2016.04.26 切尔诺贝利的文学遗产，30年之后

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Chernobyl’s Literary Legacy, 30 Years Later
The best works written about the accident express profound doubts about language's ability to capture the disaster’s magnitude.

By Michael LaPointe

Ake Ericson / Aurora Photos / Corbis / Paul Spella / The Atlantic
APRIL 26, 2016
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Thirty years ago, the sky glowed at the edge of Ukraine. An ill-conceived and bungled safety test had gone critical at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Steam explosions blew the roof off Reactor Number Four, spewing uranium and graphite into the open air, and pouring radioactive particles into the atmosphere. The fire burned for days while Soviet authorities delayed evacuating the surrounding area, needlessly exposing thousands to the worst technological disaster of the 20th century. A radioactive cloud drifted over Europe, with particles eventually appearing in every corner of the world. Strontium, cesium, plutonium—all were present in the vast fallout area, out of which was carved a forbidden 30-kilometer landscape known as the Zone.

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Since then the Zone has spawned a literary genre of its own. Indeed, it seemed instantly to pass into myth, even possessing its own poetic language. The soldiers and firefighters who cleaned up the site—many of whom died from exposure—are referred to as the liquidators. Reactor Four remains encased in a concrete-and-steel shell known as the sarcophagus. In the Zone, there is a Red Forest; there was black rain. Yet unlike myth, as a professor says in Voices From Chernobyl, a 1997 oral history by Svetlana Alexievich, “We don't know how to capture any meaning from it.” Through three decades of literary response, Chernobyl has undermined the sort of authoritative depiction that might bring closure. But something closed can be forgotten. The finest works express profound doubts about the power of language to absorb a disaster of this magnitude, and so continually reopen it to new ways of being remembered.

The German literary critic and author Christa Wolf began writing Accident: A Day’s News not two months after the explosion, and completed the manuscript in September 1986. Novelists are usually better equipped to handle history than a current event: The former comes with context, a sense of retrospect and narrative arc, while the latter is still subject to unexpected disclosures. Accident, for instance, seems to have been written under the belief that the explosion resulted from a random accident, something innate to nuclear power itself, rather than a calamitous series of human errors. Nevertheless, Wolf, the author of Cassandra and The Quest for Christa T., managed to produce a focused meditation that’s lost none of its power three decades on.


Accident is authorial, not authoritative. Instead of representing Chernobyl itself, the novel comprises the thoughts of a writer over the course of a day just after news of the accident has spread—thoughts that range over visions of environmental collapse, “the entire breathlessly expanding monstrous technological creation,” and imaginative forays into an operating room where her brother is having brain tumors removed. In real time, Accident captures the first cognitive impact of Chernobyl, and it continues to represent how almost everyone grapples with the tragedy: imaginatively, from afar.

Wolf perceived a definitive historical break in Chernobyl—“Once again, so it seemed, our age had created a Before and After for itself”—a break most apparent on the level of language. “In my grandmother’s day the word ‘cloud’ conjured up condensed vapor, nothing more,” she writes. Now, however, Chernobyl’s radioactive cloud “has knocked the white cloud of poetry into the archives.” The airborne toxic event is figured as a specter of postmodernism, its shadow recasting previously stable distinctions, and challenging literary endeavor itself.

The first work of Chernobyl literature written in English is the first to fall prey to authoritative depiction. In docudrama fashion, 1987’s Chernobyl: A Novel by Frederik Pohl tracks each minute of the accident, as well as the plight of the liquidators, the evacuation of the Zone, and even some high Cold War intrigue among the Party elite. Although a minor work in the oeuvre of Pohl, a science-fiction writer with dozens of books to his credit, everything in Chernobyl is done on an epic scale, as if only a novel conceived in grand Russian style could have a chance at absorbing the subject. The cast of characters includes everyone from plant managers to diplomats, engineers to novelists, Soviet soldiers to American TV producers.

