\"nuclear belonging\": \"chernobyl\" in belorussian, ukrainian (and russian)...

$: \"Nuclear Belonging\": \"Chernobyl\" in Belorussian, Ukrainian (and Russian) film$
For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV

Contested Interpretations of the Past in Polish, Russian, and

Ukrainian Film

Screen as Battlefield

Edited by

Sander Brouwer

leiden | boston


Contents

Acknowledgements

A Note on Transliteration

Sander Brouwer — Introduction ix

Vitaly Chernetsky — Between the Poetic and the Documentary:

Ukrainian Cinema’s Responses to World War II 1

Lars Kristensen — “Wanna Be in the New York Times?”: Epic History

and War City as Global Cinema 21

Ewa Hanna Mazierska — At War: Polish-Russian Relations in Recent

Polish Films 41

Matilda Mroz — Displacement, Suffering and Mourning:

Post-war Landscapes in Contemporary Polish Cinema 59

Mirosław Przylipiak — “I Am Afraid of this Land”: The Representation of Russia

in Polish Documentaries about the Smolensk Plane Crash 77

Olga Briukhovetska — “Nuclear Belonging”:

“Chernobyl” in Belarusian, Ukrainian (and Russian) films 95

Sander Brouwer — From Empire to Smuta and back. The Mythopoetics

of Cyclical History in Russian Film and TV-Documentaries 123

Sander Brouwer — Tsar Peter, Mazepa and Ukraine: A Love Triangle.

Iurii Illienko’s A Prayer for hetman Mazepa 143

Mariëlle W. Wijermars — Encircling an Unrepresentable Past:

The Aesthetic of Trauma in Karen Shakhnazarov‘s Dreams (1993) 163

Index 183



“Nuclear Belonging”

“Chernobyl” in Belarusian, Ukrainian (and Russian) films

Olga Briukhovetska

“…Those, who Felt Chernobyl ‘in their Teeth’…”

Up until about ten years ago, being abroad for a Belarusian, as well as for a

Ukrainian, always required at some point an explanation of what is

exactly this obscure country that he or she is coming from. Instead of

saying ‘Russia’, which would have been an easy way out of this

geographical trap, I was always choosing to say “Chernobyl,” which is a far

from uncommon way to present the secluded countries (Wendland 2011:

156). Satisfied with an understanding nod of my interlocutor, I never

bothered to pose the question to myself: “What does that mean?” Not that

the obvious fact of the worldwide known worst nuclear reactor accident

demands any elucidation, nor does presenting those who ‘come from’ it as

its victims, whether they actually “felt Chernobyl ‘in their teeth’…” as

Petryna powerfully put it (Petryna 1995: 198) or not. But there is a certain

incongruity between the mere brute fact, the tangible historical referent,

and it being seen as “something that resists comprehension” (Ackerman,

Grandazzi and Lemarchand 2006: 10): the signifier “Chernobyl” is elevated

into what Sarah Phillips calls after Sherry Ortner a “key symbol” (Phillips

2012: 138) or what can also be called after Roland Barthes (1972) a ‘myth’.

“Nuclear belonging” in the title of this article is given in quotation

marks because it is a citation of the title of an unpublished article on

Nuclear Criticism, a short-lived branch of postmodernist thought, with a

major contribution by Jacques Derrida (1984). A review of this

contribution, the unpublished ‘Nuclear belonging,’ was written in June

1991 by Roger Luckhurst, and in the following ‘hot days’ of the ‘collapse of

communism’ it was charged of being “arcane, and in some way

anachronistic” (Luckhurst 1993: 89-90). Almost a year later, in April 1992

(the author includes all this information in the text), Luckhurst wrote a

new article under the title ‘Nuclear Criticism: Anachronism or



96 Olga Briukhovetska

Anachorism,’ in which he charts the plan for Nuclear Criticism “to survive

surviving the Cold War” with its dissolute certainties:

The appearance ‘overnight’ of nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan panicked the

Western press by its dangerous incongruity, its geographic breach of net Cold War

geometrics, its boundary lines, stark divides, good and bad objects. Nuclear

Criticism, to survive surviving the Cold War, must attend to these proliferating

nations, nationalisms, ‘over-night’ nuclear belongings (Luckhurst 1993: 90).

Of course, the figurative form used by the author is far from being

innocent—nuclear weapons did not appear ‘overnight’ in Kazakhstan,

nor did they in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, the three other Soviet

republics that inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union. The

‘overnight’ appearance of Kazakhstan, as well as of Belarus, Ukraine, if not

Russia, much more likely panicked the West because it aroused the

specter of post-war decolonisation. With the nuclear weapons renounced

by all of the newly emerged states (save Russia) within five years after the

acquisition of independence, another, much more toxic ‘nuclear

belonging’ emerged, one that does not fit the ‘phantasm of war.’ That is

the object of deconstruction of Nuclear Criticism and its derivatives

(Derrida 1984; Alexijewitsch and Virilio 1993; Lemarchand 2006), which

demands to be accounted for—“Chernobyl,” the site of the worst nuclear

reactor accident, which ‘belongs’ to Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, although

some talk only about the first two, leaving aside Russia itself (Wendland

2011: 153) and, for that matter, “Semipalatinsk,” the site of the Soviet

nuclear tests, which belongs to Kazakhstan. But what kind of belonging is

this? As Adriana Petryna beautifully put it, hot particles are ‘everlasting

wanderers’ that hardly can belong to anyone: “By its nature, radiation

moves according to shifting winds and the prevalence of rain. It

exacerbates the need for bound truth, historical or otherwise” (Petryna

1995: 215).

Nuclear Trauma

A trauma is no less painful, sometimes even more, when it is localised not

in a part of the body, but in something much less tangible, even if not less

efficacious: a memory, individual or, for that matter, collective. ‘Cultural



“Nuclear Belonging” 97

trauma’ resembles physical radiation injury in its invisibility (as well as

inaccessibility to other senses) and its retroactivity. The growing study of

cultural memory in the light of trauma theory, with Dominick LaCapra

(1996) and Cathy Caruth (1996) as its most authoritative representatives,

and the Holocaust as its locus classicus, has as its central subject traumatic

historic events, the ‘founding traumas,’ to use LaCapra’s term, which form

the core of group identity. The field is rooted in the study of literature,

borrowing either from psychoanalysis or cognitive psychology, although

other disciplines, such as sociology (Saito 2006), also make their

contributions. Of course, this field is not limited to the Holocaust, indeed

a wide variety of traumatic historical events attract the attention of

scholars of cultural memory. The pioneering collective work in this field,

that studies Russian and Soviet contexts, includes an entry on

“Chernobyl,” although it totally departs from the cultural trauma theory:

the author announces that the major trauma of “Chernobyl” is merely of,

as he puts it, ‘info-’character (he indeed uses such a verbal reduction in

the title: Mirnyi 2009). In the study of “Chernobyl” it is Adriana Petryna

who comes closest to cultural trauma theory, even if hers is an

anthropological perspective and the focus is on lived everyday

experiences of what one may call the ‘Chernobyl body’ (Petryna 2002).

When the cultural memory of “Chernobyl” is studied, researchers either

focus on its less stable forms, like rituals and practices (Kasperski 2012;

Bodrunova 2012), or depart from the topic altogether (Hundorova 2013). It

is not surprising that the most comprehensive collective study of

“Chernobyl” was published in an anthropological journal (Arndt (ed.)

2012). One should add here another important moment, the split between

West and East (meaning with the latter in this case Belarus, Ukraine, and

Russia) in terms of a type of reflection on “Chernobyl.” While the West

produces ‘theory’, the East provides documentary ‘resources,’ even if they

come as art, two groundbreaking works of which (Shcherbak 1989;

Aleksievich 1998) are widely recognised in the West for their artistic

merits (Zink 2012). This ‘division of labor,’ which did not go unnoticed

(Degot, n.d.), reflects the wider disparity between the two worlds.

