Wild boars use natural feed such as ground cover for about half a year. In this work the contamination of boar muscles with caesium-137 and contamination of ground cover were compared. The level of caesium- 137 was measured by spectromertic method. Muscle samples from total 86 wild boars were collected just after Chernobyl accident (years I 986-1988 and in years I 998-1999). The results of the studies indicate that there is a relationship between radiocontamination of the environment as well as muscles of wild boars. It seems that animals at large can be good indicators of radiocontamination of the environment.

In contemporary cultural discourse, Chernobyl is associated with nuclear apocalypse. The author of the article examines two authors’ visions of Chernobyl in Ukrainian literature, which represent different textual strategies of the copreciprocalization of the trauma experienced. One of them, revealed in Markiyan Kamysh’s novel Oformlandia (2015), is an attempt to reconstruct a post‐apocalyptic world. The writer’s narrator, who is the same age as the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, travels to the Zone and talks about it as an exotic space that is freed from human presence. In Teodosia Zarivna’s novel The Silence of Caesium (2022) the narrator is a peasant woman who oppositely has spent her entire life near Chernobyl, but after the accident returns and becomes the last resident in her native village. The first work presents an imaginary model of the future: Chernobyl becomes a place of exotic excursions and extreme tourists. In the second, the Zone appears as an organic factor in a picture of the past – a historical era of the twentieth century, which is fading into oblivion along with its last witnesses.