The Story of Stalker

The 1972 novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (1933-2012), is described by Ursula Le Guin as “a ‘first contact’ story with a difference.” The alien ‘visitors’ have been and gone, apparently indifferent to Earth and its inhabitants, leaving behind in the Visitation Zones a range of objects which remain completely mysterious to Man. Some are deadly, others highly useful and technologically valuable (such as ‘eternal batteries’) – but their operating principles are totally impenetrable to science, despite institutes dedicated to their study. Le Guin makes the comparison with Solaris, “in which the human characters are defeated, humbled by their failure to comprehend alien messages or artefacts.”

The plot focuses on one of the six Zones – the location is never specified but resembles North America – and the characters who operate in the scientific institute and black market which have grown up around it. Among the troubling phenomena in the wake of the visit are mutated children, reanimated corpses returning to their former homes and catastrophes which follow emigrants from the Zones. The unpredictable hazards within the Zone itself defy the laws of physics; there have been attempts to seal and guard it, but the value of the mysterious artefacts within attracts intruders, or ‘stalkers’. They risk their lives amid the dangers of ‘burning fluff’, ‘mosquito mange’ and ‘witches’ jelly’ to return and sell their bounty. Red Schuhart is one such stalker, and the main protagonist of the novel, last seen in search of the ‘Golden Ball’ which reputedly has the power to grant wishes.

Arkady Strugatsky was a translator and editor, Boris an astro-physicist and computer mathematician. The brothers began writing together in the late 1950s and were the most popular science fiction authors in the USSR but, as Yvonne Howell relates, this did not stop them falling into “a precarious position as writers neither wholly approved of, nor yet officially black-listed.” Boris Strugatsky later charted the tortuous publishing history of Roadside Picnic, which had originally been written in 1971. After appearing in the journal Avrora in 1972, it took eight years to navigate the labyrinth of Soviet-era literary bureaucracy and the eventual book publication was heavily censored. He gives one instance of an 18-page document submitted by the ‘language editors’ – a list of removals and substitutions, covering such categories as ‘Comments Concerning the Immoral Behaviour of the Heroes’, and ‘Comments About Vulgarisms and Slang Expressions’.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

On its English translation in 1977, the novel found admirers including Le Guin abroad. In the Soviet Union, the director Andrei Tarkovsky had been so impressed with the story in its journal form that he almost immediately decided to embark on a film version, his second foray into science fiction after Solaris. The term ‘stalker’ was previously unknown in the Russian language – the brothers borrowed it from Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co and Tarkovsky adopted it for his title. By 1975, he had agreed to work with the Strugatsky brothers on the script, and shooting began in 1977; after initial filming in Tajikistan was interrupted by an earthquake, moved to locations around Tallinn, Estonia.

Arkady Strugatsky recalled the tortuous process of scriptwriting for the film – frustration at the frequent changes demanded and last-minute re-writes. Besides the liberties Tarkovsky was taking with the plot, the script was often discarded completely in favour of improvisation on the set. While the brothers were nominally the scriptwriters, the director was seemingly keen “to move away from the original science fiction concepts and premises of the original story”. A baffled Arkady was advised by Tarkovsky that “Stalker must be quite different… I don’t want that bandit of yours in the screenplay.” Eventually they were compelled to write a completely new script, now ‘a fable’, which continued to be adapted, on the set and in post-production. Like Lem before them with Solaris, the Strugatskys more or less disowned the film, claiming the final script was essentially Tarkovsky’s.

There were further hazards awaiting the film, beyond the usual wrangles with the authorities – after several months, it became apparent that the film stock was defective and useless. Tarkovsky somehow managed to get permission (and money) to re-shoot from scratch and it progressed to a general release in May 1979 without significant cuts. In their study The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Johnson and Petrie record however that: “Official disapproval was exhibited in the almost complete absence of reviews in major Moscow newspapers and journalists.” Most of the minimal publicity was negative, the director “accused of wasting public funds for films he made ‘for himself and his friends’.” A prize-winner when screened at Cannes in 1980, Stalker was well received in the West with a steadily growing cult reputation. It was the final film that Tarkovsky made in the Soviet Union; he spent the final years of his life in Europe.

The filmed version retains the basic outline of Roadside Picnic – the Zone with its altered laws of physics and incomprehensible dangers (such as ‘the meatgrinder’) – and the concept of stalkers. As he had indicated to the Strugatskys, Tarkovsky made significant changes to the characters, namely Red, who is replaced by the eponymous Stalker as the guide to the Zone. The opening scenes show the Stalker, his daughter evidently altered in some way (as is Red’s daughter Monkey in the book), and begged by his wife not to return to the Zone, emerging into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Rather than a hard-bitten mercenary prone to violence, compelled to return by financial necessity, his is a more philosophical quest as, avoiding military patrols, he leads his companions into the Zone. This pair, known only as Professor and Writer, have even more obscure motives for entering the Zone, with their goal the enigmatic Room at its heart (an analogue of the ‘Golden Ball’).

