José Alaniz - ( (POST-) SOVIET) ZONE OF DYSTOPIA: VORONOVICH/TKALENKO'S 'STERVA'

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
([POST-] SOVIET) ZONE OF DYSTOPIA: VORONOVICH/TKALENKO'S 'STERVA'

Author(s): José Alaniz
Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 57, No. 2, FORUM: CLASSICS
INTERPRETED: GRAPHIC NARRATIVE ADAPTATIONS OF SLAVIC LITERARY WORKS
(SUMMER 2013), pp. 203-228
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
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([POST-] SOVIET) ZONE OF DYSTOPIA:
VORONOVICH/TKALENKO'S 'STERVA'
José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle
Despite significant, even remarkable strides since the waning years of

USSR, comics in contemporary Russia remain an art form without an in
try: a marginalized subcultural phenomenon, confined to a handful of fe
vals, sporadic publications and the Internet.1 In particular, the rarity of the
digenous graphic novel in this market (at a time when it has become
predominant format in Europe and, more recently, America)2 argues against
full-fledged, mature comics culture. As noted by the journalist Natalia Babin
tseva, in the country's bookshops "the ratio of foreign translations to Russi
[comics] works is about 30:1 — on the most optimistic account."3
Such a context made all the more remarkable the long-awaited appearan
in August, 2010, of artist Andrei "Drew" Tkalenko and writer Elena Vor
vich's Sterva [Bitch], a 112-page dystopian sci-fi adventure. By popular a
critical consensus an important milestone for komiks culture, it earned such
praise from reviewers as "in the ranks of the best Russian comics" (Kovalev)
and "a serious claim to a full-fledged 'graphic noveP"(Vladimirsky). Loos
based on the "stalker" stories inaugurated by the classic sci-fi novel Roadside
Picnic [Piknik na obochine, 1972] by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky,4 ela
rated upon in the film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky, and reinvented
a militaristic "first-person shooter" video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow
1. For a fuller picture of the post-Soviet Russian comics scene and its travails, see Ala
2010a, especially chapter 4.
2. For discussions of the trade paperback and graphic novel domination of the Ameri
comics market, increasingly at the expense of the pamphlet format, see Rhoades (29), Santo
Gastall, and Hibbs.
3. Among the significant Russian translations of foreign works in the last several years: A
Moore/Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (Amfora, 2009), Charles Burns's Black Hole (Fabri
Komiksov, 2010), David B.'s Epileptic (L'Ascension du Haut Mal, Boomkniga, 2011), a
Maijane Satrapi's Persepolis (Boomkniga, 2013). See Prorokov for an overview of komiks
lishing in Russia.
4. Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (1933-2012) Strugatsky wrote together under their giv
names, but after his brother's death Boris wrote under the pseudonym S. Vititsky.
SEEJ, Vol. 57, No. 2 (2013): p. 203-p. 228 203
204 Slavic and East European Journal
Chernobyl (2007) by the Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, Sterva de

picts a futuristic Russia as a violent, totalitarian failed state, a gloomy vision
very much out of step with preconceived notions of komiks as humorous or
intended for children. Even the novel's title seems provocative.
And while not explicitly a "political" work (the authors, as discussed
below, scorn such intentions), in its action set-pieces, through the trauma
processed by numerous characters, including its heroine, and most of all, in
its intricately metaphorized depictions of the post-apocalyptic "Zone" that is
its setting, Sterva reflects not only the dark cynicism and anomie emblematic
of much youth culture in the Putin/Medvedev era, it evokes the lingering
specter of Soviet atrocities as well. As Sterva herself says at the end of the
novel, "We are slaves to our past."
On the other hand, Tkalcnko/Voronovich's very modern work—the first of
a planned series—broaches a transmedial space, traversing a "stalkerverse"
that intersects prose, cinema, screenwriting, fan fiction, video games, the
web, manga, sci-fi geek culture, discourses pertaining to the 1986 Chernobyl
nuclear disaster, and much else. The work's startling visual/verbal hetero
geneity of sources, in fact, speaks to the comics medium's capacities for
bridging different media while maintaining a coherent, multi-layered mes
sage. To better unpack the myriad references comprising Sterva's multi
medial "DNA," we will first examine the novel's source material and the
place of its various iterations in Russo-Soviet popular culture.
The 'Stalkerverse'
Over a four-decade span from the late 1950s that saw the Strugatskys' careers
skyrocket, then Soviet censorship turn against them, then their works appear
more or less freely during Perestroika, then the Soviet Union itself collapse,
the brothers maintained their reputation as the pre-eminent practitioners of
Russian nauchnaia fantastika (NF).5 To this day, both at home and abroad,
the Strugatskys remain the best-known Russian science fiction authors,6 with
Roadside Picnic among the best-known and most widely translated Russian
science fiction novels. But their brand of at times dystopian, politically
skeptical prose made them "unofficial" writers in the Stagnation era.
Like all cultural activity in the Soviet period, over the decades Russian sc
fi strongly reflected the politics of its times. If in the 1920s the genre "gave
self-conscious articulation to revolutionary dreams" (Stites 184), envisioning
5. For more on the terms NF and fantastika in the Russian context, see Menzel.
6. As evidenced by recent film adaptations of their works, such as Konstantin Lopushanky's
The Ugly Swans [Gadkie lebedi, 2006], based on their 1987 novel, and Fyodor Bondarchuk's
two-part The Inhabited Island [Obytaemyi ostrov, 2008/2009], based on their 1971 novel. Erik
Simon notes, "In the 1970s and 1980s the Strugatskys were for a time the most translated So
viet writers; currently they are probably the only SF writers with a considerable oeuvre that is
completely and without interruption available in Russian book editions" (404).
([Post-] Soviet) Zone of Dystopia: Voronovich/Tkalenko's 'Sterva' 205
clean cities of light, miraculous technology and sleek transport conveyances to

