Chornobyl as a Gateway to the Uncanny: Representing the Disaster First World Documentaries

Tetyana Dzyadevych (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

One of the most significant global consequences of the Russian war against Ukraine is the threat of ecological catastrophe posed by nuclear disaster. In February 2022, as Russian military troops crossed the Ukrainian border from Belarus and occupied the Chornobyl nuclear power station, the haunting memories of the 1986 disaster resurfaced. In that year, the world learned that atomic energy, which was once viewed as a peaceful alternative, could be just as dangerous as nuclear weapons. With the occupation of both the Chornobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear sites— the latter being the largest in Europe and among the ten biggest atomic stations in the world—fears of a global nuclear catastrophe emerged from a repressed collective memory.

Tetyana Dzyadevych is a researcher, commentator, and analyst of modern Ukrainian and Russian culture and literature. She was born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine. Tetyana received her education in Europe and the USA. Dr. Dzyadevych holds two PhD degrees: one from Maria Curie-Sklodowska University of Lublin in Poland, and the other from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Dzyadevych has multiple publications on Slavic romanticism, modernism, and late Soviet and post-Soviet literature and culture. Her most current publication is Nostalgia, Anxiety, Politics: Media and Performing Arts, from Egypt to Central-Eastern Europe, Including Russia (2025). She is currently working on her monograph, “Voices of Political Revival in Post-Soviet Russian and Ukrainian Cultural Field.” In the US, she worked at UIC, New College of Florida, and Grinnell College and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Davis Center. In the fall of 2024, she joined the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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