In this article, “Chernobyl” is used in quotation marks, following

the example of Hiro Saito who in this way frames another worldwide

known nuclear signifier, that of “Hiroshima” (Saito 2006). Saito does not

explicate these quotation marks, but the usage seems to be very

appropriate. Both “Hiroshima” and “Chernobyl” not only are ‘master




signifiers,’ or ‘key symbols,’ or ‘myths’, or however one might choose to

call these knots of multiple avenues of meanings. They are also ‘floating

signifiers’: they acquire different, sometimes opposite, meanings with the

changing historical moments. It might be useful to first look at this more

distant nuclear trauma as it underwent the process of ‘nationalisation’

before turning to the main subject of the present study.

Saito identifies three periods (between 1945 and 1957) in the

commemoration of “Hiroshima” after its initial phase of universal, or one

might say global, articulation: as an event belonging to the whole of

humanity, and with the emphasis on the resilience which coincided with

the postwar occupation of Japan, “Hiroshima” becomes a “founding

trauma” (LaCapra cited in Saito 2006) of post-war pacifist Japan. A

twofold period of nationalisation is then constituted through different

“structures of feeling” (Williams cited in Saito 2006), first pity and then

sympathy and solidarity—the second and the third phases of “Hiroshima”

commemoration, respectively. The transition between these phases

occurs in 1954, pertaining to what we can call figuratively a ‘shift in vision.’

While the period of ‘pity,’ according to Saito, centers around the

deplorable spectacle of the immediate survivors of “Hiroshima”

(particularly the so-called ‘A-bomb maidens,’ the young female survivors

with heavily disfigured bodies, particularly the faces with the colloid

scars), the period of ‘solidarity’ transforms these distant ‘them’ into the

intimate ‘us.’ The fisher boat Lucky Dragon 5 accidentally entered the zone

of the USA hydrogen bomb test near Bikini Atoll and was exposed to a

high level of radiation; the tuna from the ship which was distributed

through the markets all over Japan turned out to be contaminated. The so

called ‘tuna horror’ scared Japan, the shock of realisation of one’s own

vulnerability on the scale of the whole nation fostered solidarity with the

most immediate victims and transformed the whole nation into a

“community of wounded actors” (Saito 2006: 354). Such collective

internalisation or, one can even say incorporation, of a wound allows for a

historical event to become a national trauma.

Despite the obvious difference between “Hiroshima” and

“Chernobyl” there are some grounds for their comparison, the radiation

injury of a peaceful population being the major one. From the point of

view of physics, the comparison between “Chernobyl” and “Hiroshima,”

the widely circulating equation of hundreds or even a thousand of




“Hiroshimas” released in “Chernobyl” (Gould 1993: 331), is based on the

wrong premise, since the direct damage caused by a nuclear bomb cannot

be expressed in parameters designed for measuring physical destruction

caused by a nuclear explosion, which worsens in many hundreds or even

thousands times the damage to (not only human) life (Mould 2000, pp.

57-58). Yet “Hiroshima” and “Chernobyl,” marking the beginning and the

end of the Cold War, have a lot in common as cultural traumas which

have undergone a similar process of nationalisation, even if the particular

stages of these processes might differ. “Chernobyl” also had a latent stage,

followed by a rapid increase of interest to it between 1989 and 1992

(Mirnyi 2009: 227) and its subsequent sinking into oblivion. The nature of

this oblivion is put well by the Minsk-based informant of Melanie Arndt:

“Chernobyl cannot be avoided. You can’t take these radioactive

substances out of the soil any more, neither can you wish it (Chernobyl)

away from your life, but this does not mean that the topic is a very current

issue” (Arndt 2012: 3).

Whether it is referred to as a “culture of self-imposed blindness”

(Petryna 1995: 213) or a “culture of coping” (Arndt 2012: 4) this

indifference, which blurs the unavoidable life threat and moves it into the

background, is far from natural. And there is nothing particularly

Belarusian, Ukrainian, or, for that matter, Russian in it. Indeed, as Spencer

Weart reveals in his substantial study of ‘nuclear fear,’ the mechanisms of

denial of fear- and anxiety- producing thoughts and images (the author

puts an emphasis on the latter, with their ‘archaic’, regressive quality) are

universal, people generally tend to be “so disturbed by certain things that

they literally become blind rather than face them” (Weart 1988: 266). The

mechanism of ‘coping’ through ‘blindness’ works on both individual and

collective levels: when continuance of cultural trauma becomes too

damaging, it is simply ignored. In both cases, individual and collective,

there is no such thing as innocent oblivion.

The other important difference between “Hiroshima” and

“Chernobyl” is that while the former ‘belongs’ to a single country—Japan,

although it is far from being Japanese only (Yoneyama 1999: 151-186) the

latter is divided between at least three countries—Belarus, Ukraine, and

Russia. This national plurality does not prevent the process of

nationalisation and the emergence of a cultural trauma, but rather

compartmentalises it. The peoples of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia

together form the East Slav ethnic group which was mythologised in




Soviet times as the ‘three fraternal nations’ (try bratnikh narody in

Ukrainian) that are ‘forever together’ (‘naviky razom’ in Ukrainian, which

was jokingly reformulated as ‘naviky rakom,’ playing on the similarity of

the words razom and rakom; the latter, literally ‘by cancer’, also has an

obscene meaning in colloquial language: staying aloof while offering your

bottom for penetration). After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the

shattering of its mythology, the three nations remain ‘forever’ united with

the ‘circle of shame,’ as the contaminated “Chernobyl” zone was once

referred to (Phillips 2012: 138).

Or do they? The three countries, which are usually mentioned as

the worst victims of “Chernobyl,” have been stricken disproportionally to

their size, although almost equally in absolute figures: 56,920 km2 of

Russian, 46,500 km2 of Belarusian, and 41,900 km2 of Ukrainian territory

(145,320 km2 in total) are contaminated with cesium-137 (half-life 30

years) as a result of the “Chernobyl” explosion (Imanaka 2008: 15). In

relative figures Belarus is by far the worst victim of “Chernobyl,” with 23%

of its territory officially considered contaminated, while, as Melanie Arndt

points out, it still remains in “Ukraine’s shadow” (Arndt 2012: 2)—hence

the particular order of the nations in the present article which intends to

make at least a symbolic retribution to Belarus. Ukraine, which inherited

the stricken power plant station, is believed to have only 14% of its

territory polluted. While about 0.3% of Russian territory located away

from the center on its western fringe is contaminated by “Chernobyl,”

barely noticeable in the scale of the whole country, it is the Russian

version of “Chernobyl” which dominates. This is already evident at the

mere linguistic level with the international establishment of the Russian

spelling “Chernobyl” as the ‘correct’ form (the only exception known to

me so far is found in Shcherbak (1996) who uses the Ukrainian version of

spelling). The Ukrainian spelling is Chornobyl, the Belarusian—Charnobyl.

The question is not whether “Chernobyl” does or doesn’t mean ‘Mugwort’

(Artemisia vulgaris) or ‘Wormwood’ (Artemisia absintium) with the latter

referring to Revelations 8: 10-11, which, as was widely believed, predicted

“Chernobyl” as the poisonous ‘Wormwood star’ that will fall from heaven

(Kasperski 2012: 95–6; Phillips 2011), but which vowel (A-O-E) is used in it.

This single sound reveals much more down-to-earth matters, the power to

impose a particular spelling, which is far from being (geo)politically

innocent.




On the other hand, it is for Belarus and Ukraine that “Chernobyl”

earned a status of national trauma, with an unavoidable touch of perverse

fascination with it, as if it is a national treasure of some sort, a sacred

capital. This sacralisation of the national trauma was very clearly

expressed by one of its ‘priests,’ as she refers to herself, in an interview to

Svetlana Aleksievich: “I am afraid to utter this, but we love Chernobyl. It is

the newly found meaning of our life… The world found out about us

Belarusians after Chernobyl. It was a window to Europe. We are

simultaneously its victims and its priests” (Aleksievich 1998: 167).

