Radiation, Ruins and the Post-Apocalyptic Stories: The Chornobyl Landscape in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky brothers envisages an Earth pock-marked by ‘zones’ left after alien visitation. These abandoned landscapes made strange by invisible, unknowable dangers are the target of ‘stalkers’ who scavenge the Zones for artefacts and materials. Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) was (loosely) based upon this novel. Filmed in Estonia, depicting a post-apocalyptic landscape the film follows the careful exploration of the Zone of four protagonists. Although Tarkovsky claimed that “the script of Stalker has nothing in common with the novel … except for two words ‘Stalker’ and ‘Zone’” (Interview with Tonino Guerra, 1979, as quoted in Gianvito Interviews with Tarkovsky 2006), there are many similarities, if not in narrative, then in the landscape of the imagined “Zones”. The game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007) and its sequels, by GSC Game World, a Kyiv-based development team, drew from the shared Stalker ‘mythos’ of the book and film, but placed the game in the Chornobyl Zone of Alienation. Since the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., there are now dozens of video games set in the Chornobyl Zone. The ways in which the ‘Zones’ of Roadside Picnic and Stalker could be considered prescient for the Chornobyl Zone, and ways in which the landscapes and people of the novel and film serve as reference points for ‘making sense’ of the Chornobyl landscape. The novel, the film, the games and the Chornobyl Zone all present a post-apocalyptic landscape that must be lived-with and is salvaged from. This chapter will explore the landscapes of Roadside Picnic, and the Stalker film and games, and will chart the course that results in the Zone being understood as the Chornobyl Zone. Examining the role of embodied exploration in the Zone landscapes and in order to understand the ways in which Chornobyl has served as reference points of post-apocalyptic landscapes of anthropogenic/anthropocenic disaster, despite being a distinctly Soviet ruined landscape and legacy in post-Soviet Ukraine.