overturn the image of Russia as a backward nation,7 by the mid-1970s the state
had shorn "official" NF of its initial Utopian strivings and turned it, in many
cases, into neo-nationalist, anti-Semitic propaganda "eclectically mixed with
pseudoscientific theories on UFOs and on Slavic ethnogenesis" (Menzel 136).
In this climate, Yury Medvedev, the editor of Molodaia gvardiia (a major NF
venue)8 publicly ostracized the Strugatskys for not maintaining the ideological
line, a policy maintained by Medvedev's successor Vladimir Scherbakov.9
Such censorship and harassment has bestowed on the Strugatskys, domesti
cally and internationally, a patina of dissidence against the state.
In the post-utopian, market-driven 1990s, according to Birgit Menzel, NF
fused with the fantasy genre, leading to "urban fantasy" or "dark fantasy" nar
ratives typified by Sergei Lukianenko's Night Watch [Nochnoi dozor, 1998]
and the tetratology it spawned. This movement sealed a 1990s "boom" in fan
tastika broadly defined (139), which incorporated the publishing industry, fan
communities and, increasingly, the Internet. By the 2000s Putin era, the
genre—like all post-Soviet literature—was participating in a kind of social
"after-image" discursive mode whereby the old (pre-Revolutionary, Soviet)
and the new (post-Soviet, cosmopolitan) mingled freely. "Novelty," as noted
by Vlad Strukov, "never completely supplants continuity" (34), whether in
political discourse, television ads, or literature.10 In the new century, Menzel
explains, Russian fantasy/NF switched
from Utopian futures to alternative concepts of history, from the prehistoric past to recent his
tory (with barely concealed references to the present day). The idea of connecting history to
concepts of justice and truth still seems to stimulate the Utopian vision of writers. All writers are
more or less preoccupied with the topic of the vanished empire.11 No matter whether and to
7. As described by Birgit Menzel:
Nauchnaia fantastika was based on the idea of science and progress, science in the Marx
ist interpretation including not only natural science, but equally the laws of social and
historical progress. The genre was closely linked to the communist Utopian project of
wealth and happiness for the masses, and would help to overcome the traditional gap be
tween high and low, or intelligentsia and mass culture. (119)
8. On the journal's state-mandated dominance over the official NF sphere, and its advance
ment of the conservative "Efremov" brand of science fiction, see Simon 394.
9. For a fuller account of the Strugatskys' battles with the official press, see Menzel 133-39
and Simon 392^102. For further insights see Howell.
10. Strukov is referring specifically to the state-sponsored Name of Russia [Imia Rossii] web
project, in which Russians vote on the country's great historical figures, resurrected through var
ious media. As he describes it, "In a truly ventriloquist manner, Peter the Great, Aleksandr
Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and other iconic figures are brought back to life thanks to Rus
sia's contemporary authors and artists" (34), a move emblematic of twenty-first-century Rus
sian culture.
11. As Simon puts it in a more curmudgeonly manner, despite their post-Soviet nihilism con
temporary Russian writers "like to beat the dead horse of Soviet Communism" (404).
what extent new genres like romance and fantasy have been imported, all contemporary popu
lar literature is framed by the Soviet cultural context. Allusions to Soviet novels and stereotypes
are abundant, and often carry an ironic charge.... (149)
Such a "temporally heterogeneous" cultural moment helps explain the en

during relevance of the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic and its con
cept/chronotope of the Zone. The novel, to whose 1972 publication Erik
Simon traces the start of the official Soviet campaign to "ignore" the Stru
gatskys (390), takes place in an unnamed Western capitalist country (possibly
Canada) some years after an alien "visitation" [poseshchenie] has left six
"Zones" scattered throughout the world. These Zones (only one of which ap
pears in the novel) have become anomalous physics-flouting environments
where time and space warp, unidentifiable alien objects litter the abandoned
landscape, and unnatural phenomena such as "moulages" (quasi-resurrected
dead people) wander about. Closed off to the population by the state, the
Zones spawn research institutes and a black market in alien items illegally
pilfered from the forbidden areas by "stalkers" at great personal cost (tres
passers may be shot on sight, while the Zone itself acts like radiation on their
bodies, causing them to conceive deformed offspring). Over the course of
eight years, the cynical Redrick Schuhart, a stalker from the town of Har
mont, leads several excursions into the Zone. In his final expedition he seeks
out the Golden Sphere [Zolotoi shar], an object rumored to grant any wish, in
hopes of curing his daughter Monkey [Martyshka], who has non-human in
telligence and a body covered in fur.
The Strugatskys' achievement in Roadside Picnic involved, firstly, the in
fusion of existentialist noir elements into a science fiction setting,12 fashion
ing a hero who behaves by turns reprehensibly (causing a Zone companion to
die so as to deactivate an anomaly between him and his goal), selfishly (sell
ing inscrutable, likely dangerous alien booty for his own gain) and politically
apathetic, "unhappy [...] under any order, any system" (Strugatsky 136).
Schuhart, up until the novel's purposely vague ending, lives his life by an un
remittingly cold-blooded credo: "This is the way it is with the Zone: if you
come back with swag—it's a miracle; if you come back alive—it's a success;
if the patrol bullets miss you—it's a stroke of luck. And as for anything else—
that's fate" (15).
Secondly, in the Zone the novel created a hermeneutically and creatively
productive space whose ambiguity and mystery spawned countless debates,
exegeses and imitations. What is the Zone? For some readers, it recalls the
1908 Tunguska cometfall, a natural catastrophe which befell the Tungus taiga
in Siberia, an NF trope launched by Alexander Kazantsev in his short story
12. Griffin and Waldron call Tarkovsky's film "SF noir" (265), while Zaslavsky relates the
Strugatskys' writing to that of hard-boiled detective authors Dashiell Hammet and Raymond
Chandler.
"A Visitor from Outer Space" [Gost' iz kosmosa, 1958]; to acclaimed Polish
SF author Stanislav Lem, it has "properties, as menacing as they are incom
prehensible, [which] abruptly separate it from the outside world" (321); Elena
Gomel describes it as an "empty signifier" which, "[i]n questioning all cul
tural codes [...] undermines the structural basis of allegory which rests on
their fixedness" (103); while at one point the Strugatskys themselves seem to
portray it as very much an allegory—a satire of Soviet-era emigration to the
West, in which masses of people
poured into Harmont [...] to look for exciting adventures, untold riches, world fame, or some
special religion. They poured in and ended up as chauffeurs, construction workers, or thugs—
thirsting, wretched, tortured by vague desires, profoundly disillusioned, and certain that they
had been tricked once again. (73)
The elastic nature of the Zone trope expanded exponentially with the 1979
release of Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky's very loose adaptation of Roadside Pic
nic, written with the Strugatskys. This version depicts a saintly, Holy
Fool-like stalker leading an unnamed Writer and Scientist into the Zone in
search of the Room, where, supposedly, wishes are granted. Here the Zone
appears as an overgrown wilderness strewn with rusting industrial detritus,
made more mysterious and alien by trick photography and editing—though
crucially, the visitors encounter nothing explicitly supernatural. Characteris
tically for this director, the theme is reoriented from the novel's confrontation
with the unknown to one of agonized faith in a materialist society, while cin
ematic longueurs and varying film stocks infuse the Zone's otherworldly
qualities with a psychologized, dreamlike mood; the area's supposed anom
alies, in fact, may be nothing more than the mad Stalker's subjective fan
tasies. In the end, the Stalker's wife delivers a monologue on her "bitter hap
piness," and his daughter, disabled and possibly autistic but still human, may
or may not be exhibiting telekinesis.
As noted by Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, the film's reception, par
ticularly in the West, privileged a politicized reading of the Zone, "picking
up [...] on such 'clues' as Stalker's shaven head, his early comment to his wife
that he is 'imprisoned everywhere,' and the fact that the term 'Zone' had been
used for Stalin's system of prison camps" (142).13 In an interpretation that in
forms my own of Sterva, they paraphrase the Hungarian critics Andrâs Kovâcs
and Âkos Szilâgyi, who describe the Zone in more psychoanalytic terms as
13. As explained by Debora Kaple, in Soviet culture "[p]eople spoke of the malenkaia zona
or 'little zone' (the Gulag camps) and the 'bolshaia zona ', or the 'big zone' (the USSR as one
big Gulag camp)" (Mochulsky xvii), while Anne Applebaum soberly noted:
[T]he Gulag did not emerge, folly formed, from the sea, but rather reflected the general
standards of the society around it. If the camps were filthy, if the guards were brutal, if
the work teams were slovenly, that was partly because filthiness and brutality and sloven
liness were plentiful in other spheres of Soviet life. (Mochulsky xxvii)
the 'Secret' that any society needs in order to exist and maintain its authority; it is the taboo area
of memory and the past that is closed off for investigation and has constantly to be entered or
"probed" by misfits or doubters if the moral health of society is to survive. (143)
At the time of the film's release, some saw the Zone as a veiled reference
to the 1957 Chelyabinsk nuclear waste disaster and evacuations (denied by
the Soviets until 1989),14 but the 1986 Chernobyl accident, with its subse
quent "Zone of Exclusion," made the film seem prophetic—a parable of eco
logical catastrophe. Since the fall of the USSR, Stalker continues to aggregate
cultural "layers"; its murky mise en scène and despairing tone have come to
represent the sordid moral vacuity of the late-Soviet era, the spiritual empti
ness of modern life, a nightmare vision of a post-nuclear world, and much be
sides, in innumerable combinations.15 David Foster called the film's Zone "at
once a prison camp, an ecological disaster site and a dream space" (309);
Vlada Petric echoed the Stalker in calling it "an intrinsic—and necessary—
aspect of human existence" (34); Michael Dempsey labeled it a "mysterious,
cordoned-off natural wonderland" (13); while Tarkovsky himself wrote—in
irritation at how often he was asked for an "explanation"—that "the Zone
doesn't symbolize anything" (200), in short, life itself. All of which recalls
the Stalker's description of the Zone in the film: "It may even seem that it's
capricious, but it is at any given moment what we ourselves make it through
our own state of mind [sostoianie]."16
Writing in 1999, Slavoj Zizek could taxonomize, then deconstruct, the
Zone's various "meanings" thus:
For a citizen of the defunct Soviet Union, the notion of a forbidden Zone gives rise to (at least)
five associations: Zone is (1) Gulag, i.e. a separated prison territory; (2) a territory poisoned or
otherwise rendered uninhabitable by some technological (biochemical, nuclear...) catastrophe,
like Chernobyl; (3) the secluded domain in which the nomenklatura lives; (4) foreign territory
to which access is prohibited (like the enclosed West Berlin in the midst of the GDR); (5) a ter
ritory where a meteorite struck (like Tunguska in Siberia). The point, of course, is that the ques
tion "So which is the true meaning of the Zone?" is false and misleading: the very indetermi
nacy of what lies beyond the Limit is primary, and different positive contents fill in this
preceding gap.
By the early twenty-first century, writes Mikhail Zaslavsky, Roadside Pic

