The impact of Svetlana Alexievich’s Voice from Chernobyl is helped by the book’s unique form. The first part is told in a series of unrelated monologues all circling around personal experience of the disaster. Each incredibly intimate and horrifying monologue begins to add to a collective voice about the event without minimizing or generalizing any single experience.

Alexievivh’s prologue titled “a solitary human voice” (5) begins to justify her unique form. This staring monologue is longer than the rest, taking pages to tell the two-week long suffering and eventual death of one of the first responders to the reactors. The repeat theme of this narrative is the growing de-humanization of Vasily, the narrator’s husband. Once taken away from their home and moved to a hospital in Moscow, the narrator is told multiple times that, “You have to understand: this is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning” (16).  The narrator is instructed to look past the humanity of her husband, ignore him as a victim and instead view him as an object.

Just as the narrator is asked to distance themselves from the humanity of her husband, the Soviet government asked citizens to distance themselves from the human horror of Chernobyl and instead focus their attention on the environmental impact. The rest of Alexievich monologues are an attempt to destroy this crafted blind spot.