Meteors and Meat Machines*

India Lewis

“The Palace of Culture: the building is black, velvety from fire, and two snow-white nude statues stand out against this black background.

There are children wandering about, there are many laughing faces. Many people are half insane.”¹ (Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War)

Utopias are not all they seem—all too often, the bright faces, wide avenues, and fecund gardens are just there to mask the rotten heart of a flawed society. Dystopias are far more inevitable, threatening each new state as it begins its path towards a brighter, or at least a better future. It is perhaps clichéd to examine the collapse of the Soviet Union in terms of its status as utopia, or dystopia, but nonetheless, the (failed) search for the perfect world is a theme that recurs in Russian and Eastern European culture. Here, the line between utopia and dystopia is blurred or crossed over and back again, and in a particularly Eastern fascination with the biomorphic or living land, the paradise of the Garden of Eden is rediscovered in new and unsettling ways. These are places that can change those who enter them irrevocably, and, in the case of the brotherhood in Vladimir Sorokin’s Bro, become the platforms from which their utopia (in the form of an ice-meteorite with the power to awaken souls) can be collected and distributed in the world of man. Another meteor seems to have landed and created an uninhabited, but dangerous paradise in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, at the centre of which is a room that can supposedly grant man’s innermost desire. Although there is no meteor at the centre of Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer, the explosion that arguably precipitated the end of the Soviet Union is at the very heart of every testimonial that she records. In the latter’s horror there is no utopia, but nonetheless the idea persists, as both a political and a nostalgic paradise that was shattered and, paradoxically, crystallised at the epicentre of the explosion.

We drank birch drink and maple drink. We steamed runner beans in iron pots in the big oven. Made kissel from the cranberries. [...] But now we’ve got a life where that’s all ruined. We thought it would last and last, things would carry on the way they’d always been. And what was bubbling in the pot would be there forever.³

* This text was originally published in Kajet Journal, issue 02, On Utopias, available here.
1 Vasily Grossman & Antony Beevor, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945, L. Vinogradova (trans.) (London: Pimlico, 2006).
2 Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer. A. Gunin & A. Tait (trans.) (London: Penguin, 2016), 200.
3 Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer, 63.

There is a timelessness in these accounts, the idea that the land is eternal and would be there forever. This is most poignant in recollections of the homesteads’ perfection that surrounded Chernobyl, which in some cases were left intact, but in others, were figuratively and actually buried, as one worker recollects—“we buried earth in the earth. Along with the beetles, spiders and maggots, that whole separate nation.”⁴ This idea of separate worlds contained within the whole is central to how the residents remember their past. The houses, villages, woods, and fields that they left behind have become not only a paradisiacal garden of Eden, from which they were expelled by a superior force once their knowledge became too much for them, they also constituted something outside themselves with which they identified utterly. Now, that this has been taken away from them by a terrifying, invisible force, it is as if the residents who tell their stories have also been removed from their previous identities, and reformed in a new, inexplicable world. Their utopia will always be past, and can never be remade after the explosion at the heart of these testimonies and of this text.

This similar kind of nostalgia is present in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, in its opening, when the Writer (who is to journey into the Zone) is seeking to seduce a beautiful young woman with his wit and eschatological musings.

4 Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer, 104.
5 Quote from Stalker (1979, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky), by Pisatel (played by Anatoliy Solonitsyn). 

The landscape around the meteorite in Bro, which is shown in great (though terrible) beauty in Stalker and Chernobyl Prayer, is given a similar reverence by Snegirev—“the incomparable Siberian landscape [...] stretched in boundless breadth, overgrown with pine and larch.”¹¹ The surroundings to the blast zone are dead, swamp, a primordial ooze encased in an alien landscape of burnt or felled trees. The Ice is all that Snegirev is truly interested in, and all of the descriptions or depictions of nature and the past that hold so much lyrical and mythological significance in Stalker and Chernobyl Prayer, are given lip service here (even the truly mystical tales told by the local Evenki are mere foreshadowings)—we, as the reader, know that the meteorite is the sole aim and desire of Snegirev. The rest is scene-setting. He longs, however subconsciously or unconsciously, to awaken his soul, using the other, and he is not able to do that until he touches the Ice. At that moment, everything “had all hardened under glass forever. It all became the past. And detached itself from me.”¹² He is thereby emancipated in a way that none of the witnesses in Chernobyl Prayer or the adventurers in Stalker can be.

