Recreation of Chernobyl Trauma in Svetlana
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RECREATION OF CHERNOBYL TRAUMA IN SVETLANA ALEKSIYEVICH’S CHERNOBYL’SKAYA MOLITVA _______________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts _____________________________________________________ by DORIS SCRIBNER Dr. Nicole Monnier, Thesis Supervisor MAY 2008 © Copyright by Doris Scribner 2008 All Rights Reserved The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled RECREATION OF CHERNOBYL TRAUMA IN SVETLANA ALEKSIYEVICH’S CHERNOBYL’SKAYA MOLITVA presented by Doris Scribner, a candidate for the degree of master of arts in Russian and Slavonic Studies, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Timothy Langen Professor Nicole Monnier Professor Anatole Mori ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the following individuals for their assistance in this project. In general, I am grateful to the faculty and staff of the German & Russian Department for creating an atmosphere that stimulates students to strive for excellence and provides both moral and practical encouragement along the way. I would like to express appreciation to Jennifer Arnold, the department’s administrative assistant, for solving a myriad of practical problems along the way and for her constant encouragement. I am indebted to Dr. Nicole Monnier for the numerous hours she spent patiently challenging my thinking and reading drafts. She has been an excellent advisor, and I am highly privileged to have had the opportunity to learn from her. I am grateful to Dr. Timothy Langen for discussions on literary devices, unity and Bely and for reading messy manuscripts; to Dr. Rimma Garn for discussions on monologues; and to Dr. Julia Zarankin for introducing me to books relating to traumatic reality and memory, which proved to be integral to this project. I am deeply appreciative of Dr. Gennady Barabtarlo, who first encouraged me to enter this masters program and who provided encouragement at critical moments in my academic studies. Of course, this entire project would have been difficult without support from family and friends. Therefore, I am extremely grateful for my supportive, patient husband Bob who put his dreams on hold that I might pursue mine. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………………..ii List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………………...iv Chapters Preface………...................…………………………………………………………………..1 I. Introduction to Svetlana Aleksiyevich and Chernobyl’skaya molitva..….………………5 Aleksiyevich’s biography, publishing history, literary and ideological precedents and goals in writing Chernobyl’skaya molitva: writing the hidden, traumatic history II. Documentary Prose and Traumatic Reality ……………………………………………24 Сommon elements of tension in documentary prose and traumatic reality genres with comments about applicability to Aleksiyevich’s project III. Aleksiyevich’s Literary Approach: Trauma and Narrative Structure in Chernobyl’skaya molitva .………………………………………………………………………………..36 Analysis of the narrative structure Чернобыльская молитва: how its elements work together to magnify tension IV. Conclusion: A Document of Tensions..……………………………………………….94 Works Cited..……………………………………………………………………………………108 Annotated Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………110 iii LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Section Titles and Narrative Types .................................................................................... 38 2. Solitary Human Voice Themes and Time ………………………..……………………….51 iv Preface Придет вермя – я верю в это, – когда чернобыльская эпопея предстанет перед нами во всей ее трагической полное, во всем многоголосье, в благодарных жизеописаниях подлинных героев и презрительных характеристиках преступников, допустивших аварию и ее тяжкие последствия всех... Думаю, что для создания такой эпопеи понадобятся новые подходы, новые литературные формы, отличные, скажем, от «Войны и мира» или «Тихого Дона». Какими они будут? Не знаю. Юрий Щербак, Chernobyl’: dokumental’noe povestvovanie, 1991 The time will come, I firmly believe, when the Chernobyl epic…will appear before us in all its tragic fullness, in all its polyphony, in the grateful biographies of the real heroes and the scornful characterizations of the criminals who allowed the accident and its grievous consequences… I think that the creation of such an epic will require new approaches, new literary forms, different, let us say, from War and Peace or Quiet Flows the Don. What will those approaches and forms be? I do not know.1 Iurii Shcherbak, Chernobyl: A Documentary Story, 1989 Svetlana Aleksiyevich is a contemporary Belarusian author