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Narrating the Nuclear at the End of Utopia
Towards the end of Andrei Tarkovsky's science fiction film Stalker (1979) there is a brief sequence that seems so utterly banal it has largely escaped the attention of critics. Just before the last iconic scene in which the apparently disabled young girl, Monkey, moves a number of vessels across a table using telekinetic powers, her mother, the Stalker's wife, speaks directly to the camera. Shot in stark black and white without any background sound, the mother's testimony is something of a realistic aberration in a film otherwise replete with Tarkovsky's signature special effects. The conversation resembles footage from a documentary interview with a victim of disaster, with one crucial difference: instead of speaking about a singular catastrophic event, the woman records in ordinary tones the risks and compromises of everyday life in the Zone, including the embodied labour of childbearing and childrearing: 'My mother was against marrying him, you know. Everybody knows how the children of stalkers turn out. But I was in love [...] And there was happiness, too.'
In retrospect, this fictional interview could as easily have been culled from the over two hundred hours of videotaped conversations that provided Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich with material for her internationally acclaimed book Voices from Chernobyl, released in 1996 on the tenth anniversary of the nuclear meltdown. Alexievich's voices, especially those belonging to women, also deal with disaster in terms of small-scale spaces and the quiet rhythms of quotidian life, labour and love - be it in the hospital nursing a husband who is literally falling apart, or living with radioactive detritus in one's own backyard:
The first time they told us we had radiation, we thought: it was a sort of sickness, and whoever gets it dies right away. No, they said, it's this thing that lies on the ground and gets into the ground, but you can't see it. [...] But that's not true! I saw it. This cesium was lying in my garden, until it got wet with rain. It was an ink-black color. It was just sort of lying there and dripping into pieces. [...] About the size of the kerchief on my head. (Alexievich 2006: 28)
Although Tarkovsky and Alexievich's works are...