The airborne toxic event is figured as a specter of postmodernism, a challenge to literary endeavor itself.
On the back cover, Isaac Asimov says, “Forty years ago, Chernobyl would have been far-out science fiction; now it is sober (and sobering) fact.” To read Chernobyl is to see science fiction become fact before becoming fiction again. The intent is clear enough: to harness imagination so as to deliver the reader sympathetically into the Zone. But for all its meticulous research and panoramic scope, Chernobyl seems narrowly governed by conventional storytelling logic. Pohl superimposes a dramatic scheme on Chernobyl, and so it makes a kind of sense, and finds a kind of closure, that rings false. Even operating with an incomplete picture of what happened, Wolf’s Accident better captures the breakdown of convention—in both the real and literary realms—that makes Chernobyl singularly difficult to absorb.


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A key factor of the difficulty is that Chernobyl isn’t really an event. It can’t be grounded in time, like September 11th, or conceived as having a general shape, like World War II. The cesium in the soil will be reduced by half in 180 to 320 years; the director of the power plant predicts the Zone will be inhabitable in another 20,000. Perhaps in geologic time, this qualifies as an event, but to call it one is like calling human civilization an event. In the meantime, the land, its people, and the survivors remain within a process unleashed by Chernobyl. The Zone still burns with invisible flames.

Some 20 years after the accident, writers regrouped around Chernobyl. The long-term toll by now was apparent: Immediate casualties were followed by an incalculable number of victims, on top of whom was the traumatic displacement undergone by evacuees, not to mention the ecological shock that rendered fertile land into scientific oddity. And so the pressing questions seemed to shift: “What happened?” became, “Who allowed this to happen, and how would they have lived for the last 20 years?” Authors began to imagine those who had to cope with the guilt, as if to learn from them how to live in Chernobyl’s shadow.

Even the most outlandish entry in the genre finally leads back to the matter of guilt. Wolves Eat Dogs (2004), a thriller by Martin Cruz Smith, takes full advantage of the Chernobyl myth, which had only grown more elaborate by the early 21st century—with tall tales of mutant vegetables and radioactive wildlife—even as the Zone was exposed to the demystifying gaze of tourists in 2002. Smith’s recurring detective, Arkady Renko, pursues a high-profile homicide case into the Zone, where famous locations (the plant's cooling pond, the derelict Ferris wheel) serve as cinematic backdrops for an otherwise formulaic investigation. Renko is led to a murderer bent on punishing those responsible for Chernobyl, men who have gone on to thrive in post-Soviet Russia: “All I ever asked ... was for them to come to the Zone and declare their share of responsibility personally, face-to-face,” he says.


To whose face is he referring? In Wolves Eat Dogs, the guilty are oligarchs, distanced from the reader by villainy, who pay a fitting price for ruthless ambition. “The Zero Meter Diving Team,” a short story by Jim Shepard collected in 2007’s  Like You’d Understand, Anyway, presents a more intimate face, and a more ambiguous justice. Boris Yakovlevich Prushinsky is the chief engineer of the Department of Nuclear Energy, whose two brothers were caught up in the accident. In the light of retrospect, Prushinsky dissects the negligence, incompetence, and heartlessness leading up to Chernobyl, and asks, “How much difference could an individual bureaucrat really make?” The story locates no answer; it even suggests that Prushinsky’s “late-night sentimentalities always operate more as consolation than insight,” as though guilt were a closure undeserved by the guilty. In Prushinsky’s moral agony, Shepard makes sensible Chernobyl’s eternal duration.

“There’s nothing heroic here,” says a liquidator, “nothing for the writer’s pen.”
No literary response to Chernobyl deserves a wider readership than Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Alexievich, the Belarusian journalist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, represents the broadest range of a society whose alienation makes them “a separate people. A new nation.” In these pages, harrowing stories of lost loved ones sit alongside litanies against technological hubris; the history of ideas—“the era of physics ended at Chernobyl”—contrasts with spots of black humor; science collides with superstition. The cumulative effect is not the absorption of Chernobyl, but rather an unlimited expansion. More than any other work, Alexievich’s provides a direct, vertiginous glimpse of Chernobyl's abyss.


