Stalking the Atomic City
Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“His is a voice that must be heard.” —Patti Smith
“A poetic rush to madness. . . a stunning, original voice as lyrical as it is unnerving."
—Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us and Countdown
"In the shadow of catastrophe, Markiyan Kamysh writes with all of youth’s wayward lyricism, like a nuclear Kerouac." —Rob Doyle, author of Threshold
A rare portrait of the dystopian reality of Chornobyl, Ukraine, as it was before the Russian occupation of 2022.
Since the nuclear disaster in April 1986, Chornobyl remains a toxic, forbidden wasteland. As with all dangerous places, it attracts a wild assortment of adventurers who feel called to climb over the barbed wire illegally and witness the aftermath for themselves. Breaking the law here is a pilgrimage: a defiant, sacred experience.
In Stalking the Atomic City, Kamysh tells us about thieves who hide in the abandoned buildings, the policemen who chase them, and the romantic utopists who have built families here, even as deadly toxic waste lingers in the buildings, playgrounds, and streams. The book is complete with stunning photographs that may well be the last images to capture Chornobyl’s desolate beauty since occupying Russian forces started to loot and destroy the site in March 2022.
An extraordinary guide to this alien world many of us will never see, Kamysh’s singular prose that is both brash and bold, compared to Kerouac and gonzo journalists, captures the understated elegance and timeless significance of this dystopian reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ukrainian novelist Kamysh makes his English-language debut with this evocative portrait of Chornobyl's Exclusion Zone, the 1,000-square-mile site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, and the "illegal tourists" who explore it for days and weeks at a time. Mixing travelogue and reportage, Kamysh, whose father helped clear the site of contaminated debris, finds a stark metaphor for post-Soviet depravity in the derelict world he explores. He describes hiking 20 miles through waist-deep snow to climb 500-foot radar antennae; sleeping in an abandoned building near the rotting corpse of a wolf; being ambushed by police; and his "radiation fetishism" for contaminated graphite rods and "still glowing" liquidator's helmets. He also makes bitter fun of "rich girls" who map "every nook of the terra incognita on Instagram" and foreigners who dress for January snowdrifts "in proper autumn camo with anti-mosquito mesh," and draws vivid character sketches of squatters and looters such as Kolia America, who races around at night on a scooter looking for scrap metal. Though some of Kamysh's stylistic mannerisms grate, he captures the zone's strange mix of beauty and bleakness with precision. It's a captivating study of "the most exotic place on Earth." Photos.