By the time Tarkovsky died in Paris on 29 December, 1986, Stalker had taken on darker significance with the Chernobyl disaster of April that year, and the resulting fall-out Zone around the plant. The overgrown wasteland and bleak industrial ruins of the film’s Zone have been seen to anticipate the Soviet tragedy. This theme is made explicit in the video game franchise S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (beginning with Shadow of Chernobyl), as mercenaries brave the irradiated landscape in search of its treasures. Many of the novel’s hazards and artefacts, discarded in the film, are revived in the game – ‘burning fluff’, ‘mosquito mange’, ‘black sprays’ and ‘full empties’. Johnson & Petrie note that: “Among Russian film buffs, Stalker has become a kind of cult figure and film, foreshadowing Chernobyl and the ecological, social and moral collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Among the film’s Estonian locations were two abandoned hydroelectric power stations; downstream along the Jägala River from a chemical plant. Stalker’s sound designer, Vladimir Sharun, recalls it pouring out “poisonous liquids… white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison.” Sharun attributes the death of Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa, actors Nikolai Grinko, Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn and others involved in the production to this sinister setting.

Map of Stalker's locations

Stalker inspired Geoff Dyer’s meditation, Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, a detailed examination of the film. Dyer is among the critics to see echoes of the Soviet Gulags in Tarkovsky’s work, finding it “haunted by memories of the camps,” in the vocabulary of the Zone and the Stalker’s shaved head. James Norton’s article ‘Stalking the Stalker’ reaches a similar conclusion, that the Zone “was also the term by which the Gulag was known, as the Russian audience would have recognised.”

The Strugatsky brothers continued to influence Soviet science fiction, with other popular film adaptations of their work including Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, and Hard to be a God. The director Konstantin Lopuchansky was an assistant to Tarkovsky on Stalker, and the influence of film and director can be seen in the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Letters from a Dead Man (1986) and Visitor to a Museum (1989). Lopuchansky returned to the dystopian sci-fi theme in 2006 with The Ugly Swans, also based on a novel by the Strugatskys. The Ugly Swans revisits many aspects of Roadside Picnic in its setting of a quarantined zone, mutated children, and allusions to the aftermath of alien visitation.

Communist Post-Apocalyptic Film

The dogged band of survivors in the aftermath of apocalypse – whether alien attack, environmental disaster, nuclear war, or worldwide pandemic virus – has become a preoccupation of science fiction, especially since World War Two and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Developing from H.G. Wells’ visionary The Shape of Things to Come, filmed in 1936 by William Cameron Menzies, the theme has proliferated in the post-War years, becoming a sub-genre in its own right; notable novels and film adaptations range from On the Beach and I Am Legend (filmed as The Omega Man) in the 1950s, through The Day of the Triffids, to the contemporary 28 Days Later and The Road. In the distinctive Eastern European version of the post-apocalyptic film, at its peak between the 1960s to the decline of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the last representatives of humanity are typically corrupt, cynical, disillusioned, and dishonest – the nobler qualities having vanished in the struggle for survival. The bleakest examples portray the ragged remnants of mankind, often diseased or mutated, reduced to scavenging among the post-industrial ruins, occasionally emerging from improvised shelters to salvage a few precious relics of civilisation – from libraries, museums, and schools. As they gather in claustrophobic and spartan enclaves waiting for the inevitable end, there is a stark contrast with the initial optimism which followed the October Revolution of 1917. 

In the early years of Soviet rule, the Bolsheviks actively encouraged the population to look forward to the expansion of Communism, spreading a Utopian message both on earth (‘world revolution’) and into the cosmos. The Party enlisted artists to promote their vision in state-sanctioned productions, notably the film Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), itself preceded by leading Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov’s 1908 novel Red Star, which effectively transplanted Marxism to Mars. That expansive mood had long since been dissipated; firstly by the dictates of ‘socialist realism’, aggressively promoted under Stalin, which disdained science fiction in favour of heroic portraits of the Soviet workers’ struggle, and later by economic stagnation and social decay, Cold War paranoia and pessimism. The 1966 Czech film The End of August at the Hotel Ozone depicts a group of virtually feral female survivors wandering the desolate countryside, anticipating a bleak, cruel and violent future. 1985’s O-Bi O-Ba (subtitled The End of Civilisation) by Polish writer/director Piotr Szulkin, is set in a particularly grim underground bunker, whose inhabitants endure a hopeless wait for a new Ark. Both represent a widespread disillusionment with the project of international Communism, and express subtle dissent against the central control exerted by Moscow over its satellite nations of the Eastern Bloc.