As sensed by Christa Wolf, the abyss threatens to void the written word of meaning: “There’s nothing heroic here,” says a liquidator, “nothing for the writer’s pen.” Perhaps, a historian muses, only Dostoyevsky could have made any use of Chernobyl. Many of the voices are rightly skeptical of those drawn to the story: “[Chernobyl] has its own writers,” a journalist says. “But I don’t want to become one of the people who exploits this subject.” It’s a testament to Alexievich’s gifts that she manages to include critiques of her chosen medium, and yet produce a work that speaks to the enduring power of language. “I’ve read a lot of books, I live among books,” says the wife of a liquidator, “but nothing can explain this.” Nothing can. But Voices From Chernobyl forges a bond between reader and survivor; understanding exists without explanation.

The sheer richness of Voices From Chernobyl suggests why the disaster has been so tantalizing for literary depiction, and writers are bold for taking on such a painful and complex subject. At the same time, however, Chernobyl comes freighted with an automatic gravitas. A common phenomenon in the Zone is what’s known as radiophobia, psychosomatic sensations—sore throats, blurry vision—prompted simply by an awareness of being in the Zone; it’s a false response to something real. In novels, and even in an essay such as this, the very word Chernobyl strikes a note of tragic awe, and so it’s unusually susceptible to being invoked for prescribed effects.

For 30 years, authors have heaved their imaginations into the Zone, trying to crack the riddle of the sarcophagus—how to make sense of Chernobyl?
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2014), a historical novel by Darragh McKeon, is the most recent entry into Chernobyl literature. It tells the intertwining stories of a surgeon called into the fallout area, his ex-wife, and her nephew, a piano prodigy in Moscow. Taken together, they’re intended to chart the final decline of the Soviet Union, to which Chernobyl contributed. What they actually present is a kind of literary radiophobia, the false effects of invoking Chernobyl.


McKeon acknowledges his debt to other books on the subject, including Voices From Chernobyl, and his novel includes passages drawn directly from the oral history. But while McKeon admirably read everything written about the disaster, he missed the skepticism toward literary convention essential to the best examples. Many solid things, it turns out, haven’t melted into air, among them uncomplicated heroism, clear moral distinctions, and a teleological view of history. Chernobyl is harnessed to signify Tragedy, and a sonorous literary cadence seems to invade, rather than emerge from, the Zone—an odd effect for a book in which people say things like, “The past demands fidelity ... it’s the only thing that truly belongs to us.”

This 30th anniversary marks another milestone in the Zone. Later this year, a 30,000-ton steel construct known as the New Safe Confinement (NSC) will slide over the sarcophagus. The NSC is designed to contain the radiation for another 100 years, in the hopes that humans will finally develop the technology to clean up the site. “A 20th-century pyramid,” as one soldier calls it in Voices From Chernobyl, the sarcophagus, with a tall chimney crowning its asymmetries, has served as an accidental monument to the disaster. When the NSC is in place, all that will be visible is an elegant curve of steel. For 30 years, authors have heaved their imaginations into the Zone, trying to crack the riddle of the sarcophagus—how to make sense of Chernobyl? Their imperfect answers keep the question alive.

Michael LaPointe is a writer and critic based in Toronto. He contributes to the Times Literary Supplement.



切尔诺贝利的文学遗产，30年之后
有关该事故的最佳作品对语言捕捉灾难规模的能力表示深深的怀疑。

作者：Michael LaPointe

Ake Ericson / Aurora Photos / Corbis / Paul Spella / The Atlantic
2016年4月26日
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三十年前，乌克兰边缘的天空闪耀着光芒。切尔诺贝利核电站的一次设想不周的安全测试出现了问题。蒸汽爆炸将四号反应堆的屋顶炸开，将铀和石墨喷到户外，并将放射性粒子倾泻到大气中。大火烧了好几天，而苏联当局推迟了对周围地区的疏散，毫无必要地让成千上万的人暴露在20世纪最严重的技术灾难中。一片放射性云在欧洲上空飘荡，粒子最终出现在世界的每个角落。锶、铯、钚--所有这些都存在于巨大的沉降区中，其中有一个被称为 "区 "的30公里的禁区景观。

