Чернобыльская молитва (Voices from Chernobyl)

Craig Mazin has named Voices from Chernobyl as the principal source for the series, and it is credited on screen. Alexievich's book is not a history; it is hundreds of first-person accounts collected over ten years, from liquidators, wives, evacuated villagers and children. The series takes its texture and several of its scenes directly from those testimonies rather than from the technical record. The clearest case is the firefighter's wife: her account in the book, of visiting an irradiated husband in a Moscow hospital and what happened to the child, is the spine of the series' most-discussed storyline.

Hersey's Hiroshima invented the method: report a catastrophe of unimaginable scale by following a small number of ordinary survivors in close, plain detail, and keep the reporter out of it. Alexievich's book on Chernobyl is that method taken further. She removes the connecting narration almost entirely and lets hundreds of interviewed voices carry it, opening with a firefighter's widow. Both books make the same wager, which is that the statistic cannot be felt and one person's account can, and both were written against an official version that preferred the statistic.