Gutalin

Gutalin is a self-appointed opponent of the Zone’s influence whose creed is to leave its objects where they came from. Yet he does not keep that conviction at the level of preaching: when he has money, he buys the stalkers’ swag without haggling, carries it back into the Zone at night, and buries it. The contradiction between his condemnation of the Zone and his intimate, repeated dealings with it makes him both a vivid presence in Redrick Schuhart’s world and a measure of how that world changes.

Identity and Conviction

Gutalin’s moral language divides the city into the genuinely human and those who have surrendered themselves to something worse. At one gathering, he declares that only Redrick and he are real men; the rest are pigs or Satan’s children. He makes an exception for Redrick even while saying that Redrick serves the devil too: in Gutalin’s eyes, involvement with the Zone does not erase the possibility of remaining human. The judgment is sweeping, but its inclusion of Redrick gives it the force of a rough, personal recognition rather than a simple denunciation.

His explanation for the Zone is religious and absolute. He calls it the devil’s temptation and insists that people should take nothing from it, return whatever they have taken, and live as if it were not there. The objects are, in his formulation, the devil’s things and should be left to the devil. Gutalin’s argument is not merely that the Zone is dangerous; it is that accepting its products entails a moral participation in its power. His proposed answer is renunciation, even though his own life keeps bringing him back into contact with the very things he condemns.

Ritual of Return

Redrick describes Gutalin as someone he likes, despite—or partly because of—his strangeness. Gutalin’s convictions have a practical cost: whenever he has money, he pays stalkers whatever price they ask for their swag, without bargaining. At night he takes what he has bought back into the Zone and buries it. The sequence turns his sermon into a private rite: the items pass from the Zone to the city through the stalkers, then return to the Zone through Gutalin’s hands.

His conduct makes him an unusual counterforce to the market surrounding the Zone. He does not profit from the goods or try to secure a better price; he spends money to undo their removal. The ritual cannot make the Zone absent, as his preaching wishes, but it gives his refusal a material form. At the same time, the repetition keeps him entangled in the traffic he opposes: his attempt to return the objects depends on stalkers continuing to bring them out and sell them to him.

Public Outbursts and Redrick

Gutalin’s religious fervor is also theatrical and volatile. At one point, as crockery breaks and women squeal outside, he roars for Redrick and demands to know what has been done with him, calling those around him seeds of the devil. The police siren follows the disturbance. The scene links his concern for Redrick to his wider denunciation of the people around him, and places his preaching amid a noisy, disorderly public episode rather than in the calm of a formal sermon.

That concern is consistent with his earlier praise of Redrick as one of the city’s only real men. Gutalin does not treat Redrick’s involvement with the Zone as proof that he is lost; instead, he distinguishes him from the crowd even while acknowledging his service to the devil. His attachment to Redrick therefore sits alongside, rather than softening, his condemnation. Gutalin can care about a person who remains implicated in what he believes should be rejected.

The Fighting Angels and Later Change

Later, Gutalin is reported to be much as before, but his circumstances and methods have shifted. His old organization, the Fighting Angels, has broken up. He now has a gang of three men, and they spend days at a time in the Zone destroying everything they encounter. The earlier practice of buying up swag and taking it back had depended on a supply of objects brought out by stalkers; now, according to the account, there is nothing to buy. The shift from returning goods to destroying things marks a change in the form of his opposition, from a personal transaction and nightly burial to extended expeditions with a small group.

The account also connects the group’s new situation to institutional pressure: the institute’s new director has involved the police. The passage does not detail the resulting confrontation, but it places Gutalin’s campaign within a changing landscape where the old organization is gone, the market that sustained his ritual has dried up, and the police have entered the picture. His opposition persists, but the means available to it—and the risks surrounding it—have changed.

Decline and Narrative Significance

The Borscht, once a lively place associated with dancing and fun, has changed too. Gutalin no longer goes there; the altered atmosphere has put him off. His absence makes the bar’s decline personal as well as social: one of its former presences, a man who bought stalkers’ goods and preached their return, has withdrawn from it. Redrick, too, may have become more deeply fixed in his own habits, but the account presents that possibility tentatively rather than as a confirmed fact.

Gutalin’s arc is defined less by a conversion than by persistence under altered conditions. His central belief remains recognizable, while the practice attached to it changes as the Fighting Angels break apart and there is no longer swag to buy. He embodies an attempt to answer the Zone’s presence through refusal and restitution, but the later turn to destruction shows the limits of that answer: the Zone cannot simply be ignored, and the world around it does not stand still. His mixture of moral absolutism, indiscriminate generosity toward stalkers, affection for Redrick, and increasingly forceful opposition makes him one of the story’s most distinctive responses to the Zone.