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.

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: Theremin

Though preceded by the Telharmonium and closely followed by such intriguing devices as the Ondes Martenot, Clavioline, Ondioline, the Theremin was perhaps the pre-eminent musical invention of the early twentieth century, one which continues to connote other states of mind and other worlds. A true product of the burgeoning Electronic Age, with the striking sight of the performer raising their hands to produce 'music from the ether', over succeeding decades the instrument's unique tones proved perfect for film-makers seeking to convey suspense, unease and, for science fiction purposes, alien beings and the mysteries of outer space.

Lev Sergeyevich Termen [Léon Theremin] was born in St Petersburg in 1896, and from an early age it was apparent that he had a natural gift for a variety of disciplines, from astronomy and physics to music. As a student at what was by then Petrograd Uniersity, he began to conduct experiments with high-frequency currents, magnetic fields and oscillators; though interrupted by the First World War, his research continued at the city's Physico-Technical Institute, where he eventually assembled an instrument, initially called the 'etherphone', which came to the attention of the very highest authorities in the fledgling Soviet state. Lenin himself became an enthusiastic advocate of the instrument, after it was demonstrated to him personally by Theremin in 1922; the head of the USSR, who famously stated that "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country", saw potential in linking this radical electrical invention to the wider revolutionary project. The inventor was accordingly dispatched on tour to advertise his innovation to the masses, enjoying free passage on the railways (themselves an emblem of the Soviet Union's growing technological power). On his return, he was able to capitalise on his prestige with further experiments, including producing the country's first fully-functioning television apparatus. In 1927, "a foreign extension of his agitprop barnstorming" was agreed, this time throughout Western Europe, and Theremin travelled to Berlin with a quartet of musicians from the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra - and the blessing of the Soviet Intelligence Services.

Theremin performing on the Theremin, c. 1928

Enthusiastically received in Germany and France, where many etherphone recitals were sold out, by the time he reached London Theremin and his 'magic' device were something of a sensation. He gave demonstrations at the Albert Hall and performed before Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw, before finally sailing for New York at the very end of 1927. Along the way, the instrument’s name became interchangeable with that of its creator. The further he travelled, the further its status altered, from its Soviet origins as the ultimate democratic musical object, to a novelty ('no expertise necessary!', as its early American promoters boasted), and then an exclusive plaything of the rich. Theremin gave concerts with virtuoso Clara Rockmore at Carnegie Hall, and even after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 still harboured visions of achieving mass appeal – an RCA advertisement suggested ‘a Theremin in every home’, a bold ambition which sadly never came to fruition – the instrument’s main appeal was for electronics hobbyists. The most notable of these was Hugo Gernsback, an entrepreneur-publisher of popular science magazines such as Modern Electrics. Credited with the creation of the term ‘science fiction’ and popularising it through his ground-breaking genre magazines (beginning with the hugely influential Amazing Stories), Gernsback himself dabbled in inventing electronic instruments, including the ‘Pianorad’. Continuing Theremin’s lineage, Robert Moog, creator of the first modular synthesizer which bore his name, the Theremin of its day, purchased the ‘build-it-yourself’ instructions from one of Gernsback’s publications.

Poster advertising the first Theremin demonstration in the USA; New York, 1928

Though in his New York heyday, Theremin continued to entertain visiting dignitaries and enjoyed the patronage of various high society benefactors, the commercial success he had anticipated showed little sign of materialising, despite his diversifying into alarm systems and other electronic innovations. The Theremin had been adopted in the early 1920s by Soviet film composers, amongst them Shostakovich, (and in 1934 made an appropriate appearance in the score for the propaganda film Komsomol – The Patron of Electrification), and Hollywood was not long in embracing the instrument, reviving its popular fortunes. Connoting strangeness in every sense, its ethereal sounds soon became synonymous with not only disturbed states of mind – pioneeringly used by Alfred Hitchcock in Spellbound (1945) – but also other worlds; as such, it was ideal to be applied to science fiction film soundtracks: Rocketship X-M (1950), The Thing (From Another World) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (both 1951) are among the earliest examples. The subsequent ubiquity of the Theremin in the genre meant that by the time of Tim Burton's 1996 sci-fi homage, Mars Attacks, its inclusion by composer Danny Elfman was regarded as playful parody.

Footage of Theremin in later years, accompanied by his daughter Natalia

Whilst the instrument that bore his name became ever more established in the popular culture of the West, the events of his own life, shrouded in mystery and containing fantastic elements, have been exhaustively recorded by biographer Albert Glinsky in Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage and re-imagined in the 2014 prize-winning novel Us Conductors by Sean Michaels. After his return to the Soviet Union on the eve of the Second World War (whether voluntarily or not is still the subject of speculation, as the ever-vigilant Soviet Intelligence Services are likely to have kept a close eye on him throughout his Western adventures), Theremin’s technical genius was applied to the service of the state during the Cold War – namely, inventing devices for intercepting ‘enemy’ communications and spying – and he worked in seclusion over the following decades. On the fall of the Soviet Union, he re-emerged in the West, even making a triumphant return to New York in his dotage, an improbable event captured for posterity in a documentary released in 1993, the year of his death, Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey; an apt title for a man whose lifetime spanned two centuries, both World Wars and the entire Soviet era, and whose musical and scientific legacy remains relevant today.