The formulation, chosen by the head of Mahiliou branch of

Chernobyl Children, an international charity organisation which supplies

humanitarian aid to the victims of “Chernobyl,” particularly children, is

very revealing: she is “afraid” to spell the truth as if it is something obscene

and sacrilegious, as if she confesses a sin. This sinful feeling is familiar to

everyone ‘coming from Chernobyl,’ the dreadfulness of profiting from the

trauma. This feeling remains unaccounted for in the apparent “weakness

of public memory” (Kasperski 2012: 83) as well as in “historical study”

(Wendland 2011: 154) of “Chernobyl,” and this puzzles Western

researchers, who even note a seeming “non-shock” (Phillips 2011) of the

people who “have banished Chernobyl from their everyday lives” (Arndt

2012: 3). But in order to engage in “Chernobyl” one has to consider it

positively, as a ‘window’ of opportunity, no matter for whom (individual

or collective) or to which area (Europe or elsewhere). To be more precise,

the tendency to see “Chernobyl” in a positive light exists from the very

beginning and is articulated with different arguments along the way,

starting from the notorious ‘heroic effort of the Soviet people,’ for which

“Chernobyl” provides a felicitous pretext during Soviet times, and ending

with a widely acknowledged contribution of “Chernobyl” to the collapse

of the ‘Empire of Evil.’ Functioning as a national “brand” (Menzelevskyi

2013) is “Chernobyl’s” third ‘positive’ articulation. Serhii Mirnyi, who does

not manifest the slightest shadow of fear of his Belarusian counterparts,

straightforwardly launches this Ukrainian ‘branding’ in the concluding

paragraph of the authorised Ukrainian translation of his article on

‘infotrauma,’ while it is absent from the earlier Russian version:

Chernobyl is the Ukrainian phenomenon most known in the world. The reception

of Chernobyl determines to a great degree how the world will see Ukraine: as a

territory poisoned, contaminated and defeated by the nuclear accident, or as a




nation surmounting a catastrophe of global significance, setting an example to the

whole world? The answer can be provided only by us, Ukrainians (Mirnyi 2010: 22).

That such a ‘positive’ approach to “Chernobyl” is not characteristic solely

for the Ukrainian ‘mindframe’ should be clear from the mere

juxtaposition of this citation with Aleksievich’s statement quoted above.

And of course, such statements do not necessarily ‘reflect’ a nation’s

essence, if such a thing exists at all.

The most obvious example of ‘transnationality’ of “Chernobyl” is

related to the ill-famed concept of ‘radiophobia’ and its subsequent

euphemisms, up to ‘info-trauma.’ The term ‘radiophobia’ was deployed by

the Soviet authorities to downplay the damage of human life inflicted by

“Chernobyl.” Although it has disappeared from the current vocabulary,

the idea remains—the trauma is not real, it is imaginary. This argument of

the imaginariness of “Chernobyl” trauma is backed up with the objective

scientific impossibility to establish a radioactive trace in most of the

illnesses that can be attributed to “Chernobyl.” With the ‘real’ trace lost in

the gray area of medical statistics Sarah Phillips brilliantly reverses the

question:

One has to approach Chernobyl related health data not to discover ‘facts’ about

the disaster’s consequences, but more as an exercise in socio-political analysis of

the perspectives and vested interests of those generating the statistics (Phillips

2011).

Statistics can vary dramatically when it comes to counting victims of

radiation. The difference in figures can amount to twenty times, as it is

the case with the two authoritative international reports on “Chernobyl”

released in 2006, on its twentieth anniversary, and commissioned by the

parties opposing each other on the issue of nuclear industry: IAEA, its

major promoter, and Greenpeace, its opponent (Imanaka 2008: 18). One

should always look at the interests behind the numbers. The conclusion of

the Chernobyl Forum that “the mental health impact of Chernobyl is the

largest public health problem unleashed by the accident to date”

(Chernobyl Forum: 36) is supposedly aimed against the victimisation of

people which enhances their dependence on outside help. Emphasising

resilience, it intends to help people not to give up the idea of being able to

take life in your own hands. This might at first sound convincing (no one




wants to support ‘learned helplessness’) but it does point, upon closer

inspection, at the not so noble interests of a neoliberal ‘shrinking state,’

which in a hazardous striptease takes off one obligation to the people

after another. When ‘freedoms,’ real or imaginary, are granted to (not

taken by) the people this usually involves seizing their rights to

participate in welfare. In fact this policy of withdrawing welfare is

advanced both in the West and in the East. Western technocratic power

with its mere adornment of human rights and democracy is manifested in

the Chernobyl Forum, a “textbook illustration” of “scientific denial”

(Grandazzi 2006). Eastern authoritarian populism pertains to exactly the

same denial, albeit less scientific, and is manifested in one of the most

audacious programs of President Aliaksandr Lukashenka, that of the

rehabilitation and the repopulation of the zone, promoted by him from

his first day in the office. And both are derivatives of the Soviet ‘radio-

phobia.’

Whether it is “at risk to become a mere footnote in the history

book” (Arndt 2012: 1) or whether it will continue to be registered in

cultural memory, “Chernobyl,” pregnant with “Charnobyl” and

“Chornobyl,” transcends national borders.

Screen Memory

In this article I focus only on a particular area, or rather, a medium of

cultural memory, that of the cinema, the ‘carrying capacities’ of which,

together with an ability to manufacture a “simultaneity-in-time” required

for an “imaginary community” to appear (Anderson 2006) are well known.

Christian Metz famously called this quality of a screen image an

“imaginary signifier” (Metz 1982) even if an image (together with a sound)

is a “portion of a signified” as Deleuze correctly pointed out (Deleuze 1986:

28). The present work might have been grounded in the term ‘screen

memory,’ if this term did not have a very precise meaning vested on it by

its inventor: for Freud a ‘screen memory’ (Deckerinnerung) covers a ‘real’

traumatic memory, which is too painful for the consciousness to attend to

(Freud 1899). The reason for not appropriating this term for the present

study is that from the outset it makes all films equally ‘false,’ which they

are only to different degrees. This also implies that a screen can be

opposed to life and measured according to its fit (the so-called ‘reflection




theory’). But even where such comparison is productive it tends to naïvely

miss the point that a film is also an event among other events in life. And

sometimes it can reveal something which eludes a real, lived experience.

Before turning to the analysis of Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian

feature films about “Chernobyl” let me make a brief explanatory note.

These films do not belong to the greatest artistic achievements. That a

nuclear topic does not couple with artistic sophistication was already

indicated by Jacques Derrida (Derrida 1984: 27-28). Derrida attributes the

capacity to touch directly what is at stake in the ‘nuclear epoch’ to the

works of Modernist art (Mallarmé, Kafka, Joyce) that never explicitly

address the issue. Obliqueness achieves more than a loyal imitation of

reality, characteristic for the lower genres. It is no surprise that Roger

Luckhurst, by ‘crossbreeding’ Derrida with atomic war fiction, transforms

his derivative from the unpublished article into an advocacy of mass

culture (Luckhurst 1993: 91-96)—such false generosity was widespread in

the heyday of postmodernism.

Belarusian and Ukrainian fiction films about “Chernobyl” appear in

surprising concord even if there is no actual coordination between the

two countries. Both Belarus and Ukraine produced two films about

“Chernobyl” and made them at exactly the same time. The first films were

made in 1990, on the fifth anniversary of “Chernobyl,” the second films,

with a marginal distance of one year (2005, 2006) on its vigintennial. Both

pairs of films, the first and the second, manifest clear commemorative

patterns; they coincide with the round dates, even if this does not explain

why these particular ones, and not others, were chosen. There is an

important difference between the historical moments in which these two

pairs of films emerge. The first films were advanced during the highest

peak of the interest in “Chernobyl”, but also while the collapse of the

Soviet Union was nearing, an “anthropological shock” (Beck 1987) of a

much larger magnitude than “Chernobyl,” which eventually forced the

latter away from the Post-Soviet social consciousness, if not from its

physical reality. The second films, on the other hand, returned to what

had become a relatively marginal topic entrenched in social oblivion. The

Russian screen does not fit this neat symmetry of commemorative

patterns. ‘Russian’ is surrounded with brackets in the title of this article

because “Chernobyl” is virtually absent from Russian cinema until very




recently. It broke the screen only in 2011, although obliquely it already

appeared at least in four Russian films of the first half of the 1990s.

