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.