Short abstract:

Narratives on Chernobyl tend to hinge on either 'fear' or 'longing.' While the former are cosmopolitan and 'pop,' the latter are place-specific and subaltern. This paper argues that considered vis-à-vis each other, both of these cast a revealing light on life in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.

Long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss two narrative and emotional repertoires about the Chornobyl disaster. The first repertoire is characterised by motifs of fear and horror, while the second, much less known, is replete with expressions of longing and nostalgia. Both narratives try to make sense of a catastrophe the wider implications of which remain staggering even after more than three decades. Only the horror narrative, however, has gained currency in global consciousness, entering the domain of popular culture. The nostalgia story, by contrast, remains confined to the villages dotting the countryside near the power plant and the Chornobyl evacuee diaspora, i.e., the communities most severely affected by the accident's direct local ramifications. The discrepancy between the two repertoires unveils a gap between what might be termed ‘metropolitan’ and ‘subaltern’ construals of the 1986 disaster.

This contribution investigates the "place" of existential dread and sensationalised horror in pop-culture appropriations of Chornobyl, while the of emotional dimensions of longing and loss will be explored by engaging with the affective, representational, and performative repertoires of Chornobyl-stricken communities and their diasporic offshoots. Much of the ethnographic data discussed in this paper hails from the ‘Third Zone,’ the still-inhabited, impoverished rural territory at the border of the near-deserted ‘Exclusion Zone’ in northern Ukraine.

Although the two repertoires palpably differ in their articulations the post-Chornobyl condition, it is worth considering them conjointly as both of them reveal something illuminating about life in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.