Primo Levi's Chernobyl: Ecology and Trauma in The Reawakening

Abstract:This essay follows Primo Levi's journey home to Italy after the liberation of Auschwitz, as narrated in his 1963 memoir The Reawakening [La tregua]. Levi's repatriation convoy bound for Italy under Soviet guard traveled inexplicably east instead of south, traversing and being detained within the landscape of the Pripet Marshes. As Europe's largest wetlands, the nearly impassible Pripet Marshes had stalled a Nazi advance into Russia and saw partisan fighting in both World Wars. This essay examines Levi's journey into the Pripet Marshes through two temporal frames--both its haunted legacy of genocidal pogroms, as well as its near future: the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Traumatic overlays resonate across Levi's memoir of the cease-fire interval after the war, an uneasy peace Levi terms a "parenthesis of unlimited availability" (p. 206). Thinking through Levi's writing on the afterlife of trauma, Freud's concept of the "uncanny" is employed alongside trauma theory to illuminate a traumatic anamorphosis emerging from Levi's text. This essay pursues an ecological reading of trauma to gather traces strewn across human, nonhuman, and inhuman landscapes of annihilation.