Catastrophy testemonies: memories of trauma in Voices from Tchernobyl

Abstract

This article aims to conduct a brief analysis of the book of Svetlana Aleksiévitch, Voices from Chernobyl: the oral history of a nuclear disaster, from the perspective of memorialistic studies. The work gathers accounts of oral speech from people who experienced, directly or indirectly, the greatest technological catastrophe of the 20th century, that occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in April 1987. The testimony genre allows the memories of ordinary people, such as peasants, residents of the villages around the nuclear power plant, housewives, mothers and fathers of families, as well as professionals related to energy production in Chernobyl, as engineers, nuclear physicists, teachers, firefighters and Soviet military.