In 1989, Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Yavorivsky penned Mary with Wormwood at the End of the Century, a novel which grew out of his work as a Chernobyl correspondent and is set in a village located within the 30-km exclusion zone.
Official Soviet literature responded to the tragedy in its usual fashion, attempting to be true to the “scale of the tragedy”. And so began the gradual de-glorification and mythologisation of the subject. Involved in the recovery operation from 1986 to 1993, Demski describes everyday life amongst the liquidators - the work, the drinking, the widespread thievery, the competitive scientists.
One of the most famous examples of this sort of literature is Anatoli Demski’s Fumes. A poisoned society requires a profound metamorphosis, not just superficial change.Ĭhernobyl often serves as a springboard for tales of lost childhood, friendship, adventure it provides the subject-matter for psychological dramas, historical novels and love stories. Once poisoned, society’s soil and atmosphere must be decontaminated - fully, not partially.
#STALKER SHADOW OF CHERNOBYL ART PROFESSIONAL#
Much like nuclear radiation, the dissolution of all conscience, of moral and professional responsibility, is invisible to the naked eye in both cases, however, the consequences are catastrophic. People construed the accident as a sign that they “couldn’t go on living this way”. Meanwhile, the term “sarcophagus”, used to refer to the special concrete structure enclosing the damaged nuclear reactor, became associated with one of the principal monuments of the Soviet regime - Lenin’s Mausoleum on Red Square. Chernobyl came to epitomise the moral and spiritual degradation of society - hence the coining of the expression “spiritual Chernobyl”. Instead of mounting an evacuation, the authorities proceeded to hold the usual May Day parade on Kiev’s Khreshchatyk Street. In the immediate aftermath of the accident in April to May 1986, the regime attempted to conceal the ensuing catastrophe from the public eye. It is associated with the question of ethical and moral responsibility. The Chernobyl tragedy also had a cathartic dimension of sorts, facilitating a return to oneself via purgation and repentance. For years, Soviet propaganda had terrified the populace by cultivating the idea of a threat - people lived in daily fear of nuclear war with the west but the blow had come from within, and the country was suddenly a danger to itself. It came to be regarded as a portent, a harbinger of societal disaster both domestic and global. Just a year on, however, it was the reverse - a media blackout around the disaster had become impossible to imagine.Ĭhernobyl grew into an extensive metaphor - a metaphor, in fact, for the entirety of Soviet life. The open discussion of the tragedy in the media, underpinned by criticism of the regime’s actions, was unprecedented in the history of the USSR, and would have been inconceivable even in 1986 (information on Chernobyl was initially suppressed, as per old habits). Articles and books about the tragedy, which started to appear in 1987, constitute the first practical realisation of the theoretical notion of glasnost. I have Bitcoin.Chernobyl thus occured between two critical phases of perestroika. DO NOT EMAIL US BEGGING FOR NEW GAMES, LASTEST UPDATES OR PATCHES! YOU WILL BE IGNORED. Please email us at and let us know how you want to donate and we will provide more details. I want to donate via PayPal, credit/debit card or another cryptocurrency. See below for more information on each option. You may donate via PayPal, credit/debit card, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Total expenses are €91 (or $109) per month. We are currently using over 9TB of storage. All games found on this site are archived on a high-speed storage server in a data center. Donate Do you love this site? Then donate to help keep it alive! So, how can YOU donate?Įach donation is used to help cover operating expenses (storage server, two seedboxes, VPN tunnel and hosting).