Czarnobylska modlitwa. Kronika przyszłości - Swietłana Aleksijewicz

“On April 26, 1986, at one minute twenty-three fifty-eight seconds, a series of explosions turned the reactor and the fourth power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near the Belarusian border into ruins. The Chernobyl accident was the most powerful technological disaster of the 20th century.”

Twenty years later, Svetlana Alexievich returned to Chernobyl. She talked to people for whom that day was the end of the world, who should not have lived, but survived and are alive, because life is necessary. And they told her about what happened then, and about what is there today. About the more than two million Belarusians who were forgotten to be resettled outside the contaminated zone, about the hairless children, about the sad-eyed animals that took up residence in abandoned houses, about the strange creatures that appeared in the rivers and forests. And about how, despite everything, people want to be happy.

As in her book about Soviet female soldiers, the prominent Belarusian journalist confronts us with the merciless truth. This is a book about the apocalypse that occurred one April night just across our eastern border.

“Alexievich is a master at describing the history of the Soviet Union. This time she writes not only about Chernobyl, but also passionately recounts the last decades of the USSR. She arranges the story from the narratives of people who fought a deadly battle in Chernobyl and were supposed to remain anonymous. Alexievich admonishes them and bears witness to one of the USSR's last wars: the war against the atom, over which Soviet engineers lost control and which could have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Europe.” Margaret Nocun

“For more than a dozen years, the excellent reporter Svetlana Alexievich documented the fate of people and animals living on the land contaminated after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion. She has created a profoundly shocking picture not only of the tragedy itself (which affected Belarus the most), but also of the being called homo sovieticus: boundlessly devoted to the state and disregarding itself; more terrified of the possible reaction of the superior than of nuclear radiation; mercilessly exploited by the moloch of power and boundlessly helpless against it. It is also a book about immense love: the love of husbands and wives, but also the love of a man for the land on which he was born. This book is a masterfully constructed monument to the victims of Chernobyl; a monument before which each of us should bow.” Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich

The book is written in Polish.

Technical data
Author: Svetlana Aleksievich
Year of publication: 2018
Format: 133 x 215 mm
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Czarne