Abstract
“So, my love, have you understood my sadness? Pass it on to the people, though I might not be around by then. They’ll find me in the earth. Under the roots.” (Zinaida Yevdokimovna Kovalenka, returnee) The explosion and subsequent melt-down of reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 initiated a forced diaspora of Soviet citizens from the town of Pripyat and surrounding villages within the 30km exclusion zone. This paper considers the real-world return of citizens to the Chernobyl zone of alienation alongside the return of disenfranchised citizens to the zone in GSC Gameworld’s first person shooter series S.T.A.L.K.E.R., as iterations of exile and return that transect borders of safety. Two worlds – the digital and the physical – divided by their apparent realities and united by their radiation. In these Chernobyl presents an aberrant kind of mirroring that seems to have unintentionally collided in expressions of a return to spaces of belonging. If Chernobyl is, as Svetlana Alexievich writes, ‘the beginning of a new history’ 1. then speculative extrapolation of this history to reimagine the world of the Chernobyl zone must surely be that history’s corollary. After the nuclear diaspora, what reconfigurations emerge to correlate a citizen’s understanding of belonging with a standard in the order of things that makes sense to the rest of the world. 1. Svetlana Alexievich. 2013. Chernobyl Prayer. (trans. 2016). London: Penguin, 24.