nic, Stalker and the myriad discourses they enabled had coalesced into a
"purely Russian genre" [sugubo otechestvennyi zhanr]: "stories about stalk
14. See <http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/Others/inf368.shtml>.

15. Two recent Russian documentaries devoted to the film, The Zone of Andrei Tarkovsky
[Zona Andreiia Tarkovksogo, directed by Andrei Sozanchuk, 2007-2008] and Rerberg and
Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of 'Stalker' [Rerberg i Tarkovskii: oborotnaia storona Stalkera,
Igor Mayboroda, 2009], explore the moral, spiritual and aesthetic tangles of its production. Fan
websites such as <http://kino-stalker.ru/> provide news, background and a venue for discussion.
16. This dialogue occurs at 1:00:00 into Part I of the Kino DVD version of Stalker (2006).
The subtitles translate sostoianie, rather clunkily in this context, as "condition."
ers" or stalkerverse. The S.TA.L.K.E.R}1 video game series launched by the

Ukrainian developer CSG Game World would seem to validate that assertion;
the three releases so far—>S.TA.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007); its
prequel S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (2008); and S.TA.L.K.E.R.: CallofPripyat
(2010)—incorporate verbal and visual elements from all phases of the Stalker
milieu, chiefly as background for otherwise conventional "shoot-'em-up" ac
tion. The initial episode's central plot involves an amnesiac stalker, the
Marked One, searching for clues to his identity inside the Chernobyl Zone of
Exclusion—site of a second nuclear disaster—and his gun battles with mu
tants, anomalies, corrupt government scientists and other stalkers. The
S.TA.L.K.E.R. game series, in turn, shares some commonalities with the on
going Zone of Death [Zona smerti] series of stalker novels by Viacheslav Ka
lygin, Andrei Livadny, Roman Glushkov and others, launched by Eksmo
Press in 2009.18
Komiks stories based on some version of the stalkerverse have appeared
since Alexei Lipatov and Olga Chigirinskaya's Gofman (2002/2010) series19;
narratives set in the world of the S.TA.L.K.E.R. game, such as Batya by
Roman Surzhenko (2009) and others, are featured on the game's website.20
The foregoing demonstrates the decades-long flexibility and availability of
the Strugatskys' original concepts across several media, making a Russian
graphic novel based on such material, if not an economic possibility given
komiks' marginality, then certainly a creative one.
Tkalenko/Voronovich's Sterva
Among the most highly praised and respected komiksisty of the Second
Wave—the generation that emerged after the collapse of the USSR and the
advent of the Internet in Russia21—Andrei "Drew" Tkalenko (b. 1973) hails
from Ukraine, where he completed the architecture program at the Kharkov
State University of Construction and Architecture. Since moving to Moscow
in 1996, he has worked as a web designer, illustrator, graphics artist and
komiksist. Along with wife and writer/creative partner Elena Voronovich,
Tkalenko has distinguished himself from his first publications as a polished
draftsman, injecting an unusual level of professionalism into his work, com
parable to that of KOM-era veterans Askold Akishin and Yury Zhigunov; like
17. The acronym stands for "Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer,
Robber." The American "first-person shooter" video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Ac
tivision, 2007) also utilized imagery from the abandoned city of Pripyat, Ukraine, near Cher
nobyl, to construct some of its environments.
18. See <http://zona-smerti.ru/>.
19. First published in Andrei Ayoshin's landmark komiks website/gallery Komiksolet in
2002 and re-published in the journal Rumanga in 2010.
20. See <http://www.stalker-game.com/ru/?page=cxc>.
21. See Alaniz 2010a, chapter 4.
them, he exhibited a befuddling level of dedication to a medium much

