The journalist Vladimir Gubaryev, at the time the science editor of Pravda, was the first journalist on the scene of the disaster. What he witnessed so moved him that he set about writing a play, Sarcophagus: A Tragedy (1986), which he completed within three months. Set in the fictional Institute of Radiation Surgery, which is receiving early victims of the disaster, the play deals with the efforts of the medical staff and their patients to come to terms with what has happened. Ten isolated cubicles are on stage, nine of them occupied by recent victims, the 10th by the self-styled Bessmertny (the immortal), a patient who has previously been exposed to radiation and survived. Bessmertny functions as the chorus to this tragedy, interacting with the victims and doctors and interpreting both the immediate and larger significance of Chernobyl. In the course of the play, the victims begin to die, one by one.

The play's title is a pun. Sarcophagus is the term used at Chernobyl for the concrete structure that encloses the core of the reactor. Bessmertny compares this use of the term to its traditional meaning: "You're building the pyramids, the tombs of the pharaohs. You're our nuclear pharaohs. . . . The pyramid of the pharaohs have been there for a mere five thousand years. But to contain the nuclear radiation your nuclear pyramid must remain for a hundred thousand years. That's some monument to leave our descendants, isn't it?"

Gubaryev has pointed out that he hopes the play's warning will be noticed by the generations born after 1960, who have come to take nuclear energy for granted: "They must understand that the level of their knowledge and culture must be far higher than their parents." The nuclear age demands "a new level of thought and knowledge and, most importantly a new attitude toward it." An English translation of the play has been performed in Great Britain, and, in 1987, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Christa Wolf (1929- ) is a distinguished and controversial novelist/essayist who grew up in Nazi Germany and, during the postwar years, chose to live and work in East Germany. Despite the fact that she suffered for her outspoken criticism of the East German regime, until the time of its collapse in 1989, she remained loyal to the basic principles of socialism, a committed Marxist.

Her novel Accident (1987) takes place in one day, shortly after the Chernobyl disaster, a day in which the brother of the female narrator is undergoing surgery for a brain tumor. The two events--the public and the personal crises--completely occupy the mind of the narrator, a professional writer strongly resembling Wolf herself, as she goes about her usual daily activities. These mundane routines--tending the garden, listening to the radio, talking on the telephone--are fraught with new meaning as she reflects on the frailty and beauty of nature and human life. The novel opens with a description of "one of the most beautiful days of the year." The new spring blossoms on the cherry trees have "exploded," but the narrator can no longer use that metaphorical verb to express the fecundity of nature, now contaminated by nuclear activity. Later she will learn that the fruit of these trees are unsafe to eat. The environment has become, like the skull of her brother, so sensitive that the slightest mishap can be fatal. The comparison also brings to the fore the two faces of science, that which is being applied (successfully, as it turns out) in the operating room and that which goes on in a place like the Livermore Laboratory in California, peopled with modern Fausts, who have sold their souls for scientific knowledge. To a reader in the West, this Faustian allusion seems to leap out from the text: We become aware of the fact that the narrator has never mentioned the word Chernobyl, never referred to the blatant attempts of the Soviet government to cover up the disaster, thereby escalating the risk of spread. Instead the villains are sitting in California "shackled to their computers." At one point, the narrator discusses with her daughter "our blind spot." It would appear that her blind spot here revolves around her propensity to look for a scapegoat rather than acknowledge the Soviet government's responsibility.

This short novel concludes with the narrator in bed reading Joseph Conrad's (1857-1926) Heart of Darkness, which leads to the realization that, in the darkness surrounding life, there is an occasional flicker of light, "'like the flash of lightning in the clouds.' We live in the flicker--may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling." Though Chernobyl is never mentioned, it is unquestionably the subject of the work. In one sense, Chernobyl doesn't need to be named, but the fact that Wolf avoids the word allows her to shift blame away from the Soviet authorities. Nonetheless, in its ability to capture the interior consciousness coming to grips with an insidious threat, Accident constitutes a memorable, if flawed, work of literature.

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