On 26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded during a safety test in Soviet Ukraine. The disaster released large amounts of radioactive material across Europe and exposed secrecy and weakness within the Soviet system. It became a defining event in environmental history, nuclear politics, and late Cold War consciousness.

Chernobyl generated a literature of contamination, invisible danger, memory, and official silence. Writers such as Svetlana Alexievich, whose later oral-history work Voices from Chernobyl is deeply poetic in method, helped shape how catastrophe, testimony, and ordinary speech entered post-Soviet literary culture.