{"id":175067,"date":"2026-09-14T16:14:59","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T20:14:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=175067"},"modified":"2026-09-14T16:14:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T20:14:59","slug":"you-have-to-ask-questions-svetlana-alexievich-unlocked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/09\/14\/you-have-to-ask-questions-svetlana-alexievich-unlocked\/","title":{"rendered":"You Have to Ask Questions: Svetlana Alexievich, Unlocked"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Svetlana Alexievich with a cameraman in Kabul, 1988. Courtesy of Svetlana Alexievich.<\/p><\/div>\n

Each week,\u00a0<\/em>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<\/a>\u00a0interview with Alexievich, we\u2019ve unlocked \u201cVoices from Chernobyl<\/a>\u201d from issue no. 172 (Winter 2004).<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you cut straight to the part you need, which is what journalists do, it won\u2019t be interesting, and it won\u2019t be the truth, either. Not the whole truth,\u201d the Nobel Prize\u2013winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich tells Elena Kostyuchenko in\u00a0The Art of Oral History No. 1<\/a>, published in our new Fall issue. \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Alexievich, whose book about the 1986 explosion at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl was\u00a0excerpted<\/a>\u00a0in issue no. 172 of the\u00a0Review<\/em>, 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\u00a0Novaya gazeta<\/em>\u00a0for seventeen years before the paper was shut down in response to her reporting from Ukraine. \u201cIn these situations,\u201d Alexievich says to Kostyuchenko, \u201cyou have to either make composites of stories, or come up with other tricks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you mean you sometimes put two people\u2019s stories together?\u201d Kostyuchenko asks.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, so neither person can be identified,\u201d Alexievich says. \u201cIt\u2019s still nonfiction, it reflects what people told me at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Voices from Chernobyl<\/strong><\/a>
\nSvetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, \u201cI love you.\u201d But I didn\u2019t know then how much. I had no idea \u2026 We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening\u2014where he was, how he was.<\/p>\n

One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. \u201cClose the window and go back to sleep. There\u2019s a fire at the reactor. I\u2019ll be back soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t come back.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From issue no. 172 (Winter 2004)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sign up for the\u00a0Redux<\/a> newsletter to receive these pieces in your inbox every Sunday morning.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, we\u2019ve unlocked \u201cVoices from Chernobyl\u201d from the archive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31006],"tags":[67827,31384,19741],"class_list":["post-175067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-redux","tag-featured","tag-redux","tag-svetlana-alexievich"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYou Have to Ask Questions: Svetlana Alexievich, Unlocked by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 14, 2026 \u2013 This week, we\u2019ve unlocked \u201cVoices from Chernobyl\u201d from the archive.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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