After the fall, all of the inhabitants of these three works are forced into reconceptualising their futures. This process, however, is complicated by the nature of the explosions at the heart of these works. An interesting unitary factor is that all of these cataclysms take place exactly 20 years before the present of the work. In all of them, there is change, but this can only take place through the medium of the explosion or the event itself.

Chernobyl Prayer is infected by the memory of the event, which seems more ineradicable because of its untraceability:

Radiation is invisible, with no smell or sound. It is incorporeal [...] Now we could be killed by cut grass, a caught fish or game bird. By an apple. The world around us, once pliant and friendly, now instilled fear [...] A world strange yet familiar. ¹³

11 Sorokin, Ice Trilogy, 47.
12 Sorokin, Ice Trilogy, 62.
13 Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer, 28.

This is a trace that can never, physically, be removed entirely. It is perhaps trite here to highlight the apple, and link it to the Garden of Eden, but, nonetheless, there is a strong sense in which Chernobyl, once the symbol of a bold Soviet future, has turned into a repository for bitter memory. Towards the end of the text there is a Monologue on sacrificial victims and priests:

14 Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer, 28-9.

The past is the means by which the victim’s future is defined, but also the hindrance to actually moving into this future, as “time has gone backwards,” and at the moment of the explosion, time’s progression halted. “The world heard about us Belarusians after Chernobyl,” and as they seemed to come into existence at this point, so it will always define that nation for a portion of the world (however unjustly). Radiation’s incorporeality ensures its lasting infection, and crystallises “the meaning of our suffering.” That “we are simultaneously its sacrificial victims and its priests” is only enabled by having these words immortalised as testimony. The world still carries on, however, “you can resettle people, but not the elk and the boars. And the water takes no notice of boundaries, it flows where it will, over the ground, under the ground.”¹⁵ In a sense, the natural world lives on beyond the disaster allowed a temporal future that may be polluted but carries on somewhat regardless. The flora and fauna of the Garden of Eden have outlived the Fall, but its people seem trapped in the singularity of the explosion.

There is a similar feeling of the world outside carrying on regardless in Stalker. The characters that we meet in a black and white bar at the beginning of the film are returned to that same bar at the conclusion of it. The Stalker himself bemoans this indifference “no-one needs that room. All my efforts are in vain.” The Writer and the Professor undergo trials and change within the Zone, but we are not shown their reaction to it in the quotidian world. The Professor reveals that his colleagues and he had come to the conclusion that the Zone should remain, beyond its barbed wire fence, and even he cannot do what he set out to do, and destroy it, in an echo of his failure to do so many years previously. There is a reverence, here, too, as in Chernobyl Prayer; the theme of belief recurs again and again, as the Professor says:

This place will never bring happiness to anyone [...] Though, I’m not sure anymore. We came to the conclusion then that we shouldn’t destroy the Zone after all. Even if it’s some miracle, it’s part of nature, and therefore, a hope in a sense.

15 Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer, 59.

This swampy, misty otherworld is an antidote to an industrial world “ruled by cast-iron laws,” which is “insufferably boring.” There is no actual god in the church of the Zone’s room, but there is the possibility of glimpsing something hidden within the hearts of everyone who enters into it. That the Stalker, Writer, and Professor never enter it keeps the mystery intact, its presence both an intimation of the otherworldly and the basest human desires. It can be argued that the Zone and the industrial outer world that surrounds it, with pylons, puddles, and electricity stations, cannot be more separate. There seems to be only one way in, and a transport that appears to be making the journey, loaded with pylon parts, sees its technology shattered by stray bullets. The first things encountered in the Zone are ruined tanks and cars, taken out of context and broken down by the hyper-nature of the Zone. By these signs, the two worlds would seem in opposition, isolated from one another both temporally and spatially. However, there is a sense in which the Zone is bleeding into the everyday world. Colour seeps into the final scenes, as we see Stalker and his family walk across the screen with a backdrop of cooling towers, and the camera focuses on his daughter, Monkey, who is a mutant, “a victim of the Zone, as they call it.” In the last scene, again in colour, we see her use telekinesis to move glasses along a table towards us. Pollen blows in, and the plants of the Zone, almost entirely absent in the quotidian world, seem to be starting to encroach. Stalker himself can never escape, and, as his wife says directly to camera “you’ve probably already noticed that he’s not of this world.”

