Svetlana Alexievich with a cameraman in Kabul, 1988. Courtesy of Svetlana Alexievich.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, to read alongside our inaugural Art of Oral History interview with Alexievich, we’ve unlocked “Voices from Chernobyl” from issue no. 172 (Winter 2004). 

“If you cut straight to the part you need, which is what journalists do, it won’t be interesting, and it won’t be the truth, either. Not the whole truth,” the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich tells Elena Kostyuchenko in The Art of Oral History No. 1, published in our new Fall issue. “You have to ask questions, of course. Your job is to scour away the banality and return people to their true selves, to make them face what they rarely tap into.”

Alexievich, whose book about the 1986 explosion at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl was excerpted in issue no. 172 of the Review, has written books about World War II, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the fall of the Soviet Union, all of which were constructed from thousands of recorded first-person testimonies: from women who served in the Soviet army, people who experienced World War II as children, mothers of dead soldiers, villagers who were evacuated from the area around Chernobyl. Her interlocutor is Elena Kostyuchenko, who wrote for the Russian independent newspaper Novaya gazeta for seventeen years before the paper was shut down in response to her reporting from Ukraine. “In these situations,” Alexievich says to Kostyuchenko, “you have to either make composites of stories, or come up with other tricks.”

“Do you mean you sometimes put two people’s stories together?” Kostyuchenko asks.

“Yes, so neither person can be identified,” Alexievich says. “It’s still nonfiction, it reflects what people told me at the time.”

Voices from Chernobyl
Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea … We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was.

One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon.”

I didn’t see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant. The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke. The heat was awful. And he still hadn’t come back.

From issue no. 172 (Winter 2004)

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