and journalist whose works straddle the divide between Soviet and post-Soviet time and space. Both the content of her works and her methodologies reflect the struggles of the author and her subjects to come to terms with life in a new world while hers and their identities and worldviews are still affected by the Soviet “Big Utopian” ideology. I first became interested in Svetlana Aleksiyevich when simultaneously reading Poslednie svideteli: sto nedetskikh kolybel’nikh [Last Witnesses: 100 Unchildish Lullabies] and Chernobyl’skaya molitva [Chernobyl Prayer].2 Although both are written in documentary prose and Aleksiyevich used similar methods for collecting her raw materials (tape recorded interviews with witnesses), Chernobyl’skaya molitva uses the material in a far more sophisticated manner than Aleksiyevich’s other works. While constructed eyewitness narratives, or monologues, are at 1 Russian language quotes are from the 1991 edition of Chernobyl’: dokumental’noe povestvovanie; translations are from the Ian Press’s 1989 English translation Chernobyl: A Documentary Story. An excellent electronic version is also available: http://www.x-libri.ru/elib/sherb000/00000001.htm. 2 Initially published in 1985 as Poslednie svideteli: kniga nedeskikh rasskazov. 1 the heart of all of Aleksiyevich’s works, the individual narratives of Poslednie svideteli are seemingly randomly arranged within the text, whereas the eyewitness narratives of Chernobyl’skaya molitva are combined into “choirs” and chapters with descriptive titles and accompanied by statistics into a highly crafted work complete with an epilogue. Curious as to why Aleksiyevich would choose one form over another, I looked at comments attributed to Aleksiyevich in articles, book jackets and her official website. She states: “I've been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life” and “I’ve been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest approximation to real life”.3 These statements indicate a deliberate search for a literary form. Two questions which I will attempt to answer are what Aleksiyevich gains by the use of particular aesthetic (extra-content) forms she chooses, and, closely related to this, how the aesthetic manipulation of the content of Chernobyl’skaya molitva makes the work seem more like “reality”. Aleksiyevich has written five other books that explore Soviet/post-Soviet content. (See the attached Annotated Bibliography.) I chose Chernobyl’skaya molitva as the focus of my work because it encompasses the majority of the varied “structures” seen in Aleksiyevich’s other books; it can be seen as the evolutionary culmination of Aleksiyevich’s works so far. Moreover, since there has been little literary analysis of Aleksiyevich’s works, it seems this lack can best be met by acquainting others with Aleksiyevich’s writing style as seen in Chernobyl’skaya molitva . Another issue that will be addressed is genre. Aleksiyevich emphasizes she is operating in the documentary prose genre, and as the genre question is often broached in interviews, book prefaces and biographies, the genre question cannot be ignored. Specifically, this paper will attempt to answer the question: What does the documentary prose genre (as a type of manipulation of aesthetic form) afford Aleksiyevich’s works? I have discovered from research 3 “Я долго искала жанр, который бы отвечал тому, как я вижу мир. Тому, как устроен мой глаз, мое ухо... ” and “Я долго искала себя, хотелось найти что-то такое, чтобы приблизило к реальности” (http://alexievich.info/biogr_RU.html). Translation from http://alexievich.info/index.html. 2 that the word “tension” is often used in connection with documentary prose theory: tension between the document and aesthetics, tension between reliability and aesthetics and tension between reality as verifiable truth and the expression of that reality. Viewing Chernobyl’skaya molitva as a document of tension through the lens of documentary prose is helpful to understanding how the aesthetic arrangement “better portrays reality”. Yet the subgenre of traumatic reality literature genre is also helpful in understanding how Aleksiyevich develops a literature of tensions to more accurately reflect how she sees the world (and particularly the inner hidden worlds of individuals within a large collective space). I would suggest that Aleksiyevich’s use of the documentary prose genre links her firmly to a Soviet tradition, while her border crossing into traumatic reality literature is a reflection of Aleksiyevich as a post-Soviet writer. The theoretical texts that have most influenced this paper are Leona Toker’s “Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose—From