a way to
rebuild a life that will inevitably be different from what it once was."
(Herman, 74). That is why Chernobyl became their home. It’s a reminder that
Chernobyl isn’t just a piece of cultural shorthand, it’s an unhealable wound,
it is an event that will continue to affect lives for centuries, perhaps
millennia. It’s a reminder of the limits of photography and the visual, and the
understated power of text and written voices.Whether through artistic
expression, historical documentation, or communal mourning, the process of
remembering traumatic events is central to how societies reconcile with their
past and shape their future.
The author narrates the content
on two levels to highlight the tension of the Chernobyl world. At first,content
is redefined through semantic constructions,second, the content is
aesthetically arranged into literary traumatic space, which as mentioned earlier,
involves irreconcilable binaries; two pieces of contradictory information are
held near without reconciling them. Alexievich’s method is about reshaping
trauma into memory and experience while deliberately preventing them from
thinking he fully understands the experience. The traumatic effect is created
through the controlled release of information so that the reader does not have
access to the information in time to prepare himself emotionally.
Through
the development of traumatic space, “Soldier’s Choir” highlights the trauma
experienced by the soldiers. For instance, soldiers recall washerwomen whose
arms were covered with sores from washing the soldier’s clothing; they wonder
if the women are still alive. Overall, narratives by those who are proud of
their service are outnumbered by those who are not, and even the pride is given
a doubtful nuance by the presence of other information. The tone of narration
casts doubts on any Soviet citizen’s judgement, asserting that the Soviet
ideology deformed the individual’s ability to reason. The first responders and
their families are traumatized in part by their inability to respond otherwise
because of their upbringing.As a cultural process, trauma is mediated through
various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective
identity and the reworking of collective memory.
In the
Chernobyl world, unusual illnesses are the norm. In one village, almost every
child has alopecia. In another, people fall from exhaustion, their legs giving
out for no apparent reason. Extreme isolated examples are horrifying. As
mentioned earlier, a young girl is born without lower external orifices;
outwardly she appears to be a beautiful, normal girl. The mother’s dilemma- her
daughter does not know this is not normal, and physicians are helpless. Another
facet is added to the picture of Chernobyl illness as parents struggle with
guilt after they unsuspectingly and secondarily expose their children to
radiation and often death. Examples have already been given of a child who
allegedly developed a brain tumour from wearing his father’s Chernobyl cap and
the 12-year-old leukemic girl whose father served in Chernobyl. Death, which
should mark the end of a long life, becomes a normal part of everyday life for
even young children who play at “radiation” with one another. The atmosphere of
Belarus was so traumatized with death and illness.As a result of collective
trauma, people can change their views of the world. For example, trauma
survivors can become hopeless about the future and end up fearful of potential
threats. Furthermore, they can experience symptoms of psychological distress
such as flashbacks, insomnia, panic attacks, and others.
Traumatic pain is viewed retrospectively, often connected with the witness’s
recognition of absence. Valentina comments that now she sees her husband’s
horrible illness as a happy time: at least he was still nearby. After Misha’s
death, Valentina’s world is marked by his absence and, consequently, the noted
absence of happiness. Physical loss leaves a gap in her life, which is
transmitted to the text as “unreality”. Alexievich portrays the simultaneously
real and unreal world by allowing her witnesses to “float” in and out of the
present and by highlighting unresolved trauma, which insists “something is
missing”. This missing piece might be ideology, a spouse, a child, a home or
health, among others. The traumatic image is a way of gesturing to that which
lies beyond direct reference; the image’s pertinence to the novel is in its
ability to speak when words fail. Alexievich makes liberal use of traumatic
descriptions in the novel. A cap in the narrative about the boy who develops a
brain tumour is simultaneously an everyday object, a sign of a boy’s adoration
of his father and a toll of destruction. It speaks of how a seemingly neutral
object is transformed by its contact with “Chernobyl world” into an agent of
death. A door, which carries memories of the families’ hopes and dreams,
becomes a crushing reminder of the daughter’s death. In both cases, the cap and
door highlight the absence of the pre-Chernobyl world with its understandable
rules as well as the absence of a father’s beloved child. The narrator painted
a poignant picture through the words of a dejected father and a cap with a
space where the son was, that traumatic detail will hopefully continue to speak
to the authority. Alexievich portrays the trauma that the witnesses are
struggling with and still cannot find a way past to resolution. She attempts to
describe a hidden trauma in terms of inner psychological tensions thereby
framing a traumatic space of narration.
The
Chernobyl accident caused a large regional release of radionuclides into the
atmosphere and subsequent radioactive contamination of the environment. Many
European countries were affected by the radioactive contamination; among the
most affected were three former republics of the Soviet Union, now Belarus, the
Russian Federation and Ukraine. At present, in most of the settlements subjected
to radioactive contamination, the air dose rate above solid surfaces has
returned to the pre accident background level. The elevated air dose rate
remains mainly over undisturbed soil in gardens, kitchen gardens and parks.
According to social representations theory,
collective memory of historical events is a highly reconstructive and motivated
process wherein people remember the history of their group in a manner that
serves their current interests and beliefs often to the point of discounting
the historical facts. Thus, it is not historical accuracy that drives memory,
but concerns about group moral image and the desire to view one’s group in a
positive light. When the group is seen as good, individuals belonging to the
group enjoy the benefit of being valued members of a valued
group. (Hirschberger)
Alexievich in her novel, represented the
eyewitnesses’ monologues and the choirs. The text identifies the development of
traumatic space within narratives. Used as tools, the collective memory and
traumatic reality bring out multiple voices from physical and psychological
realms. Alexievich carefully keeps her traumatic space subjective, highly
pain-filled and free of resolution.
The
paper could explore how Alexievich uses oral history to give voice to the often-silenced
experiences of disaster survivors, focusing on themes of trauma, loss, and the
long-lasting psychological impacts of the Chernobyl event. The testimonies are
examined to contribute to the formation of collective memory, shaping public
understanding of both the disaster itself and the broader social, political,
and cultural repercussions of trauma on a national and global scale.
Additionally, the study could delve into how traumaliterature bridges the gap
between personal narrative and historical record, offering new ways to
understand trauma through the agency of storytelling.
Works Cited
Alexijwitsch, Swetlana. Voices From
Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Aurum Press, 1997.
Eyerman, Ron. “Cultural Trauma and Collective
Memory.” Cambridge University Press, 22
Sept. 2009.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The
Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to
Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992, p. 74.
Hirschberger, Gilad. “The Collective Memory
of Trauma and Why It Still Matters.” VerfBlog, 24 July 2024, https://verfassungsblog.de/the-collective-memory-of-trauma/. DOI:10.59704/61e3aa1c62301563.
LaCapra, Dominick.Writing History, Writing
Trauma, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, p. 66.
Meier, Andrew. “A Voice from Chernobyl.” CBS
News, 26 Apr. 2006.