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One Billion Years after the End of the World: Historical Deadlock, Contemporary Dystopia, and the Continuing Legacy of the Strugatskii Brothers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Sofya Khagi
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Abstract

The importance of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii in Soviet science fiction has been thoroughly examined. A less-explored question concerns how they have continued to inspire post-Soviet authors who muse on an environment that differs drastically from the one that gave rise to their works. Sofya Khagi explores how prominent contemporary writers—Garros-Evdokimov (Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov), Dmitrii Bykov, and Viktor Pelevin—examine the Strugatskiis to dramatize their own darker visions of modernization, progress, and morality. They continue the tradition of science fiction as social critique—in this case, a critique of society after the collapse of socialist ideology with its modernizing projects of historical progress, technological development, and social improvement. According to their parables a contrario to the Strugatskiis, the dreams of modernity embodied by the classics of Soviet fantastika have been shattered but not replaced by a viable alternative social scenario. As they converse with their predecessors, contemporary writers examine stagnation, not just in post-Soviet Russia, but in global, postmodern, commodified reality.

Type
Reading the History of the Future: Early Soviet and Post–Soviet Russian Science Fiction
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 72 , Issue 2 , Summer 2013 , pp. 267 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2013

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References

I would like to thank Sibelan Forrester, Yvonne Howell, Mark D. Steinberg, and Slavic Review’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this article.

1. Jameson, Fredric, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York, 2005), 294.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., 295.

3. Jameson, Fredric, “Fear and Loathing in Globalization,” New Left Review 23 (September-October 2003): 105.Google Scholar “Science fiction is capable of achieving profound insights into the principal dilemmas of political life: the foundation of new political orders, the endeavor to realize utopia, the exigencies underpinning tyranny, the relationship of a saintly politics to the practice of realpolitik, and the potential and limitations of radical politics in the present age.” See Paik, Peter Y., From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (Minneapolis, 2010), 1–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the novum, see Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, 1979).Google Scholar

4. The works to which this article is especially indebted include: Suvin, Darko, “Criticism of the Strugatsky Brothers’ Work,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 6, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 286–307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Suvin, ,“The Literary Opus of the Strugatsky Brothers,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 8, no. 3 (Spring 1974): 454–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howell, Yvonne, Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkad y and Boris Strugatsky (New York, 1994);Google Scholar Howell, , “When the Physicians Are Lyricists: Translating the Strugatskys’ Ponedel’ nik nachinaetsia v subbotu,” in Grenoble, Lenore M. and Kopper, John M., eds., Essays in the Art and Theory of Translation (Lewiston, 1997), 165;Google Scholar Amusin, Mark, Brat’ ia Strugatskie: Ocherk tvorchestva (Jerusalem, 1996);Google Scholar Strugatskii, Boris, Kommentarii k proidennomu (St. Peters- burg, 2003);Google Scholar Arkadii, and Strugatskie, Boris, Ulitka na sklone: Opyt akademicheskogo izdaniia (Moscow, 2006).Google Scholar

5. I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers for suggesting that I give this article more reach and to Mark D. Steinberg for drawing my attention to this interpretive theme in particular.

6. The movie treatments of the Strugatskiis’ works such as Konstantin Lopushanskii's Ugly Swans (2006), Fedor Bondarchuk's Obitaemyi ostrov (The Inhabited Island, 2008-9), and Aleksei German's not-yet-released Trudno byt’ bogom / Istoriia arkanarskoi rezni (Hard to Be a God / History of the Arkanar Massacre) are readable as a similar shift into culture at large. On recent film treatments of the Strugatskiis’ plots, see Ivanov, Viacheslav, “The Lessons of the Strugatskys,” Russian Studies in Literature 47, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. I am indebted to Sibelan Forrester for these insights. On the question of the generic change from Soviet to post-Soviet science fiction, see Menzel, Birgit, “Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature,” in Lowell, Stephen and Menzel, Birgit, eds., Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective (Munich, 2005), 117.Google Scholar

8. To look at the same issue from a different angle, many major post-Soviet writers produce works with fantastic elements: Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Vasilii Aksenov, Tat'iana Tolstaia, Ol'ga Slavnikova, Iurii Mamleev, Pavel Krusanov, Vladimir Sharov, and so on. On the interplay between postmodernism and science fiction, see McHale, Brian, Constructing Postmodernism (London, 1992), 12 Google Scholar: “Like ‘mainstream’ postmodernist writing, it [science fiction] is self-consciously ‘world-building’ fiction, laying bare the process of fictional world-making itself.“

9. Although this later generation of Russian fantasy and science fiction writers stands out for their greater familiarity with the Anglo-American science fiction tradition (including works by Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, and William Gibson), this article's main focus is the Strugatskiis; authors beyond the Russian context will of necessity be treated sparingly. Likewise, I am purposefully selective as far as contemporary works are concerned. For a list of remakes of the Strugatskiis in science fiction, see Strugatskie, , Ulitka na sklone, 547–66.Google Scholar

10. Arkadii, and Strugatskie, Boris, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh (Donetsk, 2000-2003), 4:288 Google Scholar. Ali translations are my own, with borrowings from extant English editions.