scorned in mainstream Russian culture.
Voronovich and Tkalenko's first comics work appeared in the coarse toilet/
stoner humor series Dimych and Tymich in 2002—though the publisher,
RKK, went bankrupt not long after in suspicious circumstances. They refash
ioned the material into another series, Den Banzai and Zaitsev, for Edvans
Press, to little success. Other projects, such as the satirical sci-fi series Trash
Barabanov, met with similar difficulties, and were often abandoned in mid
stride. Komiks work also appeared in youth-oriented magazines like Hooli
gan and the Ukrainian comics journal K-9.
Unlike some of the more boosterish segments of the Russian comics scene,
such as that associated with the KomMissia festival, Tkalenko and
Voronovich cultivate a dry-eyed, unsentimental, little-veiled contempt for the
komiks industry and its failures since Perestroika. As Tkalenko told an inter
viewer in 2008:
This "new phenomenon" has been "building up speed" for 20 years already. In 1988 the komiks
studio КОМ was formed, in the beginning of the 90s it "expired," and the artists who made up
the studio busied themselves with other things. So I and my "brothers in arms" are not the first
generation of comics artists in our vast motherland. And there's another generation coming up
after us. In all this time the breakthrough has not happened; there were just isolated attempts to
print something or other, but a market has not arisen, because Russia's economy is turned up
side-down. (Suslova)22
The couple's disdain for their country's underdeveloped comics culture led
directly to the Sterva project: a "serious," adult, even pessimistic work in a
format most Russians associated with humor and childishness. As I have writ
ten elsewhere (Alaniz 2010a, 241), Tkalenko and Voronovich had tired of
1^-page komiks jobs that required them to come up with endless gags and
"funny" situations. The prospect of doing the opposite—despite its lack of
commercial viability—freed them creatively.
As described by Zaslavsky23 in his preface24 to Sterva, in 2002 he and the
creators discussed possibilities for a story in an indigenous genre to contrast
with what they saw as Russian artists' often-slavish imitation of Western par
adigms. They alighted on the "stories about Stalkers" genre. The first frag
ments of the novel appeared in 2005, in the LMR compendium Almanakh,
22. Tkalenko told me something similar in 2007: "We already relate to [the industry] with
some skepticism. If a couple of years ago we comforted ourselves with the hope that some
thing's happening or will happen—well, time passes, we're getting older and nothing's chang
ing. Practically nothing." Two years later, when I interviewed the couple again, their opinions
had not budged.
23. Zaslavsky, a ubiquitous presence in Russian comics for the last 25 years, was Tkalenko
and Voronovich's editor at Edvans Press. He also worked with Lipatov and Chigirinskaya on the
aforementioned Gofman, helping to see it republished in 2010.
24. I used an unpublished, complete version of Zaslavsky's preface provided by the author. The
reader can find another version online at <http://smena-online.ru/stories/legendy-o-stalkerakh>.
published during the KomMissia comics festival. Subsequent portions were

published annually in the same anthology and/or the KomMissia cata
log/website, always to ecstatic fan reception; the 2006 excerpt won the festi
val's Narodnaya Lyuboff award.25 By the time of its first complete appearance
in print (in a Polish translation from Timof i cisi wspôlnicy, 2008), the
graphic novel had acquired its reputation as one of the most accomplished
komiks works—yet had to wait two more years for a Russian edition.26
Sterva, done in a "Russian manga" style that blends somewhat "cartoony"
figures with stylized photorealistic backgrounds,27 pays homage to all the dif
ferent phases of the Stalkerverse,28 but is beholden to none; one of its inno
vations in particular takes the Strugatskys' concept in a bold new direction.
The novel, told in three chapters—the short "Ashes to Ashes" [Prakh к
prakhu] and "Dead Season" [Mertvyi sezon], and the bulk of the book,
"Shadows of the Past" [Teni proshlogo]—recounts how one of the alien "Vis
itation" sites descends on Moscow, throwing the city into a panic brutally
suppressed by state force. Its capital evacuated and now a Zone of exclusion,
Russia falls apart into totalitarian factions ruled over by warlords, chieftains,
and "foreign peacekeepers" like the fatuous Americans—referred to by the
disparaging term "Amerikosy." Into this apocalyptic, dystopian landscape
steps a woman known only as Sterva, whose parents were gunned down by
the army on the day of Visitation (a blood-spattered panel shows the infant
girl screaming by her father's corpse); she becomes a stalker.
Oddly, the authors give no reason why Sterva risks her life in the Zone it
self and in braving the military perimeter to enter/exit it—she displays neither
desire for "swag" (and we never see her with any); nor metaphysical convic
tions like Tarkovsky's holy fool; nor a compelling personal problem she
25. Although, as pointed out by Kovalev in his review, by the time the novel finally appeared
in a complete Russian edition, most fans had already read the story in these separate excerpts,
in anthologies and/or online, thus producing a Russian version of Bart Beaty's "Cerebus Effect"
(Beaty 1-2).
26. A list of significant Russian graphic novels prior to Sterva would include: Igor Kol
garev's Attack of the Snowmen (1992); Konstantin Komardin's Site-o-polis (2004); and Aleksei
Panteleev and Roman Surzhenko's Azart (2009). Mikhail Zaslavsky and Askold Akishin's Mas
ter and Margarita (1992-93, published 2005) and the book-length works of Russia's most suc
cessful komiksisty, Nikolai Maslov and Yury Zhigunov, are published abroad. Akishin's adap
tation of Erich Remarque's All Quiet the Western Front languishes unpublished. Sterva is the
most important event in Russian comics publishing since Bogdan's landmark Russian manga
book Nika (1998/2002).
27. Kovalev aptly describes the art in Sterva as "a little manga, a little Soviet caricature, a
little Russian art school." The work of Mike Mignola, a favorite artist of Tkalenko's, also casts
its shadow. Like Japanese manga, Sterva uses plentiful sound effects: "fssst!", "tm!", "tomp",
"splasshshshs," etc.
28. The novel reworks elements of past Stalkerverse iterations, such as religious symbolism:
the makeshift altar upon which Rot dies, and at one point Sterva cannot recall if the phrase "an
eye for an eye" originates in the Bible or a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
needs correcting, like Schuhart and his deformed daughter; nor even the will
to self-knowledge that initially propels the Marked One in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:
Shadow of Chernobyl. A caption in a panel showing the bodies of stalkers
hanged as a warning reads: "Each of them had his own reason: some sought
out rare artifacts to sell on the black market, others were simply trying to es
cape the regime." But at least in this first novel of the series, the reader never
learns why Sterva took up this most dangerous of professions.29 The novel's
action proper begins with the assassination of Boar [Kaban], Sterva's mentor,
which sets in motion her relentless search for the killers, what they were after,
and why Boar had to die.
In this short excursus through the work, I will examine three main themes:
the gender politics introduced by a female stalker; inter-generational So
viet/post-Soviet conflict and misunderstanding in a context of Putinism; and,
to an extent subsuming the other two, the comics depiction of the Zone, itself
in dialog with other media depictions.
'It's Always Complicated with Women'

