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This scholarly monograph examines the concept of Chernobyl trauma by situating it at the interface of clinical diagnoses of survivors’ Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, their expressions of this trauma in published testimonials translated into English, and through English-language literary explorations of contemporary Soviet trauma. It establishes a new perspective on the intergenerational and international reception of the nuclear disaster, one shaped by Soviet cultural memory as well as Science Fiction and the literary aesthetics of the Gothic. The monograph analyses first-generation Chernobyl survivors’ imaginative reconstruction of events through testimony in the face of the Soviet Party’s attempts to sublimate the narrative of the disaster into an official account. It also discusses the ways in which a second generation represents inherited, traumatic memory through a literary diaspora of Chernobyl and Soviet-Kazakh Semipalatinsk nuclear trauma, and how English-speaking writers not personally involved in the disaster engage in its memorialisation through discourses of horror and collective mourning.
“Chernobyl Trauma and Gothic constitutes a critical intervention in Trauma and Environmental Humanities by foregrounding how the nuclear disaster’s spectrality reframes aesthetic, cultural and ontological boundaries. The book invites a re-evaluation of Gothic antiquity as a living framework for grasping post-Chernobyl and post-Soviet realities.” —Dr Inna Häkkinen, Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki, Finland.
List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Countdown to Catastrophe: The Heart of a Dog and Roadside Picnic as a Literature of Crisis; 2. The First Generation of Chernobyl Trauma and Gothic: Voices from Chernobyl; 3. Diaspora and Gothic Inheritance of the Soviet Nuclear Legacy: The Sky Unwashed and The Dead Lake; 4. Ethical Approaches to Chernobyl Memory: Global Literary Perspectives from Heavy Water: A Poem for Chernobyl and Springtime in Chernobyl; 5. The Second Generation of Chernobyl Trauma and Gothic: Post-Soviet Nuclear Nightmarology in The Russian Woodpecker and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Computer Games Series; 6. Chernobyl as Hyperobject: Doc Chaos – The Chernobyl Effect and Dicky Star and the Garden Rule; Conclusion: Deceleration from the Stratosphere, Back to Chernobyl; or the Return of Traumatic History; References; Index