'Voices from Chernobyl': the suspended time, the horror and the language of memory and forgetfulness

Abstract

Voices from Chernobyl – The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Aleksievovitch, published in 1997, represents the definitive fracture in the ideology of civilizing progress. It enables the discussion of the extreme contemporaneity of the languages of memory and forgetfulness, as well as the interpellation of the writings of history in the face of the announced catastrophe. Unsuspected and sensitive borders between both forms of knowledge are drawn. The narratives of memory traced by the author form a kind of mosaic, which expresses the ‘stupor’ experienced by thousands of people in various ways. Emerging from radical experiences of disconcert and estrangement, such narratives set out the challenges posed to tradition, subjectivity and to human existence within what is felt as a ‘new perception of time’. This article seeks to raise understandable topics on ‘estrangement’ and ‘terror’ expressed by multiple and insistent testimonies – despite their sensation of the eclipse of language – to account for what had been happened and lived.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1193