By contrast, in Bro, the explosion is controlled, free of the past when moving into its future. This is due, in part, to the nature of the event. The meteorite is generative, in a sense, as it allows the infection to spread and grow as it does so. There is some overspill into nature, but it merely reinforces the natural. Snegirev feels it along with his companions as he approaches the site—“an eternal cold was exuded by the stony, mossy earth, and it seeped through our clothes.”¹⁶ But this could equally be the chill of the permafrost; as readers, we are only alert to it given Snegirev’s connection to ice. This sense of containment is present in the moment of Bro’s awakening, as he likens it to childhood, a palm “in which you lie as though in a shell.”¹⁷ He has been rebirthed, and his past life has been shed. He is repulsed by nature as he sees bears ripping apart an elk, and henceforth he and all of his converts survive on fruit and berries. They become no longer part of the human world, of MEAT MACHINES.¹⁸ They are able to do so because each of them is hit by ice from the same meteorite, and this can only activate them if their hearts are attuned to the ice, if they are one of the 23,000 Heavenly brother and sisterhood. Their isolation is clear in their communication, which takes place in spatial and temporal disjoint. When Bro awakens Fer, they stand “stock-still, frozen in time, joining our hearts like a bridge joins two shores,”¹⁹ and when they talk “time stopped. We disappeared in this conversation. And hung in space, forgetting who and where we were.”²⁰ The past is denied in this forgetting, their previous selves lost as they become discrete islands, only connected to those whose hearts also beat in time with the Ice. Fer recalls her childhood, stepping off a cliff onto the ice of a river:

The almost negatory Ice envelopes them and constitutes them, and henceforth humans are reduced to machines, Russia renamed the Country of Ice, and Germany the Country of Order. They fear death, but will be united in themselves. And when the 23,000 are united they will pronounce the 23 words “with their hearts. And the Light would begin to shine. And the Earth would disappear. And Time would stop. And Eternity would arrive.”²²

Through Stalker, Chernobyl Prayer, and Bro we see the fallout from three past explosions, which, although seem to profoundly affect their victims or witnesses, alter them in very different ways. Stalker’s Zone seems discrete, separate, but is in actuality bleeding into the world outside, blurring the boundary between the two places. A child of the Zone has been birthed into the outside world, and her power can act upon it. Chernobyl Prayer’s speakers are unable to prevent the rampant pollution of the outside world by their own Zone. The moment of the explosion is the moment at which their time seemed to stand still, the event by which their future will be defined. However, hope rests in the natural world, as the sole positive speaker says “there’s total freedom here. I’d say it’s heaven.”²³ The human utopia may have been destroyed, but the natural world lives on regardless. The utopia of Bro, unlike either of these two pieces, seems to be given nascent possibility at the moment of the explosion. It is self-contained, and generative, able to pass between beings, and so grow in strength. It becomes a space within their mythology, a possible future world. As each of these explosions continue to affect their surroundings and their witnesses, we see both the negation and the possibility of a future utopia. But these utopias are complicated, affected by what came before. None can truly separate themselves from the outside world, and so they each pass on their experience to others, affecting them in their turn.

22 Sorokin, Ice Trilogy, 223.
23 Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer, 73.

A graduate of Cambridge University and the Courtauld Insitute, India Lewis manages a gallery in Mayfair. She is a writer for The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, with a focus on Surrealism, and Russian Avant-Garde Art.