 

Above: Poster for Aelita

Right: Poster for Voyage to Mars

Though still closely overseen by the state after the death of Stalin, film-makers, artists and writers were able – often avoiding censorship by using science fiction as a metaphor – to articulate these fears. In 1972, Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky filmed Solaris, based on Stanislav Lem’s novel, set on a near-deserted, distant space station; a meditation on an aborted mission which paralleled the abandonment of the space programme. With the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s historic orbital flight four years later, there had been a brief rush to glorify the triumphs of the cosmonauts; after the American moon landing of 1969 effectively marked the end of the space race, the focus largely shifted from the conquest of the stars to the struggle for survival on an ailing earth. 

Tarkovsky returned to science fiction themes in 1979’s Stalker, adapted from the novel Roadside Picnic by the brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future considers Roadside Picnic in terms of problematic or ‘failed’ Utopias, with professional scavengers, or ‘stalkers’, entering the Zones (sites of alien visitation, now sealed by the authorities) in search of bounty, though they run the risk of encountering inexplicable dangers and death. As it transpired, the filming locations close to the Estonian capital Tallinn proved deadly; an abandoned electrical generating station and the Jägala River, polluted by an upstream chemical works were linked to the early deaths from bronchial cancer of Tarkovsky, his wife Larisa, and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn. The Zone, mysterious centre-piece of book and film, was not only the name later applied to the contaminated area of exclusion around Chernobyl but, as James Norton noted in an article for Vertigo magazine, ‘Stalking the Stalker’, “was also the term by which the Gulag was known, as the Russian audience would have recognised.” 

Location map for Stalker

 The loose trilogy of post-apocalypse nightmares by Tarkovsky’s protégé Konstantin Lopuchansky – Letters from a Dead Man, Visitor to a Museum, and The Ugly Swans (another adaptation of a novel by the Strugatsky brothers) – focus unflinchingly on the decline of the Communist dream. This trio of films, the first two made in the later 1980s, are alike set in landscapes blighted by industrial pollution, radiation fall-out, and toxic waste, resulting in mental illness and physical mutations. These futuristic visions were thinly-veiled echoes of a catastrophic reality; the 2016 documentary City-40, exposing the once-hidden ecological devastation in one of the Soviet Union’s uranium-processing ‘closed cities’, was part of a gradual process revealing the extent of environmental destruction. Just as the locations of Stalker offered a haunting precursor of tragic things to come, the ravaged nuclear fall-out setting of Letters from a Dead Man pre-figured the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in the same year as the film’s release, 1986. Combined with an escalating arms race between the USA and USSR, which by the 1980s threatened to become a full-blown conflict, world-wide apocalypse no longer seemed a film-maker’s fanciful notion.

An Appendix to Structures of Soviet Science Fiction: Visitor to a Museum

Following the previous feature, which touched on the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker and its parallels with the ‘zone of exclusion’ created by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the 28^th Leeds International Film Festival has screened two Soviet films which can be considered in the same light. Both were written and directed by Konstantin Lopuchansky, who worked as an assistant on Stalker, and both deal with post-apocalyptic environments. Lopuchansky’s screenplay for the first of these, Letters from a Dead Man (1986), was written in collaboration with Soviet authors Vladimir Rybakov and Boris Strugatsky. The film depicts the aftermath of nuclear meltdown, a golden-tinted world of ‘perpetual twilight’ where a scholar, holed up in a makeshift shelter, copes with the devastation around him by writing and reciting letters to his son, who is presumed dead.

 

Posters for Letters from a Dead Man and Visitor to a Museum,

from 'The Apocalypse Quartet of Konstantin Lopushansky' at www.fright.com

 

The second, Visitor to a Museum (1989), has even been interpreted as a sequel of sorts to Stalker. Its main character travels through a vividly portrayed nightmarish wasteland (literally – it appears to be one vast rubbish dump) on a journey to visit the Museum of the title, which lies submerged under rising flood waters and can only be reached at low tide. In this blighted landscape, an underclass of mutated humans, known as Degenerates, are confined to reservations, where they persist in primitive forms of worship – their sole prayer is “let us out of here”. The central protagonist is disturbed by their plight and fascinated by their religious customs, later seemingly being adopted by them as a Messiah before continuing on his mission as a form of spiritual quest. The latter part of the film is particularly hallucinatory and harrowing; the ‘hero’ reaches the Museum, only to find that it is nothing more than a bleak island of ruins amidst the toxic sea. These evocations of a decayed civilisation, environmental ruin and social collapse are vividly portrayed throughout – a truly dystopian vision created at the very end of the era of Soviet Communism.