Sterva is a woman, and a stalker. How does this alter the gender dynamics and
readerly expectations of the stalkerverse?
In explaining to me their decision to invert the established gender pattern
going back to the Strugatskys, Tkalenko and Voronovich recounted a story
about the production of the U.S. sci-fi/horror film Alien (dir. Ridley Scott,
1979). When the studio requested the screenwriters "complicate" [uslozh
niat'] the hero Ripley, they instructed a secretary to go through the script and
change all references to Ripley as a "he" to "she"—but otherwise leave the
script unaltered. They sent it back and the studio approved it with this "com
plication." "So we proceeded from this supposition that a woman in extreme
conditions is more interesting than a man [...] It's always complicated [ne
prosto] with women!" (2011).30
One such "complication": the marked contrast between Sterva's outward
behavior (depicted through the visuals and dialogue) and her inner thoughts
(portrayed chiefly through first-person captions). To the eye, Sterva seems an
imposing figure, armed with a crossbow, wearing a trench coat, goggles and
combat boots, gazing sullenly. Within the first seven pages she methodically
kills four men, accomplices to Boar's murder. She speaks little, and when she
does, her pronouncements sound resolute, even sadistic. Her first words in the
novel, as she's hanging a man, are, "This world has too much shit already."
29. In an interview, Tkalenko mentions that Sterva explores the Zone in search of some
"higher meaning" [vysshii smysl] (Suslova).
30. The Alien script story is almost certainly apocryphal; see Moore 21 and Stuller 60. The
screenwriters, Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, wrote a "unisex" script to allow for flexibil
ity in casting.
(The man had been defecating when she ambushed him.) Later, in a derelict
church, she raises her weapon point-blank at Rot (Gniloi), the man who shot
Boar. He pleads with her, "You would not dare kill me in God's house." She
replies, "There's been no God here for a long time. He emigrated to another
country. Or another universe."
Conversely, in Voronovich's captions, expressing Sterva's private feelings,
a different figure emerges: a stoic philosopher, an anguished survivor, a little
girl psychologically frozen at the moment of her trauma. In short, the captions
represent a much richer emotional life than Sterva ever reveals in public. At
the end of the episode "Dead Season," a treacly billboard showing a happy
family triggers the recall of her infant self, before the Visitation and gunning
down of her parents. The two selves stare wordlessly at each other across a
large panel, a cascade of captions mediating between them. "[W]hat would I
tell this scared, lonely little girl?" Sterva ponders to herself. "That life is
cruel? Hardly. That everything'll be okay? Wouldn't want to lie to her. Prob
ably, I would just hug her. After all, real human warmth is the rarest thing in
the universe" (Fig. I).31
The complex, private/public duality of Sterva's personality—presumably
part of what makes women "always complicated"—opens up an affective
space untrodden by previous male stalkers, who tend to wear their emotions
on their sleeve: Tarkovsky's monologist hero is (ineffectively) expressive to a
fault, while the Strugatskys' more laconic Schuhart tend to act as he feels.
Throughout her adventures, however, Sterva wrestles with her inner turmoil
while maintaining a detached, "tough" façade. The ironic play of visual/verbal
registers so often central to the comics medium enables a more richly ironic
depiction of the heroine's unstable reality.
Fathers and Daughters and Sons

A central part of that reality is another "complication" of the female stalker:
Sterva's quest for a father figure—which more than anything seems to serve
as her motivation for exploring the Zone. The few instances when Sterva soft
ens in front of others all involve Boar, whom she describes as "more than" a
teacher. A dream version of Boar refers to an infant dream version of Sterva
as "daughter": the panel (in an oneiric "watercolor" style) shows Boar as a
giant, holding the child-Sterva in his paternalistic palm. As pointed out by the
feminist pop culture critic Jennifer Stuller, "a consistent theme in stories
about the female super, or action, hero is that she is reared or mentored by a
man rather than a woman" (195), evidence for Stuller of vestigial patriarchy
even in pro-woman genre discourses. Indeed, in this respect, Sterva might
31. All images from Tkalenko and Voronovich's Sterva used with the permission of the
authors.
Figure 1. Andrei Tkalenko and Elena Voronovich. Sterva. Final page of "Dead Sea
son": Sterva confronts her child self (2, 11). Used with permission.
seem less "complicated," more in keeping with conventional depictions of ac

tion heroines.32
But in Sterva, the father theme encompasses a further aspect not present in
the Western material Stuller examines: the generation gap between dead, in
effective or sadistic "Soviet" fathers and their lost, dead or traumatized post
Soviet children—with various "zones" (of memory, of dream, of the actual
site of Visitation) serving as spaces of confrontation or missed encounter. As
elaborated by, among others, Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova, contem
porary Russian culture suffers a father complex in the aftermath of twentieth
century paternalistic ideology that "positioned the leader—Lenin and
Stalin—as an omniscient divinity with absolute power" (9), but whose au
thority, especially since the USSR's crumbling, has imploded. Hence the
need—particularly during the authoritarian Putin era—for fictions to prop it
up.33 Voronovich/Tkalenko's graphic novel functions in part as a meditation
on the absent presence/present absence of fathers in the post-Soviet era.
Sterva pines for a murdered father whose death sets the novel in motion;
the story's first lines are "Today they killed Boar" (in a caption that, unusu
ally, crosses over a gutter, accentuating Sterva's pained detachment). In other
words, Boar appears only as an idealized mirage in recollections, dreams and
as "resurrected" by the Zone—yet, like the Ghost of Hamlet's father, this only
makes him all the more "alive" as a motivating figure. Near the novel's cli
max, Sterva encounters not one but two revived Boars (presumably due to the
Zone's enigmatic powers to clone the dead to quasi-life), one of whom sav
agely accuses her of causing his death through neglect: "I took care of you,
and you left me there to die." Sterva (in the only instance when she sheds
tears as an adult), answers, "Why are you talking like that? You know it's not
true!" The melodramatic face-off resembles a lover's quarrel.
The two's relationship, however, is not so much incestuous as necrophiliac;
Boar's shade haunts our heroine, fueling and guiding her actions like a direct
ing hand from beyond the grave. The humanist creed which Boar instills in
her—"The only thing people have in this chaos is to hold on to each other"—
while not often verbally expressed, leads Sterva to rescue Plague [Chumnoi],
a civilian obsessively seeking out his own long-lost daughter in the Zone.
Like Sterva, Plague too maintains an ongoing—delusional—relationship with
a dead love object: his daughter Lyubochka, lost in the chaos on the day of
Visitation.
Just as with a doubling of fathers, there is a doubling of daughters; Plague
32. Indeed, Sterva's authors see the father theme in more conventional, dramaturgical terms:
"Appearing and disappearing from the narrative, the 'father,' in one guise or another, creates a
certain gender balance on the one hand, and on the other supports the heroine, underscoring her
human sensibilities" (2011).
33. For an example of cinematic "propping up" of the Russian father image, see my essay on
Alexander Sokurov's Father and Son in Cinepaternity (Alaniz 2010b).
and Lyubochka's plight parallels Sterva and Boar's—with Plague ultimately

