Narrative strategies in the construction of collective memory in Svetlana Aleksiévitch's voices from Chernobyl

Abstract

This article analyzes the narrative strategies mobilized by Svetlana Aleksiévitch in Voices from Chernobyl for the construction of the collective memory of the 1986 nuclear disaster. The work, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, is composed of testimonies organized in a choral structure and constitutes one of the most complex examples of book-length reportage as a journalistic-literary genre. The guiding research question is: how do Aleksiévitch’s narrative strategies construct the collective memory of the 1986 nuclear disaster? Drawing on qualitative content analysis of the corpus, the study examines four dimensions of the work articulated through the frameworks of Halbwachs, Pollak, Sarlo, Bakhtin, Martinez, Arfuch and Assmann: the polyphonic structuring of voice choirs; the transcription of orality and the treatment of silences as discursive resources; subjectivity and the invisible materiality of radiation as narrative devices; and the function of the text as a site of cultural remembrance. The central argument is that Aleksiévitch's formal choices are epistemic: it is through them that what official history silenced becomes legible. Book-length reportage thus emerges as a device for the construction and preservation of the collective memory of traumatic experiences.