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.

Arturo Aldunate Phillips

Aldunate Phillips (left) with Norbert Wiener

In November 2020, I wrote a post about a project I’d been involved in, to translate Juana y la cibernética (1963), a short story by the Chilean SF writer Elena Aldunate, with my colleague Ana Baeza Ruiz. The publication, a Spanish-English bilingual edition of the story, had an online launch at the Desperate Literature bookshop in Madrid. During the event, Ana and I reflected on the translation and aspects of the story we’d found intriguing. One of the questions raised by Juana concerns cybernetics itself. The plot, which revolves around an erotic encounter between the protagonist (Juana) and her factory work station, never explicitly touches on the topic of cybernetics and is very far removed from Norbert Wiener’s influential definition of ‘the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal’. However, the human-machine relationship which is central to the story does suggest a thematic link to the idea of cybernetics as it relates to the imaginary of robots and automated life. 

This is where the figure of Arturo Alduante Phillips (the author’s father) comes in. A writer-poet and engineer, Aldunate worked for the Electricity Company in Chile (later Chilectra) and as a university lecturer teaching courses in cybernetics. Even more significant, he published two books on cybernetics, Los robots no tienen a Dios en el corazón (Robots do not have God in their hearts) (1963) and Por las fronteras de la cibernética (On the frontiers of cybernetics) (1973). In the first of these books, published in the same year as Elena’s story, Aldunate Phillips explains the fundamentals of cybernetics and the current state of the discipline in relation to machine intelligence, as well as discussing the implications for industry, construction and healthcare. A contemporary review remarks that the book will be of interest to readers who want to know more about how today’s scientific developments will contribute to ‘the material progress of the world and the social transformation that will follow from their application’.

Pages from Los Robots (1963)

In this context, the reference to cybernetics in Juana appears to be less incidental, as it seems likely that the topic was discussed in Elena Aldunate’s family. There is one moment in the story that especially chimes with the issues and debates covered by Aldunate Phillips in his book. Juana remembers some articles she's read in the newspapers: ‘One day the machines will rebel against their masters. They will not depend on them, they will take control of their future’. By contrast, Los Robots is dismissive of the idea of autonomous automated life. One of the concluding remarks in the book reads ‘I believe that it will never be given to the machine to replace the capacity of the human brain, which will continue to be the inspirer, the guide, the one that will have to manage the world of machines’. The message of Juana is more ambiguous and can be read as a cautionary tale. In the final passages, in the consummation of Juana’s desire, she is simultaneously released and obliterated by the machine’s motions: ‘The movement demands surrender […] its expression is burning, lacerating’. An interpretation of this ending might be that humans underestimate machines at their peril, with Juana’s fate serving as a warning about the destructive tendencies of automation…

The Story of Solaris

Solaris is the best-known work of the Polish novelist Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), a philosophical science fiction writer. It has been adapted twice into major feature films and on each occasion met with the author’s disapproval.

Lem’s 1961 book re-evaluates the nature of Contact with a truly alien intelligence, an immeasurable and unknowable entity. It opens with the arrival of a psychologist, Dr Kris Kelvin, at the station on Solaris, a distant planet dominated by its sentient, plasmic ocean. The disordered state of the station is reflected in the mental distress of the beleaguered remaining crew – the ocean apparently sends ‘visitors’ to them, (re-)constructed from their memories. From the initial premise, Kelvin recounts the science of Solaristics, the planet’s discovery, exploration and studies/theories of the ocean’s enigmatic organic structures, before he receives his own ‘visitor’. 

The Yugoslav SF writer, Darko Suvin, a contemporary of Lem’s, credits the Polish author with raising sci-fi “to the dignity of a major literary genre,” praising Solaris as “puzzle, parable and cognition of freedom”. Critics have attempted to unlock the book’s “psychological puzzle” by placing it within a Freudian framework or interpreting it as a parable of madness/schizophrenia. Acknowledging the novel’s complexity, Richard E. Ziegfeld saw in it Lem’s depiction of “the infinite nature of the universe,” contrasted with “the limits of man’s knowledge”.