National Markers

In a process not unlike the Russian pronunciation of “Chernobyl”

becoming established as the correct version internationally, the

Belarusian and Ukrainian films are shot in the Russian language, obeying

the same logic of its linguistic transparency. The marker of the language is

powerfully simple and all-encompassing, but there exist more, so to say,

‘local’ markers of Russian belonging. In the first Belarusian film Wolfs in

the Zone (Volki v zone, 1990, dir. Viktor Deriugin, Impulse Studios) such a

local marker occurs in an uncanny setting of the zone where a Party boss

is brought after being kidnapped by two friends, a ‘good’ (former) cop and

a ‘bad’ one. The main character, who is, of course, the ‘good cop,’ stands

alone against the predators (hence the title of the film) in defense of

‘Russian soil’ (russkaia zemel’ka)—and he uses the diminutive form

zemel’ka, which does not exist in Russian and, presumably, connotes

‘Belarusianness,’ real or imaginary. There is also a somewhat inconsistent

statement made by the boss: as he swirls deeper into toxication he keeps

reiterating with regret “My mother told me to stay at home!” The ‘home’

remains unnamed, but it is very unlikely to be Belarus. This presumably

non-Belarusian Party boss is endowed with an inherently treacherous

purport in the film: in a swing of mood he works himself into enthusiasm

about an idea to turn the zone into a tourist resort with all the First World

luxury. When, on the other hand, it comes to explicitly acknowledging

Belarusian belonging, and this moment occurs in the film once, the

subject marked with it bears negative connotations as well, even if his

crimes (selling contaminated cherries at the local market) are much more

innocent than that of the boss. For the first time this Belarusian nuclear

smuggler is shown at the checkpoint exiting the zone, where he is caught

with the cherries, which are thrown down the hill. In the fruitless effort to

prevent this he tries to appeal to his “brothers, Belarusians” to no avail.

Later in the film he is shown selling cherries at the local market, not to

appear again.

In the first Ukrainian film Decay (Raspad, 1990, dir. Mikhail Belikov,

Dovzhenko Film Studios, Peter O. Almond Productions) the main




character, a journalist, refers to himself as “us, Russians” before breaking

into a passionate declamation about the “irresponsibility and corruption”

of the whole society, which is decomposing under his eyes. The Ukrainian

language actually forces its way through the linguistic transparency of

Russian. One family in the film speaks colloquial Ukrainian, neither the so

called surzhyk (a condescending name for the mixture of Ukrainian and

Russian usually typical to recently urbanised peasants) nor the literary

Ukrainian. This family is singled out from the inhabitants of Prypiat, the

‘City of Atom’ (atomohrad in Ukrainian) which hosted workers from the

Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This nuclear family (a mother, a father,

and a son), which is wiped out with the explosion of “Chernobyl,” is

interestingly symmetrical with the other one, that of the protagonist,

which, albeit in a less verbatim sense, also disintegrates during the course

of the film. In the second Ukrainian film Aurora (Avrora, 2006, dir.

Oksana Bairak, Bairak-studio, In West Distribution) the main character,

an orphaned child, is taken to a private hospital in the USA after receiving

a severe radiation injury (in reality all the injured were sent to Moscow as

there was no orphanage in the ‘city of the future’). She is referred to in the

film as a “Russian girl.” Surprisingly, only the second Belorussian film I

remember (Ia pomniu, 2005, directed by Sergei Sychev, Belarusfilm)

withstands this alluring power of Russian belonging… at the cost of

avoiding any national markers (beside the language): in this film the land

is simply ‘ours.’

Journey to the Zone

Despite a number of differences between the two Belarusian and the two

Ukrainian films they share the basic outline of their narrative trajectory,

that of a journey to the zone. The journey is undertaken by the main

character alone; he or she is a hero on a mission. In the first Belarusian

film he takes revenge on the corrupt Party boss. The mission is

accomplished, the boss is dead, and so are the rest. In the first Ukrainian

film the hero wants to tell the truth about the zone, but reality itself melts

down under the high levels of radiation and starts resembling a

hallucination. In these first films the missions are inverted yet

complementary: in the Belarusian film—to seal the borders of the zone,




that is leaking murderous substances, and in the Ukrainian film—to

break the borders of the zone, starting the free flow of information.

In the second Belarusian film the protagonist goes to the zone, to

his abandoned native village, in order to die (at least it is initially

interpreted so in the film), only to come back to life. He is conveniently

provided with the mission on the spot—to paint the church which is

under construction. In the second Ukrainian film the motivation for the

journey that takes place at the very moment of the fatal explosion, to

what will become the zone, is as implausible as its very possibility: a

disciple of an orphanage walks a number of kilometers at night to visit a

fireman on duty; but the mission is stronger than any reason—she looks

for her father and sees him in the fireman. After receiving a lethal dose of

radiation she is taken away to the USA, where she finally finds the ‘father,’

a famous choreographer and a Russian émigré. But it is too late, she dies,

and her newly-found ‘father’ dedicates his staging of the ballet Sleeping

Beauty to her, the ‘Russian girl.’ The striking shift in type of protagonist

distinguishes the second Ukrainian film from the rest: it is no longer a

mature person who bears responsibility for his or her actions but a child, a

passive object and sufferer of the actions of the others for which it can

carry no responsibility whatsoever. There is also a correspondence

between the missions in the two second films: they both pertain to the

quest for the ‘father,’ or to use Lacanian term, the Other, even if in the

Ukrainian film this quest is much more explicit. The paternal figures,

which are multiple in the second Belarusian film, provide the main

character with the mission: he meets some ‘elders’ in the zone, who want

him to paint icons from them, assuring that in doing so “there will be no

sin” (grekha ne budet).

In Russian films of the first half of the 1990s which deal with a zone

(here an abstract one), this narrative trajectory of a journey is also clearly

manifested but, unlike in the Belarusian and Ukrainian films, it is

accomplished not by a single person, but by a couple. In one film (Third

Planet [Tret’ia planeta], 1991, dir. Aleksandr Rogozhkin, Film Consulting,

Lenfilm), the couple consists of a father and a daughter, in three others—

of lovers: future (Tomorrow. Nuclear Princess [Zavtra. Iadernaia

printsessa], 1992, dir. Aleksandr Pankratov, Kvadrat Studios, Guild of

Filmmakers, ETO Ladia, Gorky Film Studios), actual (Year of the Dog [God

sobaki], 1994, dir. Semen Aranovich, Lenfilm, SODAPERAGA), or former

(Monsters [Monstry], 1993 dir. Sergei Kuchkov, Sinebridge).




This inward trajectory of the journey to the/a zone turns outwards

in two later films that commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of

“Chernobyl:” Innocent Saturday (V Subbotu, 2011, dir. Aleksandr

Mindadze, Passenger Studio, Bavaria Film, Sota Cinema Group, Russia,

Germany, Ukraine) and Land of Oblivion (La terre outragée, 2011, dir.

Michale Boganim, Les Films du Poisson, Vandertastic Films, Apple Film

Productions, France, Ukraine, Poland, Germany). In these films the

protagonists are not traveling into the zone, but are trying, without

success, to escape from it. There is no mission in these films, only a

meaningless return of the same.

