Stalking the Atomic City

Stalking the Atomic City / Markiyan Kamysh
trans. from the Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv and Reilly Costigan-Humes
St Peters, MO: Tantor Audio, 2022, c2015.

I shouldn't have liked this one, really -- it's not my thing, a memoir by a disaffected young man who likes to take illegal trips into the Exclusion Zone around Chornobyl to get drunk and wander through abandoned buildings, while avoiding police patrols. 

But I did like it. Markiyan Kamysh's father was one of the men who cleaned up after the Chornobyl disaster, and perhaps that's why he feels drawn to this space. Also, he takes groups through the spaces he knows, acting as a bit of a tour guide for those foreigners who want to explore abandoned places. It's a certain type of younger man who seems to be drawn to these kind of adventures, whether Ukrainian or not. And a lot of his story covers his drinking binges in Chornobyl, or the hours of struggling through hip deep snow to get to a lodging. Hiding from or being spotted by patrols. Finding new locations to scout, drinking directly from contaminated rivers, or burning random items to keep warm in a 'camp'. And he throws in quite a lot of cursing, and some questionable comparisons of inanimate objects to women's anatomy. 

So I'm not entirely sure why I listened to this almost all in one go, and thought it was really interesting. There is a sense of longing and nostalgia for a frozen past, one in which there are no people to mess it up, and no expectations on the resident/observer. And I can understand the fine edge of seeing abandoned places and feeling the haunting sense of the past through them. I feel like this emotional element is perhaps tied to his father's role in the days following the disaster somehow, but rather than be straightforward about the sadness or the emotional ties to this landscape, he uses tough language and a dismissive attitude toward what is really a compulsion to keep returning to the exclusion zone. 

The combination got to me. And I could feel the strong draw of this sense of time stopping, a slowing down of the frantic pace of life -- and a dare to the dangers of radiation, a young person's bravado that bad things won't happen to them. There was just something about this storytelling that I found mesmerizing, and have thought about some scenes often since I finished it. It's a completely personal story, no wider meaning or references to politics or history or patriotism or anything else of the sort. Just a young man returning and returning to a dangerous and mostly abandoned place for reasons he can't quite articulate. And yet, it resonates somehow.