dying to join his child, a fantasy reconciliation. In fact, Plague rejects the real,
living daughter-object, Sterva (refusing to heed her warnings of danger), for
the imagined, long-dead one; a failed father since he could not protect his
child, Plague can only "redeem" himself through sacrificing his life. Lyu
bochka's ghostly, imaginary status—like Boar, she appears only in memories,
dreams and hallucinations—is underscored by the dead cell phone Plague car
ries, waiting for her call, as well as by the split-panel composition of the page
in which Plague reaches for Lyubochka just before he is shot: a gutter sepa
rates the two figures, which are otherwise spatially close. (Only after Plague
dies do we see him embrace his daughter; the two appear together in the same
panel, no longer divided by the gutter.)
The cited examples of intergenerational disconnect (or abuse) link Sterva's
family melodrama to another of the novel's major themes: the stubborn per
sistence of Soviet-style totalitarianism in a post-Soviet milieu. In this respect,
the fathers (Boar, Plague) bear the scars—physical and psychic—of their So
viet origins, in the end becoming victims, yet somehow enduring beyond
death.
Markers of Soviet atrocity abound: after glimpsing a Zone anomaly, the
grotesque "sleepers" [spiashchie]—insensate human bodies growing like
moss along a building wall—Plague dreams of lying shot upon a mountain of
naked, bald corpses, like Gulag victims (Fig. 2).34 When Plague finally re
ceives a "call" on his defunct cell phone, it takes place in the derelict Revo
lution Square metro station, with its 1930s-era statues of proletarians. In his
essay on the Moscow metro, "Bodies of Terror," Mikhail Ryklin notes how
such statuary and décor masked the violence of the Stalinist purges, a process
he describes as "the inevitable traumatizing nature of industrial labor, camou
flaged in every possible way by the literature of that era" (61). The "order of
the visible," unlike the literary, allows unconscious traces (e.g., of political re
pression) to show through more clearly, according to Ryklin. As if sensing
such traces, Plague nervously intones, "I never liked these statues." Immedi
ately after, the phone rings—literally calling Plague to his doom, as follow
ing the instructions he receives exposes him to gunfire. The cell phone screen
even lights up with the word "home": Plague returns to the scene of Soviet
horror, his generation's unheimlich, inescapable "home."
In this light (read through the sociopolitical context of the Putin era),
Boar's accusations that Sterva "abandoned" him to his death correlate to com
plaints that contemporary young people—either by joining neo-nationalist
groups like Nashi or through political apathy—have betrayed the humanist
34. On the post-Soviet exhuming of Stalin's victims, see Paperno. The image of Plague atop
a heap of naked corpses resembles the poster to Alexander Rogozhkin's The Chekist (Chekist,
1992).
Figure 2. Andrei Tkalenko and Elena Voronovich. Sterva. Plague's nightmare: atop a
mountain of corpses, evocative of Stalin's victims (3, 41). Used with permission.
principles of the Soviet-era intelligentsia which Boar represents. The gutter

separating the living Plague and dead Lyubochka signifies the fatal discon
nect between the Soviet (lost, brutalizing, failed) and post-Soviet (incipient,
unformed, innocent) generations.
It should be noted that some intergenerational relationships in Sterva do
manage to avoid strife and misunderstanding—albeit by perpetuating mas
culinist violence. Two minor characters, a senior watch-tower guard and a
green recruit, enact a rite of passage when the latter achieves his first kill by
shooting Plague, to his commander's encouragement. "Way to go!" says the
older man, hand on the recruit's shoulder. "See, there's nothing to it. You can
make your first notch." In the post-Visitation dystopia (read: post-Soviet
dystopia), power and violence are the final arbiters,35 as much as under Stalin,
what Irina Paperno has called "an attitude characteristic of the current [Rus
sian] state in the process of 'coming to terms with the past': not exactly a de
nial or forgetting, but an inclusion of the criminal modality of the past into the
imperfect present" (106).
The Comics Space of the Zone

In an essay devoted to the representation of non-human consciousness in
graphic narrative, David Herman highlights comics' medium-specific poten
tial for conveying different "experiential frames," as when various panels
(each representing its own subjective state or point of view) are juxtaposed
over a common background (157). In such instances, no one "reality" pre
dominates; the reader switches between numerous alterities, verbal vs. visual
cues and overall page design to ascribe a reading(s). For Herman, the depic
tion of "otherness" benefits from such inherent capacities of comics to offer
simultaneous and sequential units of meaning, what Charles Hatfield calls a
unique "art of tensions":
[W]e can say that the single image functions as both an imagined timeline—a self-contained
moment substituting for the moment before it, and anticipating the moment to come—and an
element of global page design. In other words, there is a tension between the concept of "break
ing down" a story into constituent images and the concept of laying out those images together
on an unbroken surface. This tension lies at the heart of comics design—and poses yet another
challenge to the reader. (Hatfield 48)36
Such discussions of the multi-modal nature of comics and its engagement

with ontology(ies) very much resonate with Tkalenko's unique depiction of
the Zone in Sterva. In its "cityscape" interludes, use of "empty" panels, cap
tion/art tensions and page design, in fact, the novel most productively taps
35. In the novel, government troops at times hesitate to obey, and one commander even
curses his superiors when they instruct him to fire on civilians to make way for the president's
motorcade—but they all follow orders anyway.
36. For an exhaustive semiological treatment of space and page design in comics, see Groen
steen, particularly chapter 1.
into, interacts with and innovates upon previous iterations of the stalkerverse
Zone in different media—in the process, incidentally, legitimating comics as
an independent art form on a par with any other.
Two recent discussions of Tarkovsky's cinematic treatment trace a critical
line similar to the one I want to advance for Sterva. David Foster argues that
Stalker's often jarring transitions between color and black and white photog
raphy, along with its editing and other techniques, emphasize the Zone's
reflexive significance apart from narrative [...] signaling] to the viewer not only that he or she
is watching a film, but that the 'filmic-ness' of this film exists outside the narrative [...] As the
distinction between those images belonging to the narrative present and to other narrative mo
ments or spaces is blurred beyond narrative coherence, these alternations defamiliarize the nar
rative structure for the spectator. (3 ll)37
Similarly, Robert Bird contends we should read the Zone as a self-reflex