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从那时起，"区 "就催生了自己的文学流派。事实上，它似乎马上就变成了神话，甚至拥有了自己的诗意语言。清理现场的士兵和消防员--其中许多人死于暴露，被称为清算者。四号反应堆仍然被包裹在一个被称为石棺的混凝土和钢铁外壳内。在该区，有一个红色森林；有黑色的雨。然而，与神话不同的是，正如一位教授在《切尔诺贝利之声》（Svetlana Alexievich于1997年撰写的口述历史）中所说，"我们不知道如何从中捕捉任何意义。" 通过三十年的文学反应，切尔诺贝利已经破坏了那种可能带来封闭的权威性描述。但是封闭的东西可以被遗忘。最优秀的作品对语言吸收如此巨大的灾难的能力表示了深刻的怀疑，因此不断地重新打开它，以新的方式被记住。

德国文学评论家和作家克里斯塔-沃尔夫开始写作《事故》。爆炸发生后不到两个月，就开始写《事故：一天的新闻》，并在1986年9月完成手稿。小说家通常更有能力处理历史而不是当前的事件。前者有背景，有回溯感，有叙事弧度，而后者仍会有意外的披露。例如，《事故》似乎是在这样的信念下写成的：爆炸是由随机事故造成的，是核电本身固有的东西，而不是一系列灾难性的人为错误。尽管如此，《卡桑德拉》和《寻找克里斯塔-T》的作者沃尔夫还是成功地创作了一部专注的冥想作品，三十年来没有失去任何力量。


事故是作者的，而不是权威的。小说没有表现切尔诺贝利事故本身，而是由一位作家在事故消息刚刚传开后的一天里的想法组成--这些想法包括对环境崩溃的设想，"整个令人窒息的技术创造的扩张"，以及对她弟弟正在进行脑瘤切除手术的手术室的想象。事故》实时捕捉到了切尔诺贝利事故的第一个认知影响，它继续代表了几乎所有人如何应对这场悲剧：从远处想象。

沃尔夫在切尔诺贝利事件中察觉到了一个明确的历史断裂--"我们的时代似乎又一次为自己创造了一个之前和之后"--这种断裂在语言层面最为明显。"她写道："在我祖母的时代，'云'这个词让人联想到冷凝的水汽，仅此而已。然而，现在，切尔诺贝利的放射性云 "把诗歌的白云打入了档案"。空气中的有毒事件被认为是后现代主义的幽灵，它的阴影重塑了以前稳定的区别，并挑战了文学努力本身。

第一部用英语写成的切尔诺贝利文学作品是第一个被权威性描述的牺牲品。1987年的《切尔诺贝利》以纪录片的形式，由弗雷德里克-皮尔逊（Frederik P.）创作的《切尔诺贝利》。1987年，弗雷德里克-波尔（Frederik Pohl）的《切尔诺贝利：小说》（Chernobyl: A Novel）以纪实的方式追踪了事故发生的每一分钟，以及清算人员的困境、隔离区的疏散，甚至是党内精英们的一些高级冷战阴谋。虽然在波尔的作品中，这是一部小作品，他是一位拥有几十本书的科幻作家，但《切尔诺贝利》中的一切都以史诗般的规模完成，仿佛只有以宏大的俄罗斯风格构思的小说才有机会吸收这个主题。剧中人物包括从工厂经理到外交官，从工程师到小说家，从苏联士兵到美国电视制作人。

