In Voices from Chernobyl, several victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster share how their notions of life, death, and love are all inescapably intertwined. In the preface, these storytellers are referred to as survivors. The inexplicably awful contradiction that these victims are survivors mirrors the fact that death hangs over every aspect of these people’s lives. 

Each storyteller either directly ponders, or at least tells stories of how life and death are one in their lives. One person describes the door that is used in family rituals for death, but also has etch-marks of him and his children growing up. His “whole life is written down on this door” (35). This man is the only person who suggests how life and death, in this case, were beautifully and meaningfully connected, even before the Chernobyl incident. However, after Chernobyl, life and death forcefully become one and the same.

One pregnant woman recalls from her memory as follows: “The baby starts crying, it’s just come out… So they grab the little baby, it’s been on this earth for maybe five, ten minutes, and they throw it out the window…. How are you supposed to live after that? How are you supposed to give birth?” (57). Another woman who stayed in her village and watched all of her neighbors around her die, says, “you can talk to the dead just like you can talk to the living. Makes no difference to me. I can hear the one and the other. When you’re alone… And when you’re sad” (33). And yet another reflects,  “Back then I thought of death just as I did of birth.” (26).

The prevalence of these piercing images and reflections of life and death shows us how much this incident psychologically killed these “survivors.” They however yearn to return to a reality in which life and love are oppositional to death. The first woman captured this in asking,  “Why are these things together – love and death…. No one wants to hear about death. / But I was telling you about love. About my love…” (23).

The concepts of how nature and individuals and society are in a war with one another– as discussed by our classmates’ blog posts — resonates with me. However, I found it difficult to focus on the portrayal of nature in this work. There are certainly passages that are rich with commentary on how the animals responded to the incident. However, I found, in reading these narratives, that the human emotional destruction is so strikingly horrific that I didn’t even have any emotional capacity to think about nature. In my next read, I will try to hone in more on this, but ultimately, how could these people even think about nature, when their friends and family are being destroyed?