Darina Pustovaya

      Photos by Vladislav Vetvitsky, Alexander Sirota 

Video: Nikolai Kolomiets  

All day April 19 passed in the torture of waiting, in anticipation of an evening engagement. The team of Pripyat.com was invited to the presentation of a new production by Sergii Mirnyi on a Chernobyl theme, a screenplay.

My feelings overflowing on the eve of that happening were contradictory and chaotic.  I did not doubt the competence of the author on this theme, or his literary talents.  (Mirnyi participated in the Chernobyl mitigation in 1986; he is a screenplay, comedy, and fiction writer; a prize-winner (2004) and member of the jury (2006) in the most prestigious Ukrainian screenplay competition ⌠The Crowning of the Word;■ and on and on and on.)  The evening promised to be interesting; the regalia of the author assured that. 

My interest was piqued, at a minimum, by two other factors.  The thing was that, despite the fact that the pripyat.com team had assisted in the preparation of the presentation (we assembled video footage of the mitigation works of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident from a trove of newsreels from our collection), we didn▓t know anything at all about the author▓s concept of the evening.  And, most importantly, our souls were tormented with doubts and misgivings: Mirnyi designated his work a Chernobyl ┘ COMEDY! 

To put it very mildly, we approached the evening on guard. In addition, personally I got the duty of speaking before the audience on behalf of pripyat.com about what we would see and hear at the presentation.  I couldn▓t prepare my speech in advance: we spent all day at the Chernobyl NPP at a seminar about finishing the work on the ⌠Shelter■ confinement structure; besides, the topic of the actual speech seemed far from standard to me.  And so, on the way back from Chernobyl, contorted in an odd position in the back seat of an overcrowded car, I tried to hatch some kind of ▒home-made▓ draft.  In short, the main idea was something like: every creative work has the right to exist, and comedy is, naturally, a new genre for Chernobyl and because of that evokes all sorts of not necessarily pleasant associations, but attracting attention of the public to this subject is needed, as the theme of Chernobyl has become somewhat stale... And so forth and so on.  In short, I had to manage saying something without offending the author.

And so the long-awaited evening fell.  I seat myself in the second row, happily stretching out my legs that had suffered the two-hour trip from Chernobyl to Kyiv, sort out diffuse preparatory thoughts for my upcoming speech, and morally prepare myself to become a direct participant in one more scandal on the Chernobyl topic.

In front of me, a weaving with ethnic figures hanging over a stage, a white screen in the foreground, a table and a chair for the author.  Mirnyi (a smiling man with the movement, look, and manner of speech of an incorrigible optimist √ a person who loves life and enjoys living it) walks to the table.  An 80s-style table lamp, illuminating the author in a soft light, the half-light of the premises, an exciting sense of the unknown...  It started. 

As the hall filled with the sounds of ancient, even pre-Christian songs of Polissya region [translator▓s note:  where Chernobyl NPP is located] and on the screen the viewers from the height of a bird▓s flight saw the beauty of this ancient and mysterious land of forests, marshes and rivers, it appeared to me that time stopped and the air became viscous and practically material (you could touch it √ reach out your hand and sense its warm soft palpable essence).  And when a cold chill ran down my spine, I remembered a cartoon of my childhood about a village in far Siberia in which women with their songs were creating singular icy masterpieces (like lace, but made of ice).  I never understood that cartoon until now.  A few seconds after the last sound had melted away, the image finally faded and the public came to.

What followed was a story from the author (one from the screenplay novella) about how in 1986 those who desperately saved that region, unique in its thousand-year history, were apparently not unique, totally ordinary people.  Every one of them, of course, had his own ⌠history,■ but that history was counted not in the thousands of years, but at most thirty, thirty-five, or perhaps forty years of an average Soviet life.   They were un-unique characters in unique circumstances.  For me, after watching scores of documentary films about the Chernobyl mitigation, distinguishable from each other en masse only in the quality and cost of their special effects, those people became something like epic heroes, a parallel ⌠liquidator-superman■ rooted in the subconscious.  On the contrary, Mirnyi made his heroes out of living people.  They miss their nearest, and dearest, cry and laugh, feel terror, they are desperate, brave, do noble, reckless, moral and immoral things.  That is, they are exactly like us.

In the presentation of the novella, a relatively short production, the author managed to connect, it would seem, completely uncombinable points with each other.  That includes ethnic particularities of Polissya, the exploits of the liquidators [translator▓s note:  as those who worked on containing and mitigating the accident at Chernobyl are known], the everyday life of these people, the attitude of their bosses towards them, deep moral questions. A story about the clean-up works on the roof of the badly contaminated third unit of the NPP was intercut with narration about a quite different Chernobyl ⌠hero■ who received the status of liquidator (and, as a matter of fact, the privileges attached) just for wasting air at the comfortable HQ while ... censoring the letters of other Chernobyl liquidators to their families!

A major shock was a video clip, documentary footage of the tense mitigation works at the NPP to the soundtrack of... the disco-music of an 80s pop group, ⌠Modern Talking■! It turns out, in the huge military tent camp where the real liquidators, Sergii Mirnyi included, lived, the songs of this 1986 chart-topping group and other pop hits were an ordinary matter.  ⌠You Can Win If You Want,■ an attempt to raise the fighting spirit or a mockery (come on, guys, relax √ really there▓s nothing to fear √ do your duty, get up to the required dose of radiation, and then home you go √ guys, enjoy √ nature, weather, music)?  I was really struck by this combination of the uncombinable.

The opinions of the public split, resulting in a hot debate which lasted for just about as long as the actual presentation itself.  The principal argument of the detractors was that this work was ⌠dancing on graves,■ and at the very least immoral.  Supporters said that a work has the right to exist; this one is the first of its type and only for that reason seems unusual and apparently ▒unacceptable▓.  There were some who abstained, too.  After the official end of the event one of the Chernobyl veterans called me to the side and said something like:  ⌠It was, of course, just like Sergii told it tonight┘ including jokes, how could it have been without them √ we were all live people┘ but is it worth it to bring up all those┘ well, it▓s somehow not done┘ the main thing in any case is the exploits...■ 

And it appeared to me, that, in fact, the funniest thing in the production was the name ⌠comedy.■  It did the job all right √ attracted attention, caught our interest, struck us.  All the rest is simply the truth.  And if it makes us readers to laugh and cry, that means it▓s real.  With appreciation and admiration, I express my genuine gratitude to Sergii Mirnyi, that sunny person, radiating life.

Authorized translation by Monica Eppinger

Original in Russian:

http://pripyat.com/ru/publications/2007/04/21/1656.html