空气传播的有毒事件被认为是后现代主义的幽灵，是对文学创作本身的挑战。
在封底，艾萨克-阿西莫夫说："四十年前，切尔诺贝利是遥远的科幻小说；现在它是清醒的（和清醒的）事实"。阅读《切尔诺贝利》是为了看到科幻小说在再次成为小说之前成为事实。其目的很明确：利用想象力，让读者同情地进入 "区"。但是，尽管《切尔诺贝利》有着细致的研究和全景式的范围，但它似乎被传统的讲故事逻辑所束缚。波尔在《切尔诺贝利》上叠加了一个戏剧性的计划，因此它具有某种意义，并找到了一种结束，但这是错误的。即使在对所发生的事情不完全了解的情况下，沃尔夫的《意外》也能更好地捕捉到常规的崩溃--无论是在现实还是在文学领域--这使得切尔诺贝利变得异常难以吸收。


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困难的一个关键因素是，切尔诺贝利并不是一个真正的事件。它不能像9月11日那样以时间为基础，也不能像第二次世界大战那样被设想为有一个总体的形状。土壤中的铯将在180至320年内减少一半；发电厂的负责人预测，该区将在另外2万年内适合居住。也许在地质学上，这算得上是一个事件，但把它称为一个事件就像把人类文明称为一个事件一样。与此同时，这片土地、这里的人们和幸存者仍然处于切尔诺贝利事故所引发的过程中。该区仍在燃烧着无形的火焰。

事故发生约20年后，作家们重新聚集在切尔诺贝利周围。到现在为止，长期的损失是显而易见的：眼前的伤亡是不可估量的，除此之外，还有疏散人员所经历的创伤性迁移，更不用说使肥沃的土地变成科学怪胎的生态冲击。因此，紧迫的问题似乎发生了变化。"发生了什么？"变成了 "谁允许这种情况发生，他们在过去20年里会如何生活？" 作者们开始想象那些不得不应对内疚的人，仿佛要从他们身上学到如何在切尔诺贝利的阴影下生活。

即使是这一类型中最离奇的作品，最后也会回到内疚的问题上。狼吃狗》（2004年）是马丁-克鲁兹-史密斯的一部惊悚片，它充分利用了切尔诺贝利的神话，这种神话在21世纪初变得更加复杂--关于变异蔬菜和放射性野生动物的高谈阔论，甚至在2002年该区被暴露在游客的非神秘化目光下。史密斯扮演的复出侦探阿卡迪-伦科（Arkady Renko）在 "区 "内追查一起引人注目的凶杀案，在那里，著名的地点（工厂的冷却池、废弃的摩天轮）作为电影背景，进行着原本公式化的调查。伦科被引向一个一心想要惩罚那些对切尔诺贝利事故负有责任的人的凶手，这些人在后苏维埃时代的俄罗斯获得了发展。"他说："我所要求的......就是让他们到区里来，亲自面对面地宣布他们的责任。


他指的是谁的脸？在《狼吃狗》中，有罪的是寡头，他们因小人之心而与读者保持距离，为无情的野心付出了合适的代价。"吉姆-谢泼德（Jim Shepard）的短篇小说《零度潜水队》（The Zero Meter Diving Team）收集在2007年的《好像你会明白》（Like You'd Understand, Anyway）中，呈现了一张更亲密的面孔，和一个更模糊的正义。Boris Yakovlevich Prushinsky是核能部的总工程师，他的两个兄弟被卷入了事故。回想起来，普鲁辛斯基剖析了导致切尔诺贝利事故的疏忽、无能和无情，并问道："一个官僚个人到底能带来多大的变化？这个故事没有找到答案；它甚至暗示，普鲁辛斯基的 "深夜的感伤总是作为安慰而不是洞察力来运作"，仿佛内疚是有罪的人不该有的结局。在普鲁辛斯基的道德痛苦中，谢泼德使切尔诺贝利的永恒期限变得合理。

一位清算人说："这里没有什么英雄主义，""没有什么值得作家动笔的"。
没有任何对切尔诺贝利的文学反应比《切尔诺贝利之声》更值得广泛的读者阅读。一场核灾难的口述历史。2015年获得诺贝尔文学奖的白俄罗斯记者阿列克谢耶维奇，代表了这个社会最广泛的范围，他们的疏离使他们成为 "一个独立的民族。一个新的国家"。在这些页面中，失去亲人的悲惨故事与反对技术傲慢的颂歌并存；思想的历史--"物理学时代在切尔诺贝利结束"--与黑色幽默的斑点形成对比；科学与迷信相撞。累积的效果不是对切尔诺贝利的吸收，而是一种无限的扩张。与其他作品相比，阿列克谢耶维奇的作品更直接地、令人眩晕地瞥见了切尔诺贝利的深渊。


