Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

Contents

Some historical background

A lone human voice

The author interviews herself on missing history and why Chernobyl calls our view of the world into question

1

Land of the Dead

Monologue on why people remember

Monologue on how we can talk with both the living and the dead

Monologue on a whole life written on a door

Monologue of a village on how they call the souls from heaven to weep and eat with them

Monologue on how happy a chicken would be to find a worm. And what is bubbling in the pot is also not forever

Monologue on a song without words

Three monologues on ancient fear, and on why one man stayed silent while the women spoke

Monologue on how man is crafty only in evil, but simple and open in his words of love

The Soldiers’ Choir

2

The Crown of Creation

Monologue on the old prophecies

Monologue on a moonscape

Monologue of a witness who had toothache when he saw Christ fall and cry out

Three monologues on the ‘walking ashes’ and the ‘talking dust’

Monologue on how we can’t live without Tolstoy and Chekhov

Monologue on what St Francis preached to the birds

Monologue without a title: a scream

Monologue in two voices: male and female

Monologue on how some completely unknown thing can worm its way into you

Monologue on Cartesian philosophy and on eating a radioactive sandwich with someone so as not to be ashamed

Monologue on our having long ago come down from the trees but not yet having come up with a way of making them grow into wheels

Monologue by a capped well

Monologue about longing for a role and a narrative

The Folk Choir

3

Admiring Disaster

Monologue on something we did not know: death can look so pretty

Monologue on how easy it is to return to dust

Monologue on the symbols and secrets of a great country

Monologue on the fact that terrible things in life happen unspectacularly and naturally

Monologue on the observation that a Russian always wants to believe in something

Monologue about how defenceless a small life is in a time of greatness

Monologue on physics, with which we were all once in love

Monologue on something more remote than Kolyma, Auschwitz and the Holocaust

Monologue on freedom and the wish to die an ordinary death

Monologue on a freak who is going to be loved anyway

Monologue on the need to add something to everyday life in order to understand it

Monologue on a mute soldier

Monologue on the eternal, accursed questions: ‘What is to be done?’ and ‘Who is to blame?’

Monologue of a defender of Soviet power

Monologue on how two angels took little Olenka

Monologue on the unaccountable power of one person over another

Monologue on sacrificial victims and priests

The Children’s Choir

A lone human voice

In place of an epilogue

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