Even if it takes us beyond the scope of the present article, I would

like to briefly mention here two other titles, the Swedish avant-garde film

Container (2006, dir. Lukas Moodysson) and the American horror film

Chernobyl Diaries (2012, dir. Bradley Parker) which explicitly deal with

“Chernobyl.” In these films the narrative trajectory is directed both inward

and outward, albeit in a much different manner: in the Swedish film,

“Chernobyl” is both inside and outside of the main character going

through a depression, in the American film the zone becomes a trap for

the tourists, with no easy escape.

Such is the general outline of some the key points (national

markers and narrative trajectories) characteristic for all Belarusian,

Ukrainian, and Russian fiction films about “Chernobyl.” Let us now look

closer at each of the films.

Decay

The title of the first Ukrainian film about “Chernobyl” has very telling

political connotations. The word ‘decay’, raspad in Russian, rozpad in

Ukrainian, in both languages means decay of an atom in nuclear physics,

as well as political or personal decomposition. This word is often used in

phrases like ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’ (raspad Sovetskogo Soiuza) in

Russian, or ‘disintegration of personality’ (rozpad osobystosti) in

Ukrainian. The grotesque political decay is tangible everywhere in the

film beginning from its very prologue, in which a train comes to a halt

because rails suddenly disappear underneath it: we see the pale face of an

elderly locomotive operator (a locomotive being a well established




symbol of the October Revolution) peering down; the fixed horror of his

gaze reveals nothing, where there should have been something,

resembling the Freudian structure of a castration scene. The main

character of the film does indeed undergo a multiple castration: he loses

his wife, then reality, then himself. Although it is not an explicit story of

madness, this is exactly what goes on in the film. The disintegration of the

main character begins when he enters the zone, and culminates when he

fades into a standstill in an absurd patriotic ritual with a red flag at the

highly contaminated rooftop of the Third reactor of the stricken power-

plant station—while time works up the lethal doses. This key episode in

the film refers to the actual hoisting of a red flag at the funnel of the Third

Block after the extremely harsh clean-up work of its roof was

accomplished (Daum and Kostin 2012). The ‘event’ was staged for the

official delegation of the Soviet authorities, although Gorbachev, who was

intended as a major subject of this gaze, avoided the ‘journey to the zone.’

The red flag on top of the Third reactor was supposed to be a sign of

victory similarly to the red flag over the Reichstag in 1945. After all, the

official Soviet “Chernobyl” was fashioned after the model of the ‘Great

Patriotic War,’ with the discourse of a heroic effort of the Soviet people

struggling against an enemy, this time ‘invisible.’ From the rooftop of the

reactor the film cuts back to Kyiv, to the office of the journalist’s boss.

Visually transformed into a typical apparatchik, there the journalist is

watching the red flag video. This abrupt shift in locations marks a gap in

reality which is left after the penetration of the zone. During the course of

the film reality becomes less coherent even if is recuperated at the end

with the wife of the main character reuniting with him.

The other interesting point about Decay pertains to its American

‘link,’ which I already discussed elsewhere (Briukhovetska 2010): Decay

has as its prototype the American antinuclear disaster film The Day After

(1983, dir. Nicholas Meyer, ABC Circle Films) which was shown on Soviet

television after “Chernobyl.” Suffice it to point out here that although

there are a number of similarities, there are major differences between

the two films: the nuclear hell is imaginary in the American film and real

in the Ukrainian; and the former is deadly serious, while the latter is, no

less deadly, grotesque.




Wolves in the Zone

The first Belarusian fiction film about “Chernobyl” has no sign of the black

humor of its Ukrainian counterpart; it is an action film, or boevik, as these

films were called in Russia in the early 1990s, which takes place in a town

bordering with the zone. The main character is a former policeman, who

has resigned from his job in a gesture of protest against the creeping

corruption under the local Party boss, who supervises the smuggling of

contaminated valuables from the zone. The main character lives in

poverty with his blind mother, but instead of taking care of her he

endeavours in redeeming the wrongdoings of the world, still behaving as a

‘cop.’ He keeps policing special burial places (mogilniki in Russian) where

the contaminated objects are supposed to be consigned, and observes

how some of them escape this fate and are brought back in circulation

again. It is through him, as his recollection, that we see the ill-famed visit

to this bordering town of the first secretary of the Central Committee of

the Communist Party of Belarus, which actually took place in reality.

During his trip the first secretary, with the revealing name Sliunkou

(meaning also ‘coward’), tried to persuade the people living on the

contaminated territory that it was safe. However, people saw how he

changed his clothes before getting out of the car and then threw them

away after leaving (Piatrovich 2011), and this episode is recreated in the film.

If the main character is a local version of the ‘good cop,’ his mate,

still working in the militsiia, is definitely a ‘bad cop.’ He contrives a plot of

kidnapping the Party boss and bringing him ‘into the zone’ (‘behind

barbed wire’, za koliuchku), but his motivations are far from noble. When

the main character realises this, he walks away as he is interested only in a

restoration of justice. Deep into the zone he is led by a mysterious glow

which shows him the way to his own home. Upon arrival there he shoots a

looter and kneels in front of the scattered family photos, particularly

mesmerised by one, where he as a little boy is seen near (but not with) his

father wearing an illustrious military outfit. This missing parental figure

reappears in the film as the enigmatic Zone-Man (Chelovek-Zona), who at

the end brings the nearly dead body of the main character in an

underground shelter, where he keeps improvised religious and national

symbols: a candle and a towel with embroidery (rushnyk). The double

name of Zone-Man is his first word in the film (before speaking it he is




just a silent observer), and the last word of the film, followed by the

author’s voice over: “If a child is taken away early from the maternal

breast it will survive, but will be sick; the same will happen to a human

from whom God was taken away.” The image which is superimposed on

this admonition just reinforces this paternalistic ideology: a pastoral

landscape with a field in the background, a cross on the foreground, and

an elder couple, a man seeding a ground and a women praying in front of

him. This image travels to the second Belarusian film where it finds its

grounding.

I Remember

The second Belarusian film, the most helpless one artistically and the

most servile politically, contains a striking internal contradiction related

to the opposition clean—contaminated. Similarly to the mendacious

Sliunkou, or the not less mendacious Lukashenka, it says one thing and

does (or, for that matter, shows) the opposite. This opposition pertains in

the film to a very sensitive topic of the death of a child.

Hitchcock once was criticised for violating this taboo in his

Sabotage (1936), where a child unknowingly carries a bomb and is killed

in an explosion (Truffaut 1985). To be more precise, it was the meanness

and contingency of the ‘cause’—a random act of terror, which does not

provide a sufficient moral ground for a sacrifice—that scandalised the

death of the child in this film. Radiation resides in the realm of myth (see

for a substantial study of the process of its mythologisation Weart 1988).

An impossible event, the death of a child, is much more ‘justified’ when it

is vested in a myth. And as such it is shown in both Ukrainian films about

“Chernobyl,” not directly, of course, but as an inevitable outcome. For

Belarus, the theme of death and, for that matter, illness, of a child, even

the risk of radiation injury, is much more pressing (Hundorova 2012,

Bodrunova 2012). “We are living in a country of dying children” says

Belarusian photographer Anatol Klashchuk, who documents the suffering

of the patients of the special ontological clinic for children with the ill-

famed name Baraulany (Klashchuk 2011). ‘Chernobyl children,’ originally

the name of the charity organisation network founded in 1991 to provide

relief for the contaminated territories, and particularly active in Belarus,




became a “transnational lieu de mémoire,” as is aptly pointed out by

Melanie Arndt (2012: 6).

Back to the second Belarusian film about “Chernobyl,” in which

(unlike its Ukrainian counterparts) the death of a child from a radiation

injury is not shown on the screen, but repressed from the visual field into

a much safer, verbal one. This tendency is already present in the first

Belarusian film, which does not touch upon this topic at all. However, the

traumatic idea of a death of a child manifests itself in it as a question

uttered by a unanimous boy from the crowd, who came to the meeting

with ‘Sliunkou’. The boy asks the first secretary: “Are we all going to die?”