正如克里斯塔-沃尔夫所感受到的那样，这个深渊有可能使书面文字失去意义。一位清算人说："这里没有什么英雄的东西，""没有什么适合作家的笔"。也许，一位历史学家认为，只有陀思妥耶夫斯基可以利用切尔诺贝利。许多声音对那些被故事吸引的人持怀疑态度是正确的。"[切尔诺贝利]有自己的作家，"一位记者说。"但我不想成为利用这个主题的人之一。" 这证明了阿列克谢耶维奇的天赋，她设法包括对她所选择的媒介的批评，并产生了一部讲述语言的持久力量的作品。"我读过很多书，我生活在书中，"一位清算人的妻子说，"但没有什么可以解释这个。" 没有什么可以。但是《切尔诺贝利之声》在读者和幸存者之间建立了一种纽带；理解是不需要解释的。

切尔诺贝利之声》的内容之丰富，说明了为什么这场灾难对文学描写来说如此诱人，作家们对这样一个痛苦而复杂的主题也很大胆。然而，与此同时，切尔诺贝利也自动带上了一种严肃性。切尔诺贝利区的一个普遍现象是所谓的辐射恐惧症，即仅仅因为意识到自己身处该区而产生的身心感觉--喉咙疼痛、视力模糊；这是对真实事物的错误反应。在小说中，甚至在像这样的文章中，切尔诺贝利这个词本身就给人一种悲剧性的敬畏，因此它异常容易被引用来产生规定的效果。

30年来，作家们将他们的想象力投入到 "区 "中，试图破解石棺之谜--如何理解切尔诺贝利？
Darragh McKeon的历史小说《All That Is Solid Melts Into Air》（2014）是切尔诺贝利文学的最新作品。它讲述了一个被叫到核爆区的外科医生、他的前妻和她在莫斯科的钢琴神童的侄子之间的交织故事。这些故事合在一起，意在描绘苏联的最后衰落，而切尔诺贝利事故正是其中的一个原因。它们实际上呈现的是一种文学上的辐射恐惧症，即援引切尔诺贝利的虚假效果。


麦基翁承认他欠了其他关于这个问题的书的债，包括《切尔诺贝利之声》，他的小说包括直接取自口述历史的段落。但是，尽管麦基翁令人钦佩地阅读了所有关于这场灾难的文章，他却忽略了对文学惯例的怀疑态度，这对最好的例子是必不可少的。事实证明，许多坚实的东西还没有融化成空气，其中包括不复杂的英雄主义、明确的道德区别和目的论的历史观。切尔诺贝利被用来象征悲剧，一种铿锵有力的文学腔调似乎侵入而不是来自特区--对于一本人们说 "过去需要忠诚......它是唯一真正属于我们的东西 "这样的话的书来说，这种效果很奇怪。

今年是 "区 "的30周年，是 "区 "的另一个里程碑。今年晚些时候，一个被称为 "新安全监禁"（NSC）的30,000吨钢结构将滑落到石棺上。NSC的设计是为了将辐射再控制100年，希望人类最终能开发出清理该地的技术。正如一位士兵在《切尔诺贝利之声》中所说的那样，"一个20世纪的金字塔"，石棺有一个高大的烟囱为其不对称性加冕，已经成为灾难的一个意外纪念碑。当国家安全委员会就位后，所能看到的只是一条优雅的钢铁曲线。30年来，作者们将他们的想象力投入到 "区 "中，试图破解石棺的谜题--如何理解切尔诺贝利？他们不完美的答案让这个问题继续存在。

迈克尔-拉波因特是驻多伦多的作家和评论家。他为《泰晤士报文学副刊》供稿。