Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and Depraved of Chornobyl by Markiyan Kamysh

The Dead City. Dead, oh yes,. Twice dead. For the second time, with the emergence of thousands of photos and the shitty lines of official tours. Bored hipsters shot Prypyat dead with their expensive cameras; rich girls from the capital soiled the rotten couches with their tattooed backs and mapped every nook of the terra incognita on Instagram. The sense of mystery has been lost; it has escaped, vanished in the web. The aura of mysticism was scattered like ash in all directions, flying through the Internet byways to distant foreign lands. After that, abandoned apartments can’t be scary.

I’m not sure what I expected from this book, exactly. Based on the title, I’d anticipated a traditional travelogue, where a guy goes someplace unfamiliar, meets some people, talks to them, writes a little about the history of such and such a place, tells about some of their experiences, finds a good place to wrap it up, and sends in the manuscript. 

In fact, Kamysh’s book is almost the exact opposite. Kamysh is intimately familiar with Chornobyl, ”the Zone”. His father was a liquidator, one of the men who dealt with the fallout from the Chornobyl explosion, and Kamysh himself has spent large swathes of his adult life making trips in and out of the Zone, which is illegal, camping in abandoned houses, having romantic rendezvous in rotting villages, drinking irradiated water, spending time with the weirdos and degenerates who populate the Zone. There’s very little third person dialogue; Kamysh generally narrates his encounters himself, from the police to the tourists who don’t know what they’re getting into, to the taxi driver who made the 3 hour drive to the edge of the Zone until the shuttle came. There’s not much history here either, not much talk about a pre-explosion Zone.

What we’re left with is a very personal work, punkish and blase about how fucked up it is to visit the Zone over and over, a recounting of Kamysh’s various misadventures that at first seems to come from a defensive posture but which eventually reveals itself to be more complex, and more concrete. Kamysh’s identity is tied up with the Zone in ways he can’t fully explain himself. At times, he talks about it like an addiction, about the cycle of visiting, exploring, getting lost in the snow or a flood or cornered by wolves, surviving, heading home and thinking “never again” and then finding himself sitting in his apartment a week later, trying to schedule another trip. Like an addict, Kamysh seeks out the next high, taking less supplies, heading further in, staying longer. He’s also pretty sure it’s going to kill him, writing about a future where he and the other Zone addicts sit together in a cancer ward, swapping stories.

Ultimately though, the sadness that pervades the book isn’t about the addiction--which, in spite of what I wrote above, actually seems like a precious and good thing in Kamysh’s telling--but about a loss of the past, a loss both physical, as the Zone is slowly decimated by nature and by the government, and metaphysical, as the Zone is transformed from a terrifying mystery to a commodified tourist trap. I couldn’t help but think of DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America, as the Zone turns into a decontextualized postcard. And what happens to the people who need the Zone, who identify a part of themselves with it? Perhaps like the utopian city it once represented, they’re doomed to be lost, destroyed by forces beyond their control. But perhaps not entirely. Kamysh writes,  as he lights a candle in an abandoned church:

Our memories of our loved ones who are no longer with us fly away with its smoke--up to the church dome, to the bees and higher, through the cracks in the dome. The smoke will fly up into the sky; tears will drop on the hardwood floor. The candle will burn out, and I’ll forget everything. Farewell.

This church is dear to me, and I believe that out of all the things in the Zone, it’s the only one with a future, with its patch of hope, sentimentality, and infinitely dazzling sunrays rushing in every morning when I open the heavy gate and light fills a semi-dark vestibule.