(My vse umrem?) never to appear in the film again. The repression of this

traumatic idea goes even deeper in the second Belarusian film, where the

death of the child is even more distant, although accomplished. It does

not involve any screen characters and is simply told by Kateryna, a young

blonde nurse. The child is a grandson of the former owner of the house

which now belongs to her. Kateryna moved in this house to escape her

obtrusive admirer, a rude and uncultivated “profiteer” (baryga), as she

refers to him. With the help of the main character, an artist obsessed with

“Chernobyl,” she finds out that the cause of the child’s death is a

radioactive timber which was palmed off by a common construction

worker who was not satisfied with his wages. Meanwhile in the zone,

where the main character, the artist, returns, local elders emphasise that

the timber used for the construction of the church is clean, and

demonstrate this with a dosimeter that keeps silent. Thus what was

contaminated outside the zone miraculously becomes clean inside of it.

Such ideological inversions guide the whole film. The main character,

unable to work any more and to have sexual relations, goes to the zone on

a suicidal leap to unexpectedly awaken there for a new life full of

productivity and procreation.

I remember proves that President Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s policy

of revival of the zone could be propagated only at the expense of memory,

the debilitating loss of which during the course of the film calls for a more

proper title—I do not remember. This inversion in the film reflects the real

substitution of cultural memory performed by Lukashenka. The annual

commemorative rally known as ‘Chernobyl Path’ was first organised on

September 30, 1989 by the Belarusian Popular Front, the major

oppositional force at the time, and has become one of the culminating




points of the popular uprising against the Soviet power. From 1996 it

became a vehicle for the opposition against Lukashenka’s authoritarian

rule. On its side, official Minsk launched a ‘simulacrum’ of the rally under

the same title (‘Chernobyl Path—Road of Life,’ usually designated only

with the first half); it propagates both the revival of the contaminated

territories and authoritarian populism (Kasperski 2012). Whether it

‘delegates’ its repressed omnipotence to the regime of Lukashenka

(Marples 2006) or not, “Chernobyl” undergoes a similar ‘transmutation’ in

the second Belarusian film. Like the official ‘Chernobyl Path,’ the second

film erases the emancipative intensions of its ‘original’.

There is, however, an interesting example of cinematic memory,

which resists erasure and establishes a dialog between the two Belarusian

films. A blonde nurse of the same name, although of much less prudish

outlook, is also present in the first Belarusian film. The affinity between

two Katerynas is emphasised when the second pronounces, word for

word, albeit in much different circumstances, the rhetorical question of

her predecessor: “Would you be able to live on the nurse’s salary?” which

explains and justifies her moves. However, two Katerynas are rather the

opposites of each other. The first one remains incorruptible even if she

exposes her naked body on the screen. The second one, despite her

apparent modesty, can shamelessly bargain herself to her baryga. The first

Kateryna is killed (accidently) by her unlucky boyfriend, the ‘bad cop,’ the

second one survives for her radiant future.

Aurora

There is also a radiant future in the second Ukrainian fiction film about

“Chernobyl,” where it is present in the main character’s dreams. Alongside

her mission to find her absent father, Aurora dreams to become a

ballerina and successfully uses “Chernobyl” to make this dream come true.

Even if at the end she has to die, she does it after being recognised by her

newly found ‘father,’ who appreciates her talent. To be more precise, the

orphan-character already inhabits the first Ukrainian film, but in the

second it comes to dominate. The orphan of the first film is a young son of

the only Ukrainian speaking family in the film, of which both parents die

in the accident. The child is shown alone during the evacuation of the

inhabitants of Prypiat, which is recreated in the film with a lot of




attention to the historical details: the endless convoy of yellow Ikarus

buses and the empty eyes of the herded people, wide open into the

nothingness which suddenly breaks through everyday reality. We see the

boy at a checkpoint at the exit from the zone, where people are examined

for radiation contamination; he is found to be very contaminated: he has

been holding underneath his clothes a radioactive kitten, which is thrown

away by the officer. The next time we see him, the orphaned boy wanders

into a hospital in which abortions are performed, passing by the sorrowful

women awaiting their turn. For one last time we see him in an uncanny

apparition revealed to the journalist from the bird-eye view of a

helicopter during its flight over the petrified Prypiat. We see the bald

spots on the child’s head, the best known indicator of a radiation injury.

We see the message to his mother, the giant letters of which he, as a

typical Soviet child, draws with a piece of chalk on the central square:

“Mommy, come home, I have already…”; and frightened by the

approaching helicopter the ghost-boy runs away to fold together with the

radioactive kitten in front of the locked door of his home; he then forever

disappears from the film. Contrary to this, the second Ukrainian film on

“Chernobyl” opens new windows of opportunities for the child, who is

here orphaned from the very beginning. “Chernobyl” becomes her cultural

capital, which Aurora manages well, despite her apparently desperate

physical state, of which, beside the hair loss, she does not show the

slightest symptoms.

The Zone

Despite the diversity of their genres, as disparate as melodrama and trash-

horror, the four Russian fiction films of the first half of 1990s share a

common ground—an abstract zone contaminated by an invisible

hazardous force; the rusty signs with an emergency triangle leave doubts

about its nature. The articulations of the zone diverge from film to film. If

it is populated it is either a place of a higher evolution of the human race

(The Third Planet) or one of monstrous mutations, which threaten man’s

survival (Monsters). If the zone is desolated, it provides an escape for the

lovers who for a brief moment possess a whole world even if doom is

drawing near to them (Tomorrow. Nuclear Princess and Year of the Dog). In




fact, this motif of a couple stalking through the zone appears already in

Decay as a side story: the newlyweds go on their honeymoon take a

motorbike trip on the day of “Chernobyl,” only to find out later that the

area is highly contaminated and that they have received a lethal dose of

radiation. This romantic doom is particularly prominent in Tomorrow,

where the couple is young, the freedom is sweet, and the world is

abundant. It is no surprise that both couples—the Ukrainian and the

Russian—end up kneeing in the church. Whatever the story in each

particular Russian film, the zone provides a geographical or, one may say,

geopolitical solution to a lack in existence through what is essentially a

sexual act, either ‘raw’ or sublimated into a desire to penetrate an

unknown. This “stalkerism” explains an attraction of “Chernobyl,” “one of

the world’s most unique adventure travel destinations” according to

Forbes (Phillips 2012: 129). It is played upon in all four Russian films, not

to mention their ‘Godfather,’ Andrei Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1979). Instead of

concrete historical reality there is the “indeterminacy of what lies beyond

the limit” (Žižek 1999: 227) of an abstract zone. The zone becomes a zone,

a somewhere, utopian or dystopian.

Innocent Saturday

Only twenty-five years after “Chernobyl” the concrete historical reality

finally breaks through the Russian screen, even if the most artistically

accomplished film about “Chernobyl” to date, the Russian-German co-

production Innocent Saturday (2012), according to Johanna Lindbladh,

aims at something much bigger than “Chernobyl” (Lindbladh 2012: 114).

This film functions precisely as a Freudian ‘screen memory,’ which covers

the much more traumatic event, to which the social consciousness of

present-day Russia, with its increasingly authoritarian rule and imperialist

ambitions, is not able to attend directly. For the founding trauma of Post-

Soviet Russia is not “Chernobyl,” but the ‘collapse of the Soviet Union.’

