Language, Body, Nature: Tackling the Representation of the Kyshtym Disaster in Kate Brown’s Plutopia
Language, Body, Nature: Tackling the Representation of the Kyshtym Disaster in Kate Brown’s Plutopia

Summary/Abstract: The article examines ways of representing nuclear catastrophe in Kate Brown's Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. In 1957 an explosion in the Mayak works - a plutonium production site - led to massive contamination of the surrounding areas. The event remained a closely kept secret till 1992, absent from the public sphere and cultural texts, despite of the fact that the scale of contamination was as big as the Charnobyl explosion. One of the reasons for this was the difficulty of representing nuclear radiation. The author focuses on three contexts of this impossibility: in relation the the cognitive theorey of the metaphor, the figure of the sick body as bearer of memory, and the invisibility of the nuclear landscape.

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