Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future Conflict in Postcatastrophic Narrations Cover Image

Czarnobylska modlitwa. Kronika przyszłości Swietłany Aleksijewicz: konflikt postkatastroficznych narracji
Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future Conflict in Postcatastrophic Narrations

Author(s): Anna Karonta
Subject(s): Polish Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: Alexievich Svetlana; Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future; Chernobyl; disaster;trauma;

Summary/Abstract: Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future is a collection of narratives created after the catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The paper presents the posttraumatic reality as an inexpressible experience that cannot be explained or described. However, the inability to represent traumatic experience does not mean falling into silence. Instead, it rouses the imagination. Interviews with victims of the catastrophe carried out by the author confirm the existence of a specific, collective “imaginarium” of the conceptual realm, where the process of fantasizing actuates discourse, both metaphysical-apocalyptic and other, and also evokes the aestheticization of the disaster, as well as irony. The emergence of different languages reflects the possible ways of perceiving posttraumatic reality and creating postcatastrophic discourse. The catastrophe, which creates a threat – and simultaneously, an attraction, an unreal object of desire – is terrifying and at the same time ridiculous.

  • Issue Year: 2/2020
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 1-16
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: Polish