ive space, "simply the demarcated area within which an event can occur, akin
to the screen in cinema [...] The Zone is where one goes to see one's inner
most desires. It is, in short, the cinema" (69). These insights raise the ques
tion: if the Zone is cinema in a film, is it comics in a graphic novel? If
Tarkovsky in Stalker figures the Zone as "a logically impossible but cinemat
ically possible space" (Foster 314), does Tkalenko produce a graphic narra
tive version possible only as comics?
Certainly Tkalenko's art and design open new possibilities for what the
polysemous Zone "is," in ways only a comics approach can effect (some in
dialogue with other media depictions). For example, the central panel on the
novel's opening page, showing Sterva hunched over Boar's dead body, is
"shot" through a large, shadowed hole in a wall; the odd visual vacuum this
creates heightens a mood of mourning (Fig. 3). Here, the Zone is that vac
uum, just as in Stalker Tarkovsky moves his camera into and through various
open pathways, including an abandoned car, to create his "cinematically pos
sible space."38 (Tkalenko "duplicates" Tarkovsky's track-in movement in
subsequent panels, which depict increasingly closer views of the subjects.)
Other "transmedial" or allusive segments include a recasting of the film's
"Dry Tunnel" scene as the metro tunnel Sterva and Plague cross en route to
the Revolution Square station; the "sleepers" previously mentioned, a fairly
obvious homage to the Aliens films; the somewhat parodie names for Zone
anomalies, such as "Burning Black" and "Wind of Change," in mocking trib
ute to the Strugatskys' own outlandish nomenclature; and the desolate
Moscowscapes, evocative of the Chernobyl exclusion zone as described by
Natalia Manzurova—"abandoned, partly looted, multi-storied apartment
37. Foster's comments on how certain shots in the film make time "tangible" (314) clearly
have some relevance for my own discussion of comics, as the panel is often figured as a unit of
(ambiguous) time.
38. On the Stalker DVD (Kino), see such shots at 48:00 and 57:00 in Part I, and 1:15 in Part 2.
Figure 3. Andrei Tkalenko and Elena Voronovich. Sterva. The opening page of Sterva
(1, 1). Used with permission.
houses, big squares and buildings" (25); "Empty and stripped, apartment
buildings became reproachful concrete boxes" (38)—and Svetlana Alek
sievich's interviewees—"People have left, but their photographs are still in
their houses, like their souls" (192); the high-caliber action set pieces, which
naturally recall the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games as well as sci-fi manga.
Other less derivative episodes in Sterva involve uniquely comics techniques
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eral senses. At the conclusion of "Ashes to Ashes," Sterva bursts
doors of a church, chasing Rot's unknown killer outside (Fig. 4, p
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borderless emptiness sprinkled with rain drops (Fig. 4, panel 2). The c
tell of the heroine's sense of defeat and will to vengeance; they do not describe
her literal surroundings. Instead, the emptiness is figurative—the notion of the
Zone as ultimate mystery, where human understanding dissolves, is reinforced
through the contrast of gray shades (in the "normal" first panel and in the cap
tions, whose tone visually echoes that of the church doors) with the Zone's
stark white space and black rain-drops. The effect is akin to a narratival trajec
tory stopped cold before a Malevich-like absoluteness.
Tkalenko and Voronovich also resort to page designs that "cascade" panels
and/or captions over a page-size illustration to emphasize the Zone's perva
siveness, how it constantly threatens to overwhelm the narrative in ways sim
ilar to Foster's and Bird's readings of Stalker. As Plague and Sterva explore
the underground tunnels, we see them in two panels entering a murky hatch;
a third panel shows only the gloomy doorway that has consumed them, while
a fourth depicts the close-up of a sign warning: "Danger!" Enveloping these
smaller panels and dominating the composition, however, is a bleak portrait
of the forsaken tunnel, all shadows and industrial debris (Fig. 5). The gutted
machinescape super-panel—in Groensteen's parlance, the "hyperframe"
(30)—penetrates and "contaminates" the minor panels with its oppressive
hopelessness; it seems to gaze into them. As if in response, Sterva looks out
uncertainly towards the reader as she enters; she feels something watching.
As argued by Herman, the different panels imply different subjectivities
(Plague's, Sterva's, an "omniscient" narrator's), while the hyperframe nearly
subsumes them all with its foreboding hyper-subjectivity.
Another element of the Zone, its strange physical and temporal nature, is
suggested by a "cascading captions" technique (Fig. 6). As Plague and Sterva
prepare to set out on their final expedition, the narrative breaks away to a
splash page depicting Moscow as a jumble of decrepit buildings in rainfall. In
six grey-toned captions, Sterva elaborates on the spatial elasticity of the Zone:
"Sometimes these distances ... change. They get longer or shorter. In the lit
eral meaning of the word. It's like someone is stretching and contracting
space, like a rubber band" (ellipsis in original). Tkalenko's drawing accentu
ates this topographical impossibility by combining different photographs of
buildings while retaining each picture's perspective—this, together with the
oddly-spaced captions, gives the illustration its "jumbled" quality,39 an effect
not unlike the reverse perspective of Russian icons.
Moreover, the tension between image and text here produces its own elas
ticity of time, since as with any comics work there exists no set pace for read
ing the page. But Voronovich takes this quality a step further by anticipating
time: the last two captions, describing the military patrols that roam the Zone
"destroying] anyone they meet," more properly "belong" to the first panel on
39. For Sterva's backgrounds, Tkalenko downloads images of Moscow streets from the In
ternet and alters them to suit the story's needs (2011).
Figure 5. Andrei Tkalenko and Elena Voronovich. Sterva. The underground tunnel as
hyperframe: the Zone pervades the "minor" panels (3, 59). Used with permission.
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патрули.
НУ,
НУ, ЗНАЕТЕ,
ЗНАЕТЕ,СО&ИРАЮТ
СО&ИРАЮТ ВСЯКИЕ
ВСЯКИЕ ТАМТАМ
ОБРАЗЦЫ,
ОБРАЗЦЫ,
ФОТОГРАФИРУЮТ
ФОТОГРАФИРУЮТ.
И ОНИ УНИЧТОЖАЮТ
лю&ого, кто
ВСТРЕТИТСЯ НА ПУТИ,
Figure 6. Andrei Tkalenko and Elena Voronovich. Sterva. The Zone as comics:
"cascading panels" overlay a multi-perspectival Moscowscape (3, 43). Used with
permission.
the next page, which actually shows one of these patrols. The "jumbled"
Moscow page opens up space (through the multiple perspectives) and time,
through captions that move backwards (reminiscences of Boar) and forward
(military patrol) in the story's chronology.
Through such techniques—abandoned cityscapes, disorienting chronoto
pography and oppressive mood that yields to unexpected epiphanies—Serra
effectuates the comics version of a "Zone sublime."40
Conclusion: Zone of Dystopia