Both the English and Russian translations of Solaris are problematic – an English version (the first of any of Lem’s work) was not available until 1970, Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox basing it on a French translation. The background to the film adaptation is similarly complex and difficult. The very first film was made for Soviet television in 1968, directed by Boris Nuremberg and, though low-budget, regarded as faithful to the novel (more so than the following versions). It was Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, released in 1972, that remains the most celebrated and controversial version of Solaris.

An “uncompromising visionary” working within the Soviet system, Tarkovsky had no love of science fiction, but (correctly) reasoned that working within the genre would grant him greater leeway. He had seen numerous projects blocked outright, and others subject to lengthy delays before release. According to artist and the set designer of Solaris, Mikhail Romadin, in the eyes of the authorities sci-fi “was hardly serious and intended for youngsters”. Tarkovsky’s proposal of “a futuristic thriller set on board a remote space station” was granted official approval by Goskino (USSR State Committee for Cinematography), though an initial draft of the screenplay re-located two-thirds of the film to Earth. After meeting a disapproving Lem in Moscow, and working with writer Friedrich Gorenstein, Tarkovsky settled on another draft, closer to the novel. 

Andrei Tarkovsky on the set of Solaris

However, the final version of Solaris, clocking in at more than two and a half hours at a stately pace, concentrates more on the ‘human’ aspect of the narrative. The film inserts a lengthy prologue on Earth, at Kelvin’s dacha, where the pilot Berton’s report on the phenomena he witnessed in the ocean is delivered. Kelvin’s relationship with his own ‘visitor’ and the response of the other inhabitants of the station to theirs remains central. Even after filming was completed, at a reduced budget, further changes and cuts were requested by the authorities. Ostensibly science fiction, Soviet censors still objected to the religious themes (present in all Tarkovsky’s work) and caused the usual delays in the film’s release; meanwhile Lem, already irritated by the liberties taken with his novel in the screenplay, accused the director of making “Crime and Punishment in space”.

Coming soon after Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated 2001: A Space Odyssey, there was bound to be a perception of Solaris as a Soviet equivalent. Where 2001 used compositions by Johan and Richard Strauss, J.S. Bach provides the main theme for Solaris, with additional soundtrack contributions from the contemporary Soviet electronic music composer Eduard Artemiev (in the first of his three collaborations with Tarkovsky). The production values reflected the respective budgets, with Mikhail Romadin in charge of the slightly kitsch interior design of the Solaris space station at the state studio Mosfilm – cutting-edge certainly in terms of Soviet film at the time, the future has dated rapidly in this instance. However, Tarkovsky clung to his vision of a mysterious, philosophical epic, haughtily dismissing 2001 as “phony... a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth,” and continuing to bemoan his own film’s sci-fi trappings as “a distraction.” 

After winning the Grand Jury Special Prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival (and also the BFI’s ‘Film of the Year’ award), the international reputation of Solaris was secured. Its many admirers see it as a high watermark for the genre in film: “the benchmark against which all sci-fi should be held accountable.” The English writer Trevor Hoyle was “absolutely blown away” by Tarkovsky’s “magical” film. Other critics have found it confusing, overly long, pretentious and – presumably in contrast to 2001 – commented on its “visual poverty” (New York Times). The director himself later came to regard Solaris as the least favourite of his films.

Like 2001, Solaris has been subjected to innumerable academic re-readings and critical interpretations, and remains the director’s most enduring work. Tarkovsky returned once more to science fiction for the similarly fascinating, grandiose and troubled Stalker in 1979. He left the Soviet Union the same year, made two further films during his European exile and died of cancer in Paris, aged only 54, in 1986.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long after Tarkovsky’s death, a third adaption of Solaris was made, this time in the United States. Steven Soderbergh’s slick and expensive 2002 film version, while cutting more than an hour off the running time, is essentially a Hollywood re-make of the Soviet epic thirty years on rather than an attempt to return to Lem’s text. The author was distinctly unimpressed: “And I thought Tarkovsky’s Solaris was bad.”

In continuing to distance himself from both major versions of the film, as late as a 2002 interview, Lem stated: “As Solaris’ author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images.”

 

Stanisław Lem