I had the delightful opportunity to spend the evening of the 21st anniversary of the Chornobyl accident with Sergii Miryni, a writer, scientist, and commander of radiation reconnaissance platoon in Chornobyl in 1986.
I first met Sergii at the opening of a photo exhibition at the Chornobyl museum in March. Last week I attended a reading of his screenplay about Chornobyl. Michael and Dave both took some great photos of the event.
Sergii’s dissertation is titled “Chernobyl Liquidators’ Health as a Psycho-Social Trauma”, and excerpts of it (in fact, most of it) are available on his website. I was fascinated to listen as he retold the process that brought him to writing about Chornobyl, about the struggle to deal with everything he had seen, the work he had done. We discussed numerous books about Chornobyl, and he highly recommended “Chernobyl: A Documentary Story” by Yuri Shcherbak, which unfortunately seems to be out of print. It was this author who expressed what Sergii had noticed himself, too – that there just is not a way, there is not the right language, to adequately describe or discuss Chornobyl. Yet Sergii found writing about Chornobyl to be the only way he could comes to terms with it. His prose (also available in the original Russian and some of it in English translation on his website) is fascinating to read. His latest unpublished book, “Живая сила” (“Live forces”), is, as he describes it, a comedic novel, which he recognizes will be controversial. He explained, though, that it is important to start talking about Chornobyl in a new way. Just as World War I created a whole new genre in literature, so, he feels, will Chornobyl.
Sergii said the most relevant book about Chornobyl contains neither the word “Chornobyl” nor the word “radiation”. The book is Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman. I can’t wait to read it.
Anka in Kyiv 