Sanna Turoma1; Mika Perkiömäki1; 1 Tampere University, Finland
Discussion
In 2021 there were two screened fictions of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster competing for global audiences on major streaming services: the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, and the Russian feature film Chernobyl 1986 on Netflix. The Anglophone and Russophone filmed fictions were heavily indebted to Svetlana Alexievich’s documentary prose Chernobyl Prayer (1997), but, as we argue in a forthcoming publication (Geopolitics and Culture: Narrating Eastern Europe and Eurasia, ed. S. Kaasik-Krogerus, S. Ratilainen, S. Turoma. Bloomsbury, 2023), they failed to highlight environmentalist concerns, which Alexievich's work raises. In 2022 consumers of news media were drawn again to Chernobyl, this time for an unprecedented reason: Russia used the power plant as a military weapon in its invasion of Ukraine. We will investigate Russophone media and fictive narratives about Chernobyl from the viewpoint of ecocritical geopolitics, a theoretical and methodological approach which expands the field of popular geopolitics to consider environmental perspectives alongside spatial and political fields of meaning (see E. Dell’Agnese, Ecocritical Geopolitics: Popular Culture and Environmental Discourse. Routledge, 2021). This approach allows us to re-situate Chernobyl as a cultural text in a larger post-humanist debate – a debate that has become all the more urgent with Ukrainian nuclear power plants becoming targets of military action.