Readers can’t stop thinking about Roadside Picnic:

And it is for her that Red makes his last, tragic foray into the hazardous and hostile depths. Even the nature of his daughter has been determined by the Zone.

His life is dominated by the Zone and the thriving black market in the alien products. Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those strange misfits who are compelled by some unknown force to venture illegally into the Zone and, in spite of the extreme danger, collect the mysterious artefacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. On that way I wrote in my dissertation about processes occurring with a text of the literary piece when it is transferred to the screen, and also in the case when a literary piece becomes part of the multi-platform media project.The Strugatsky brothers’ poignant and introspective novel of first contact that inspired the classic film Stalker Also I wrote shortly about European and Russian theories of adaptation for cinema and TV from Bela Balazs and Viktor Shklovsky to our times. In my master thesis I wrote about specificity of the novel by Brothers Strugatsky, I analized the film by Tarkovsky and franchise “S.T.A.L.K.E.R” from which made Ukrainian-Russian television series, cycle of PC games, three series of books and amateur films. Famous theoretic of that genre, Darko Suvin, wrote: “The story has since been strongly reworked, and to my mind impoverished, in a sequence of the Strugatskys’ scenarios for Tarkovsky’s Christian-existentialist movie Stalker.” Brothers Strugatsky reworked their scenario about ten times and finally it was film as Tarkovsky wished to be.

Their novel is example of science fiction genre but the film “Stalker” is something different.

Although the authors of the scenario were Brothers Strugatsky, the plot of the film is very different from the text of the novel “Roadside Picnic”. The most famous cinema adaptation of that novel is “Stalker” by Andrey Tarkovsky from 1979. That novel is published first time on 1972 by Brothers Strugatsky. The master dissertation titled „Problems of Adaptations of Strugatsky Brothers 'Roadside Picnic' for Cinema and Television” focuses on that novel and it adaptation for cinema and television on Russian language.

Strugatsky brothers roadside picnic