"It’s tempting to call his trespasses acts of pilgrimage, and there is something votive about them, but they are a compulsion too, an addiction. The prose – or maybe the experiences it describes – has the quality of a fever dream. Kamysh is a stalker, but it’s the forbidden Zone that stalks him. The thought of it won’t leave him alone. He swears he will stay away. He always comes back. You might call these journeys entradas, after the word the Spanish used diving into the American interior after the fall of the Aztec and Inca empires. And the zone too is a kind of terra incognita. Yes, there are maps. But I don’t know if there are any maps for what Kamysh wants to find."

— The Quietus Magazine

“By the time we get to that explanation, late on in this remarkable book, Kamysh has made us understand why he thinks the zone around Chornobyl is so special, why – because of its desolate serenity, and the freedom it grants from the strictures of normal life – it may even be worth dying for.”

— The Guardian

"He goes beyond the ghost villages, he continues to rummage through nothingness because he does it inside himself. He curses this magnet by writing: «I want all this to disappear so I can see the photos and not feel any nostalgia». And yet he comes back." "The Zone is his drug. It is good because it is bad, it is cursed because it is irresistible. It gives, for a brief, deceptive, but otherwise unattainable moment, what the inclusive world denies: peace."

— la Repubblica

Markiyan sits down in front of a grave. In front of us, the forest unfurls its trees, which the setting sun is starting to set ablaze. "There's no one for fifteen kilometers around," he rejoices. He remains motionless for twenty minutes, his eyes staring into space.

"True peace is here."

— Le Nouvel Obs

"The reader thus comes to share Kamysh's vision of himself and of those like him: "Sometimes I think we don't exist. There aren't those forty persons who regularly wander through the swamps... We were once there, then we dissolved into the marshes, we decomposed into duckweed, rushes and sunlight." And this is what the book is about, in fact: an absolute fusion with the landscape." "What it offers us, however, is not a morbid tourism in the apocalypse, but rather an act of love, an annihilation of the ego, a mystical immersion in a suspended world where things grant themselves in their hostile and yet helpless and poignant beauty precisely because they are beautiful despite the offenses we have inflicted on them and because, like all of us, they are headed towards the final harmony of consumption."

— il Manifesto

“He has gone to the Zone in the dead of winter, stomping into an endless blizzard, freezing through the night. “We know how stupid our escapades are,” Kamysh writes, but his own motivation is not merely to experience extreme tourism. He revels in a feeling of “true alienation: treading unfamiliar paths and sinking into swamps without a compass or a map, looking up at the stars you know nothing about.” In sparsely repopulated villages and secluded borderlands, following the paths of smugglers looking for scrap metal, Kamysh admits he is looking for “something unattainable”—an antidote, perhaps, to complacency and consumerism. Illegal tourists revive dead cities. “They breathe life into the empty shells of fragile houses” and make the Zone “a place worth living for.”

— Kirkus Review

“Thanks to a style balanced between the linguistic ecstasy of the desperate journey among the crumbling relics of a historical tragedy and the cruel and sentimental minimalism of an atrocious reality, Kamyš writes a work capable of shaking us in the face of human pain and the pain of nature.”

— Corriere della Sera

“Brilliant text between an intimate story, a spicy walk and a searing post-Chernobyl document". "A morbid and magical world reminiscent of the films of Tim Burton and Jim Jarmusch, in which Markiyan Kamysh plays a Baudelaire vagabond."

— Les Inrocks

“Breathless rhythm, relentless writing: Markiyan Kamysh, now under arms, paints a poignant picture of a desperate resistance to destruction, painting, in passing, an uncompromising portrait of his native country. Let us bet that once peace returns, The Master will find its place on the shelves of a great universal library”.

— Le Monde

— То будемо чекати на велику книгу, а зараз уточню: коли ви говорите, що вас заворожує краса, ви говорите про природу, чи все ж і про індустріальну красу?

— Люблю гул станцій автоматичного контролю радіації, скрегіт лапок птахів, що сідають на битий фарфор лепівських "чашок", настирливий писк радіометра і шкряботіння білки, яка видирається на стіну прип'ятської висотки. Зрештою, візерунок палого листя в умивальнику на закинутій вулиці – щовесни я видивляюся в ньому особливі візерунки. Вони знаменують – хороший буде рік чи поганий. Моя таємна, персональна, гаруспічна карта.

Я зневажаю забобони, але в Зоні свідомо створюю масив ритуалів, бо вони маркують простір, перетворюючи його на дім. І чим більше ходиш, тим більше хочеться цих ритуалів створювати: привалюватися в тих само місцях, обходити закинуте тими самими маршрутами, повторювати і зациклювати. Насправді, я експлуатую доволі простий ефект: в есхатологічній істерії епохи та атмосфері постійної тривоги повторення це дарує ілюзію стабільності й "розряджає" психіку, а фітоциди соснового лісу – довершують справу.

Для мене давно важать незначні елементи, вже непомітні людям, які там працюють і ще непомітні тим, хто залетів по дотичній. Наприклад, перед комендантською годиною із Зони виїжджають машини, одна за одною. Гул змінюється гулом, наростає і зливається в супергул, що затихає моментально з настанням комендантської години. І в цій обірваній луні, чистій музиці авторитаризму є водночас щось прекрасне: бо ти цю симфонію порушуєш.

— з інтерів’ю “Укрінформ”