11. If the reader “decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs ta … the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained ta account for the phenomena, we enter . ..the marvelous.“See Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, 1973), 41.Google Scholar

12. Baudrillard, Jean, The Illusion of the End (Stanford, 1994), 4.Google Scholar For Baudrillard, the present, bereft of visionary ideas, revolves around repetition, simulation, and sanitization of the past; it entertains a death wish while endlessly deferring the end.

13. Garros, Aleksandr, “Ulitka na slome,” Ekspert, 28 April 2008, 84.Google Scholar See also Garros, Aleksandr and Evdokimov, Aleksei, “Fantasticheskaia interventsiia,” Ekspert, 8 March 2004, 76.Google Scholar

14. They stopped writing together when Garros left Latvia for Russia. Evdokimov's recent works include Tik (St. Petersburg, 2007) and Nol’-nol’ (Moscow, 2008).

15. “ABS-premiia,” at archivsf.narod.ru/1999/abc_award/ (last accessed 1 March 2013).

16. Garros-Evdokimov, [Golovo]lomka (St. Petersburg, 2003), 1. In their interviews, the authors emphasized their reliance on real events. See, e.g., Ol'ga Bychkova, “Zachem pishutsia romany,” 15 May 2006, at razgovorchiki.ru/arkhiv/evdokimovandgarros.html (accessed 7 March 2010; no longer available).

17. Garros-Evdokimov, [Golovo]lomka, 77.

18. Ibid., 25.

19. Ibid., 214. For more on Headcrusher, see Khagi, Sofya, “Garros-Evdokimov and Commodification of the Baltics,” Journal of Baltic Studies 41, no. 1(March 2010): 119–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Garros-Evdokimov, , Seraia sliz’ (St. Petersburg, 2005), 214.Google Scholar

21. Reviews of Garros-Evdokimov's works have noted their interest in the Strugatskiis. See Chantsev, Aleksandr, “Vita Nova gadkikh lebedei,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 82, no. 2 (April 2006): 425–26Google Scholar, and Bykov, Dmitrii, “lukost', ilivozvrashchenie gospodina X,” Ogonek, 28 August-3 September 2006, 51–52.Google Scholar

22. Garros-Evdokimov, , Chuchkhe (Moscow, 2006), 10.Google Scholar The book consists of a movie script and two novelettes. 1focus on the former, the longest in the volume.

23. See, e.g., the Strugatskiis’ Polden': 22 vek (Noon: 22nd Century, 1962). This theme is also reminiscent of Iain Banks's later Culture series.

24. Garros-Evdokimov, Chuchkhe, 79.

25. Ibid., 110-11.

26. Cf. rumors circulating around the leprosarium in The Ugly Swans that it may be under the wing of the military.

27. Garros-Evdokimov, Chuchkhe, 112-14.

28. Ibid., 20.

29. Ibid., 76, 86. Cf. Lyotard on efficiency: technical devices follow “the principle of optimal performance, maximizing output (the information or modifications obtained) and minimizing input (the energy expended in the process). Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just, or the beautiful, etc., but to efficiency.” See Lyotard, Jean François, The Postmodern Condition; a Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1984), 44.Google ScholarOn the equation of the subject with his function in advanced industrial society, see Frankfurt School theorists, e.g., Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, 1968), 84.Google Scholar

30. See the ending of The Ugly Swans: “All this is beautiful, but there's one thing-I'd better not forget to go back.” See Strugatskie, , Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 8:529.Google Scholar

31. Garros-Evdokimov, , Chuchkhe, 66.Google Scholar

32. The name Gorbovskii also has a phonetic connection to Gorbachev.

33. Ibid., 136. The other two novelettes in the volume, Novaia zhizn’ (New Life) and Liuft (Clearance) examine the issue of the New Man from additional perspectives. New Life is the story of another virtuoso of mimicry- a man who changes his professional and persona! life every year. Clearance, one more take on Khodorkovskii, has him bringing up his successor Sachkov. Having attained a high position in the presidential administration, Sachkov, another “self-sufficient combat unit,” sets out to destroy his teacher.

