This fragment gives a great example of how Szczerek writes and of how his texts came to be. Before he wrote Mordor, his impressions were published on Interia.pl. In these, the author (writing under a pseudonym) explored the Polish need for Ukrainian hardcore. He wrote texts in which the lines between fiction and reality were blurred – it was this kind of Ukraine that readers wanted.
Szczerek hit the nail on the head. Ukrainian reality as depicted by Szczerek seems made for gonzo. However, the negative stereotypes about Ukraine (that hardcore East is East type of vibe) are readily contradicted in the book. Mordor is a total deconstruction of Polish attitudes towards Ukraine and Ukrainians, as well as towards the East itself – attitudes that try to preserve leftovers from romanticism or colonialism, all attitudes that stem from a historical sense of superiority and which now backlash in the form of resentments.
Something like that would probably not be possible in traditional forms of reportage. Thanks to gonzo, however, Szczerek can make stronger sociopolitical statements, for example, that Western Ukraine is the one place that most resembles Poland, distant and close at the same time – it's Poland, only with higher dosage of the East or, as the author puts it, "it's Poland; only it pisses you off more".
East: Deconstruction!
In Mordor, Szczerek demonstrates the unease of grasping the amorphous spatial designations we use for this territory. The "post-Soviet" space is traditionally associated with the East (subconsciously excluding Poland). It is a space where nothing resembles anything, or rather everything resembles nothing, where objects pretend to be their counterparts (mainly Western ones) rather than being themselves – and all of this is weird, seemingly unfinished as if deconstructed from the very beginning.
This is precisely what Szczerek emphasizes in his description of Zamarstyniv, a district in Lviv. He describes streets ("an incredible cocktail of rubble, dry mud and stones stubbornly pretending to be a sidewalk"), neighbourhoods ("bundles of wires hung like vines, heaps of rusting scrap and virtually everything else, lying around helter-skelter in the courtyards, all resembling something organic, something that would soon sprout branches") and all the other places and objects that, due to their unclear ontological character and function, cannot even be named. It's a reality in which, according to the protagonist of Mordor, "form and aesthetics have been discarded, as a useless fad..." Szczerek's descriptions are most of all humoristic, like his view of Drohobych:
The monstrous Soviet block took over the Galician hills like a conquering army. We took a long, boring road which led through Khrushchev-esque blocks. Among them was a little old orthodox church, the last remaining sign of what had been there before. The blocks loomed over it like a group of thugs over a victim about to be demolished.
In his clash with Ukrainian reality, Szczerek's protagonist retains a capacity for childlike amazement – this could partly be associated with the mind-altering substances consumed in large quantities by the characters, but also the reality which in itself seems to be hallucinogenic.
At the same time Szczerek, unlike others, knows how to coin poetical descriptions of towns and places – although in all likeliness no one will ever use them in a tourist guide. For example, his description of Bakhchysarai ("a jolly Slavic shibby put on top of the town’s oriental skeleton"), or the surroundings of Sevastopol ("It was Italy but Soviet, post-Soviet. It was Italy made up of settlements of poured concrete and breeze block. An alternative history in all its splendour").
In Ukraine, Szczerek moves around in a space and time in which many cultural and landscape layers are superimposed: the former Galicia (Halychyna, in Ukrainian) with Zakarpathia, Volyn, Podole, the steppe of middle Ukraine, the Cossak Zaporozhe, the Black Sea Odessa, the "Oriental" Tatar Crimea – and somewhere around it all (everywhere) the gaping abyss of Mordor. To be able to see these layers – covered with Communist-era blocks and now with turbo-capitalistic advertising – one needs to have a really sharp eye.
Szczerek's book also shows that East merges with its surroundings. To those interested in demarcation lines, we suggest reading the book – there they will find where Mordor begins.
He returned to Ukraine in 2015 with the book Tatoo with a Tryzub ("tryzub" means "trident" and it is the national coat of arms of Ukraine), which was nominated for the Nike award. The vision of Ukraine as a "theoretical country", which never had the chance to truly exist, where "everything looks as if there had been a nuclear holocaust" is reinforced by post-apocalyptic images taken out of Star Wars or Mad Max. These reportages are less fictionalized, pure non-fiction born out of a fascination with the chaos and weirdness of a place, where "apocalypse [...] already took place and now everything slowly, calmly deteriorated".