Stalinist culture is a memorial to a nation which appears to be extinct today. The Soviet na
tion no longer exists, but the post-Soviet nation has taken on all the trauma of the era in which
that earlier nation was born. [...] [I]t is clear that we are concerned with the most profound so
cial trauma in recent Russian history, "work" on which has barely begun. Society has not out
grown it, in fact, it has not even matured enough for this work. And it has not matured because
it has not yet emerged from the Stalin era. (Dobrenko 164, emphasis in original)
Zaslavsky notes that initially Voronovich and Tkalenko had no desire to

create a political allegory. Yet much of Sterva is clearly informed by the con
temporary sociopolitical reality Dobrenko describes; it is a work suffused
with post-Soviet traumas, with the enduring history of Stalinist abuse
(metaphorized here as the Zone).41 Such maturity of subject, along with its
expansion of the Strugatskys' original concepts (particularly in regard to gen
der), and deployment of techniques unique to comics to engage with the
darker side of the Putin/Medvedev era, indeed make Tkalenko/Voronovich's
graphic novel a milestone in komiks publishing.
As argued by Zizek in his dissection of Stalker, Sterva recasts the blank
slate of the Zone's radical otherness for an "inner journey," a psycho-drama
of loss and historical reckoning. Odd as the concept remains for many Rus
sian readers, comics yields nothing to other formats in its treatment of such
topics; indeed, in discussing the medium's response to the 9/11 terrorist at
tacks, Christophe Dony and Christophe van Linthout maintain: "Though
trauma, by definition, imposes a barrier between the imaginable and the ex
pressible, comics can overcome and emphasize the 'unrepresentability' of the
traumatic events via its fractured sequential format" (186).
Furthermore, as more than a few political scientists and cultural critics in
sist, contemporary Russia needs to come to terms with its past. Its refusal to
40. The term is partly inspired by Polina Barskova's "siege sublime" in her discussion of the
World War II Leningrad blockade, whereby the observer "replacefs] the horrific with the beau
tiful, or reconstructs] the horrific as beautiful" (331, emphasis in original).
41. Voronovich/Tkalenko's continuation of Sterva, an excerpt of which appeared on the
KomMissia Festival website in 2010 (<http://www.kommissia.ru/gallery/thumbnails.php?
album=1940>) makes these links to the Stalinist past even more explicit: it features a scene of
political torture by government agents, in a room presided over by a portrait of Felix Dzerzhin
sky, first director of the Cheka secret police.
do so has led to such national neuroses as its "Eastern authoritarian" political

culture (Dobrenko 161); its "negative definition" of statehood (Strukov 34); a
twenty-first-century "apocalypticism" and "disinterestedness" among its pop
ulace (Lapina-Kratasyuk 61); and indeed, to Putinism itself—all symptoms of
a deep-seated, lingering trauma (Ryklin).
Popular texts such as Sterva—which reify those symptoms as gun-toting
heroines, living dead and sci-fi tropes—in their own way make conversations
about that history more possible, particularly for young readers least inclined
to take on such a task. Moreover, by taking an established Soviet-era classic
as its hypotext, then adapting and reconfiguring it for a new and very differ
ent generation, Sterva makes confronting the past "safer," more familiar, re
assuringly relevant.42
Will future episodes feature a moulage Lenin, free of his mausoleum, wan
dering the Moscow Exclusion Zone?
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Реферат
Хосе Аланиз
([Пост-] Советская) зона дистопии: «Стерва» Ткаленко и Воронович
Адаптируя концепции и контексты «сталкеровской» истории, впервые

предложение классическим научно-фантастическим романом «Пикник на
обочине» Бориса и Аркадия Стругацких (1972), разработаные далее в фильме
«Сталкер» Андрея Тарковского (1979), и вновь рождённые в милитаристской,
"шутер от первого лица" видеоигры «S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Тень Чернобыля» (2007) и в
её продолжениях, предлагаемых украинской компанией GSC Game World,
знаменательный русский графический роман «Стерва» Андрея Ткаленко и
Елены Воронович (2010) проходит через некий транс-жанровый "сталкеровский
мир," возникший на пересечении прозы, кино, сценаризма, фанфика, видеоигры,
манги и многих других жанров. Поразительная визуальная и словесная
гетерогенность источников произведения говорит о возможностях комикса
соединять различные жанры, сохраняя при этом связное многослойное значение
в российском контексте. Не будучи явным «политическим» произведени
«Стерва» отражает чёрный цинизм и аномию большой части молодёжной
культуры в эпоху Путина / Медведева, а также всё ещё присутствующий призр
советской кошмарности. Ключевые действия прозведения, травмы перенесённые
его многочисленными персонажами, в том числе его героиней, и, более всего, е
сложно метафоризированые изображения пост-апокалиптической "Зоны,"
достигнутые уникальными методами комикса, все представляют призрак
российского 20-го века и его ужасы, демонстрируя многолетнюю адапт
оригинальных концепций Стругацких в многочисленных жанрах и п
доводы в пользу жизнеспособности российского графического романа н
традиционно враждебном комиксу.

José Alaniz - ( (POST-) SOVIET) ZONE OF DYSTOPIA: VORONOVICH/TKALENKO'S 'STERVA'

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José Alaniz - ( (POST-) SOVIET) ZONE OF DYSTOPIA: VORONOVICH/TKALENKO'S 'STERVA'

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American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

([POST-] SOVIET) ZONE OF DYSTOPIA: VORONOVICH/TKALENKO'S 'STERVA'

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages is collaborating

José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

Despite significant, even remarkable strides since the waning years of

SEEJ, Vol. 57, No. 2 (2013): p. 203-p. 228 203

Chernobyl (2007) by the Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, Sterva de

clean cities of light, miraculous technology and sleek transport conveyances to

7. As described by Birgit Menzel:

Such a "temporally heterogeneous" cultural moment helps explain the en

By the early twenty-first century, writes Mikhail Zaslavsky, Roadside Pic

14. See <http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/Others/inf368.shtml>.

ers" or stalkerverse. The S.TA.L.K.E.R}1 video game series launched by the

them, he exhibited a befuddling level of dedication to a medium much

published during the KomMissia comics festival. Subsequent portions were

'It's Always Complicated with Women'

Fathers and Daughters and Sons

seem less "complicated," more in keeping with conventional depictions of ac

and Lyubochka's plight parallels Sterva and Boar's—with Plague ultimately

principles of the Soviet-era intelligentsia which Boar represents. The gutter

The Comics Space of the Zone

Such discussions of the multi-modal nature of comics and its engagement

Similarly, Robert Bird contends we should read the Zone as a self-reflex

Figure 4. Andrei Tkalenko and Elena Voronovich. Sterva. The metaphor

to construct the Zone as a metaphorical, atemporal space of absen

иногда это расстояние,,.

ДЛЯ СОСТАВЛЕНИЯ ТАКИХ КАРТ

Conclusion: Zone of Dystopia

Zaslavsky notes that initially Voronovich and Tkalenko had no desire to

do so has led to such national neuroses as its "Eastern authoritarian" political

Alaniz, José. Komiks: Comic Art in Russia. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010a.

Herman, D. "Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives." SubStance

Tkalenko, Andrei, <http://www.drew.ru/>. Personal website.

([Пост-] Советская) зона дистопии: «Стерва» Ткаленко и Воронович

Адаптируя концепции и контексты «сталкеровской» истории, впервые

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