The film dwells upon perestroika’s questions of personal

responsibility, but does so in a much different manner comparing to the

real perestroika films, of which the first Belarusian and Ukrainian fiction

films about “Chernobyl” are perfect examples. Twenty years after their

release, in the first Russian film about “Chernobyl” the very ability to wake

up and take responsibility, when life with its overpowering everydayness




calls for the opposite, is undermined. In this respect the final sequence of

shots of Innocent Saturday is very revealing. The main character, who

during the course of the whole film fails to escape from the invisible

nuclear hell, is confronted with a dreadful hallucinatory image, too close

to be true, of the Fourth reactor’s cavity thrown out by the explosion. In a

gesture of pure impotence, that is of powerless rage, the main character

threatens this monster run amok with his fist, manifesting the utter

incongruity of the human scale. The film stirred a discussion in Russia,

and was even forbidden in Belarus, for it does not fit the official heroic

image of “Chernobyl” (idem: 114-5, 118). The latent political and explicit

sexual meanings are intimately intermingled in the film, which, unlike its

Russian predecessors, traverses the oedipal trajectory. The couple which

is forcefully formed at the very beginning of the film falls apart very soon,

and the protagonist is left lonely and lost in his life. Director Mindadze

proclaimed that the film is not about “Chernobyl,” but about the ‘Russian

character’ (russkii kharakter) (idem: 117).

Evaporation of History, Domestication of the Zone

One can observe through the succession of the fiction films about

“Chernobyl” a change in both the sense of history and the status of the

zone. In the second Belarusian and Ukrainian films history, which was

very efficacious in the first couple, evaporates, and the alienated zone gets

domesticated again. If, as I demonstrated earlier, the second Belarusian

film inscribes the loss of memory in the very filmic text in the second

Ukrainian film this type of social obliteration acquires no less hazardous

forms, albeit in a more oblique way. First, since the second Ukrainian film,

similarly to the first, takes us back in the past to the moment of the fatal

explosion, it invites the simple measurement of its fidelity to the facts.

Aurora turns out to be very promiscuous in this respect, confusing

geographical locations and historical dates. The most outrageous example

of the former is that the town of Chernobyl in the film is shown to be

closer to the stricken station than Prypiat, although in truth Chernobyl is

located more than fourteen kilometers away from the station while

Prypiat only three. As for the dates, it is shown in the film that the

inhabitants of the Prypiat orphanage watch the May Day demonstration




on TV, which, as, is well known, indeed took place upon the irresponsible

insistence of Moscow, in order to maintain an air of normalcy (at the

expense of the population’s health, exposing people to the radiation when

its levels were particularly high). The only problem is that by that time the

city of Prypiat had undergone full evacuation—from which, it seems, its

nonexistent orphanage is ironically omitted in the film. Beside these and

other scandalous lapses, there is in the film an extra-textual erasure of

memory so disgraceful that it deserves mentioning here. Aurora was

promoted as the first Ukrainian film about “Chernobyl” (Kuprienko 2005)

demonstrating a deplorable negligence toward its predecessor, from

which the central motif of the “Chernobyl” orphan was borrowed, to say

nothing of its Belarusian counterparts.

The name Aurora also deserves special attention. It is a highly

implausible name for the late Soviet period since it was firmly attached to

the famous cruiser which fired the salvo of the October Revolution. The

fact that the authors play on this highly charged signifier through the

direct reference to the 1980s children song starting with the line: “What

are you dreaming about, cruiser Aurora?” is revealed in the initial title of

the film: Aurora, Or What Sleeping Beauty Was Dreaming About

(Palchikovskii 2005). Thus a strange equivalence is established between

the three—a Sleeping Beauty and two Auroras, the girl and the cruiser.

This equivalence remains an empty play of signifiers from which a

meaningful history has evaporated. Let us leave the question of what this

evaporation of history in both second films tells about the concrete

historical moment, open for now.

The second pattern manifested in the two couples of films,

Belarusian and Ukrainian, concerns the status of the zone. In both first

films the recently emerged zone is endowed with an uncanny quality. The

alienation zone is something that ceases to be a home, something that

becomes distant and unfamiliar, or, to use the original German Freudian

word, unheimlich. To paraphrase Freud with Freud, the motto of the

second film is “What should have been ‘heimlich’ became ‘unheimlich.’”

In Freud’s 1919 study of the subject, the specific context of this

paraphrased utterance points out the scope of the meaning of the word

‘heimlich’ itself: from meaning ‘familial and congenial’ through ‘that

which is concealed and kept away of sight’ it “develops towards an

ambivalence until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich”

(Freud 1919: 226). It follows from the previous discussion that the process




of domestication of the zone is particularly explicit in the second

Belarusian film, in which the official policy of its revival is promoted, but

it is also present in the second Ukrainian film. Aurora undertakes her

pilgrimage to the epicenter of the explosion attracted by the imaginary

familial bonds with the fireman. Even if her quest does not stop here, its

success becomes possible only due to her descent into a nuclear hell,

which in the representational system of the film resembles her namesake,

a dawn—not the cruiser.

The Russian film about “Chernobyl” manifests an adverse

tendency, that of awakening of historical memory rather than its decay. It

remains a question whether this belatedness is a sign of backwardness or

not, if at all it should be measured according to the Belarusian and

Ukrainian timetables, but at the present moment it is the Russian film

that comes closest to the historical truth of “Chernobyl.” It acknowledges

the irreparable loss, the shrinking geo-body, inflicted by it, although, as we

already know, the real stake of this bemoaning lies elsewhere.

The most striking similarity between the Belarusian and Ukrainian

films about “Chernobyl” belongs to the realm of absence. The Ukrainian

films do not have space for a Belarusian “Chernobyl” (or, dare I say,

“Charnobyl”) and vice versa. This lack of mutual recognition between

Ukraine and Belarus is, as we have already seen, articulated with Russian

national belonging. But is it really possible? To cite Petryna again, the hot

particles, by which radiation is carried around, these ‘everlasting

wanderers’ exacerbate any bounding. Petryna concludes her brilliant

study of the meaning of the Sarcophagus, the first and the only

containment construction over the open core of the Fourth reactor, with

the open question, which I would like to reiterate here: “to whom do these

wanderers belong?”

Bibliography

Ackerman, G., Grandazzi, G., Lemarchand, F. (eds) 2006. Les silences de Tchernobyl.

L’avenir contaminé, Paris: Édition Autrement.

Aleksievich, S. 1998. Chornobyl: Khronika Maibutnioho. Trans. by Oksana Zabuzhko. Kyiv:

Fakt, 1998.

Alexijewitsch, S. & Virilio, P. 2003. ‘Radioaktives Feuer: Die Erfahrung von Tschernobyl,

(Radioactive fire: experience of Chernobyl)’ Lettre international, Vol. 60, pp. 11–16.




Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, Revised Edition, London and New York: Verso.

Arndt, M. (ed.) 2012. The Antropology of East European review. Vol 30, No 1 (2012)

Memories, commemorations, and representations of Chernobyl.

—— 2012. ‘Memories, commemorations, and representations of Chernobyl:

introduction,’ The Antropology of East European review, Vol 30, No 1, Memories,

commemorations, and representations of Chernobyl, pp. 1-12.

Barthes, R. 1972. Mythologies, trans. A Lavers. London, Paladin.

Beck, U. 1987. ‘The anthropological shock: Chernobyl and the contours of the risk society,’

Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 32, pp. 153–165.

Bodrunova, S. 2012. ‘Chernobyl in the eyes: mythology as a basis of individual memories

and social imaginaries of a “Chernobyl child”,’ The Antropology of East Europe

review, Vol. 30, Issue 1: “Memories, commemorations, and representations of

Chernobyl,” pp. 13-24.

Bryukhovetska, O. 2009. ‘Chernobyl films: half-life of the Soviet imaginary,’ KinoKultura,

Special Issue 9: Ukrainian Cinema, (December) http://www.kinokultura.com/

specials/9/bryukhovetska.shtml (accessed 28-2-2014).

Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History, Johns Hopkins

University Press.

Chernobyl Forum, The 2006, Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental, and Socio-

Economic Impacts, and Recommendations to the Governments of Belarus, the

Russian Federation, and Ukraine. Vienna: IAEA. http://www.iaea.org/

Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf (accessed 28-2-2014).

Daum, Ch. & Kostin, I. 2012. ‘"The vodka was supposed to cleanse our thyroid glands" Igor

Kostin on his Chernobyl photos,’ Eurozine http:// www.eurozine.com/articles/

2006-04-21-kostin-en.html (accessed 28-2-2014).

