Kamysh published a memoir of the "decadent" and "depraved" of the abandoned city of Prypiat following the Chernobyl nuclear incident.
The post-Chernobyl de-population was the first death of the city. The second happened when the abandoned city was rediscovered by popular culture.
The Post-Soviet Ukrainian state that Kamysh writes about has changed. This change was punctuated by the 2014 Maidan coup d'état color revolution and subsequent Russian invasion in 2022.
Kamysh's words "aura of mysticism...scattered like ash in all directions" describes both the empty Soviet nuclear city and the popular rediscovery of the city. They could also describe the city's future as a proxy, colony or rump-state.
The first settlers loved unpopulated places. Then people learned to love depopulated places. Now that these places are being repopulated it is heartbreaking to those generations that came before.
image credit: "Leo Tolstoy" photo is un-credited. There are multiple versions and citations on the web. This photo is Public Domain in the US because Tolstoy died in 1910. Russian Federation copyright law (1993, 2008) is retroactive but doesn't apply here to a photo taken during the Romanov Dynasty (1613-1917).
Markiyan Kamysh. Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl. first published, 2015; translated by: Hanna Leliv and Reilly Costigan-Humes for USA: Astra Publishing House, 2022.