Fission, Food, and Family: Alina Bronsky’s Baba Dunja’s Last Love and the Possibility of Bad Environmental Narrative

This chapter addresses the reemergence of fictional texts about the Chernobyl meltdown in the aftermath of Fukushima, tracing thematic and aesthetic continuities in transnational nuclear narratives focusing on both disasters. It examines the novel Baba Dunja’s Last Love (Baba Dunjas Letzte Liebe, 2015) by the Russian-born German writer Alina Bronsky, in which the eponymous protagonist inhabits a village that lies within the post-Chernobyl evacuation zone. Considering Baba Dunja as an avatar of what Nicole Seymour has termed “bad environmentalism,” the analysis pays close attention to the dissolution of temporal boundaries and the transcorporeal ecologies that open up pathways for solidarity and resistance in the face of atomization and crisis.