Degot, E. n.d. ‘How to obtain the right to post-colonial discourse?’ Art Magazine,

http://xz.gif.ru/numbers/moscow-art-magazine/how-to-obtain-the-

right/view_print/ (accessed 28-2-2014).

Deleuze, G. 1986. Cinema I. The Movement-Image, trans. H Tomlinson & B Habberjam,

London: The Anthole Press.

Derrida, J. 1984. ‘No apocalypse, not now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives),’

Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 2, Summer, Nuclear Criticism, pp. 20-31.

Freud, S. 1899. ‘Screen memories,’ in S Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works, Vol. III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications,

London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 301-322.

—— 1919. ‘The 'Uncanny',’ in S Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works, Vol. XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works,

London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 217-256

Gould, J.M. 1993. ‘Chernobyl—the hidden tragedy,’ The Nation, March, No. 15, pp 331-334.

Grandazzi, G. 2006. ‘Commemorating the Chernobyl disaster: remembering the future,’

Eurozine http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-04-21-grandazzi-en.html (accessed

28-2-2014).

Hundorova, T. 2012. ‘Post-Chornobyl: katastrofizm iak nova natsionalna ideia (Post-

Chernobyl: catastrophism as a new national idea),’ Ukrainska Pravda

http://life.pravda.com.ua/columns/2012/04/26/101231/ (accessed 28-2-2014).


http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/9/bryukhovetska.shtml

http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-04-21-kostin-en.html

http://xz.gif.ru/numbers/moscow-art-magazine/how-to-obtain-the-right/view_print/

http://xz.gif.ru/numbers/moscow-art-magazine/how-to-obtain-the-right/view_print/

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-04-21-grandazzi-en.html

http://life.pravda.com.ua/columns/2012/04/26/101231/

http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/9/bryukhovetska.shtml

http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-04-21-kostin-en.html



—— 2013. Pisliachornobylska Biblioteka: Ukraïnskyi Literaturnyi Postmodern (Post-

Chernobyl Libraray: Ukrainian Literary Postmodernism). Kyiv: Krytyka.

Imanaka, T. 2008. ‘What happened at that time?’ in T Imanaka (ed) Many-sided Approach

to the Realities of the Chernobyl NPP Accident—Summing-up of the Consequences of

the Accident Twenty Years After (II), pp. 1-19 http://wwwrri.kyoto-

u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr139/pdf/imanaka-1.pdf (accessed 28-2-2014).

Kasperski, T. 2012. ‘Chernobyl’s aftermath in political symbols, monuments and rituals:

remembering the disaster in Belarus,’ The Anthropology of East European review.

Vol. 30, Iss. 1, Memories, commemorations, and representations of Chernobyl, pp.

82-99.

Klashchuk, A. 2011. ‘Children of Chernobyl,’ Eurozine http://www.eurozine.com/

articles/2006-04-21-klashchuk-en.html (accessed 28-2-2014).

Kuprienko, N. 2005. ‘Avrora Oksany Bairak (Aurora by Oksana Bairak),’ http://e-

motion.tochka.net/ua/4020-avrora-oksany/ (accessed 28-2-2014).

LaCapra, D. 1996. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Cornell University

Press.

Luckhurst, R. 1993. ‘Nuclear Criticism: anachronism and anachorism,’ Diacritics, Vol. 23,

No. 2 (Summer), pp. 89-97.

Marples, D. 2006. ‘Diktatur statt Ökologie: Krisenmanagement in Lukašėnkas Belarus

(Dictatorship against ecology: crisis management in Lukashenka’s Belarus),’

Osteuropa, Iss. 4, Tschernoybl: Vermächtnis und Verpflichtung, pp. 117-130.

Menzelevskyi, S. 2013. ‘Sdelai radiatsiiu chastiu svoego brenda (Make radiation a part of

your brand)’ Eurozine http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-04-24-

menzelevskyi-ru.html#footNote11 (accessed 28-2-2014).

Metz, Ch. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Indian University

Press.

Mirnyi, S. 2009. ‘Chernobyl kak infotravma (Chernobyl as infotrauma)’ in S. Oushakine &

E. Trubina (eds), Travma: Punkty (Trauma: Points), Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe

obozrenie, pp. 209-246.

—— 2010. ‘Chornobyl iak infotrauma (Chernobyl as infotrauma),’ Krytyka, Vol. 149-150,

Iss. 3-4, March-April, pp. 18-22.

Mould, R.F. 2000. Chernobyl Record. The Definitive History of the Chernobyl Catastrophe,

IOP Publishing Ltd.

Palchikovskii, S. 2005. ‘Zalp Avrory, ili chto snitsia Oksane Bairak (Aurora’s salvo or what

Okasana Bairak is dreaming about),’ in Pervaia Krymskaia Informatsionno-

Analiticheskaia Gazeta, No. 84, 29 June – 4 August http://1k.com.ua/84/details/10/2

(accessed 28-2-2014).

Petryna, A. 1995. ‘Sarcophagus: Chernobyl in historical light,’ Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10,

Iss. 2, pp. 196–220.

—— 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, New Jersey: Princeton

University Press.

Phillips, S.D. 2011. ‘Chernobyl forever,’ http://somatosphere.net/2011/04/chernobyl-

forever.html (accessed 28-2-2014).


http://wwwrri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr139/pdf/imanaka-1.pdf

http://wwwrri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr139/pdf/imanaka-1.pdf

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-04-21-klashchuk-en.html

http://e-motion.tochka.net/ua/4020-avrora-oksany/

http://e-motion.tochka.net/ua/4020-avrora-oksany/

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-04-24-menzelevskyi-ru.html#footNote11

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-04-24-menzelevskyi-ru.html#footNote11

http://1k.com.ua/84/details/10/2

http://somatosphere.net/2011/04/chernobyl-forever.html

http://somatosphere.net/2011/04/chernobyl-forever.html

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-04-21-klashchuk-en.html



Phillips, S.D., Ostaszewski, S. 2012. ‘An illustrated guide to the post-catastrophe future,’ The

Anthropology of East European review, Vol 30, No 1, Memories, commemorations,

and representations of Chernobyl, pp. 127-140

Piatrovich, B. 2011. ‘The Chernobyl that nobody wants,’ Eurozine http://www.

eurozine.com/articles/2011-04-22-piatrovich-en.html (accessed 28-2-2014).

Saito, H. 2006. ‘Reiterated commemoration: Hiroshima as national trauma,’ Sociological

Theory, Vol. 24, Iss. 4, December, pp. 353-376.

Shcherbak, I. 1989. Chornobyl: Dokumental’na povist’ (Chernobyl: A Documentary Story),

Kyiv: Dnipro.

—— 1996. ‘Ten years of the Chornobyl era,’ Scientific American, Vol. 274, Iss. 4, pp. 47–

48.

Truffaut, F. 1985. Hitchcock, New York and London: Simon & Schuster.

Weart, S.R. 1988. Nuclear Fear: A History of Images, Harvard University Press.

Wendland, A.V. 2011. ‘Povernennia do Chornobylia. Vid natsional’noï trahediï do

innovatsiinykh pidkhodiv v istoriohrafiï ne til’ky Ukraïny (Chernobyl revisited.

From national tragedy to innovative approaches in the historiography of (not

exclusively) Ukraine),’ Ukraïna Moderna, Vol.18, pp. 164-200.

Yoneyama, L. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory, Berkley:

University of California Press.

Zink, A. 2012. ‘Approaching the void—Chernobyl’ in text and image,’ The Anthropology of

East European review, Vol 30, Issue 1, Memories, commemorations, and

representations of Chernobyl, pp. 100-112.


http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-04-22-piatrovich-en.html

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-04-22-piatrovich-en.html

\"nuclear belonging\": \"chernobyl\" in belorussian, ukrainian (and russian)...

Documents