34. Dmitrii Bykov, “Strugatskie i drugie,” Ogonek, 18-24 September 2006, 46.

35. Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 3:378.

36. Aleksandr Garros, “Plius nullifikatsiia vsei strany,” Ekspert, 9-16 June 2008, 90.

37. For a review of The Evacuator, see Chantsev, Aleksandr, “Fabrika antiutopii: Distopicheskii diskurs v rossiiskoi literature serediny 2000kh,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 86, no. 4 (August 2007): 276–79.Google Scholar

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39. Ibid., 302-3. Cf. Hard to Be a God: ‘“l know only one thing: man is an objective carrier of reason, everything that prevents man from developing bis reason is evil, and evil should be eradicated as fast as possible and by any means.’ ‘Any means? Truly?'” See Strugatskie, , Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 3:314.Google Scholar

40. Bykov, , Opravdanie. Evakuator, 367.Google Scholar

41. “In the evolution of the Strugatskys’ poetics, the stature of the hero-as-humanist enlightener (e.g., Don Rumata in Hard to Be a God) gradually diminishes, while the prominence of the alien super-human increases. The principle of characterization shifts from the defeat and disillusionment of the enlightener to the power of the Fyodorovian superhuman.” See Howell, , Apocalyptic Realism, 116.Google Scholar

42. Bykov, Opravdanie. Evakuator, 442. 43. Ibid., 449.

44. Ibid., 494, 498. The choice between escape and futile struggle and the closing of the plot in upon itself recall Escape Attempt, where Saul returns back in time, to die fighting the Nazis. Cf. also the Strugatskiis’ Grad obrechennyi (The Doomed City, 1988).

45. Bykov, Opravdanie. Evakuator, 367.

46. On the theme of the intelligentsia in Pelevin, see Parts, Lyudmila, “Degradation of the Word or the Adventures of an Intelligent in Viktor Pelevin's Generation ‘П,“’ Canadian Slavonie Papers 46, no. 3-4 (September-December 2004): 435–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. Pelevin's parables are often compared to those of Bulgakov and Franz Kafka. On Pelevin and the Anglo-American science fiction tradition, especially Dick, see, e.g., Ken Kalfus, “Chicken Kiev,” New York Times, 7 December 1997, at www.nytimes.com/ books/97/12/07/reviews/971207.07kalfust.html (last accessed 1March 2013).

48. I give just a few examples since there is no room to do justice to the theme of Pelevin versus the Strugatskiis in general. Ornon Ra won Boris Strugatskii's Bronze Snail award in 1993. For Boris Strugatskii on Pelevin, see Boris Strugatskii, “Na randevu,” at www.rusf.ru/abs/int/bns_chat.htm (last accessed 1March 2013).

49. The novel was nominated for the ABS Award in 2000 but lost to Sergei Siniakin's Monakh na kraiu zemli (A Monk on the Edge of Earth, 1999).

50. On Generation “П” as a consumer dystopia, see Khagi, Sofya, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Viktor Pelevin's Consumer Dystopia,” Russian Review 67, no. 4 (October 2008): 559–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Pelevin, Viktor, Generation “П” (Moscow, 1999), 12.Google Scholar

52. Ibid.

53. Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 4:484. One may consider Pepper in opposition to Kandid as someone who is assimilated by the powers that be. Yet his first order can still be seen as a gesture of defiance.

54. Mark Lipovetskii, “Traektorii ITR-diskursa: Razroznennye zametki,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 74, no. 6 (December 2010): 216. On the Strugatskiis and the Soviet scientifictechnical intelligentsia, see also Il–ia Kukulin, “Al'ternativnoe sotsial'noe proektirovanie v sovetskom obshchestve 1960kh-1970kh godov, ili Pochemu v sovremennoi Rossii ne prizhilis’ levye politicheskie praktiki,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 88, no. 6 (December 2007): 169-201, and Kukulin, “Sentimental'naia tekhnologiia: Pamiat’ o 1960-kh v diskussiiakh o modernizatsii 2009-2010 godov,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 74, no. 6 (December 2010): 277-301.

55. On Empire V as a conspiracy novel, see Keith Livers, “The Tower or the Labyrinth: Conspiracy, Occult, and Empire-Nostalgia in the Work of Viktor Pelevin and Aleksandr Prokhanov,” Russian Review 69, no. 3 (July 2010): 495-503. On the novel see also Natal'ia Kochetkova, “Pisatel’ Viktor Pelevin: ‘Vampir v Rossii bol'she chem vampir,'” Izvestiia, 3 November 2006, at www.izvestia.ru/news/3 18686 (last accessed 1 March 2013); Pavel Basinskii, “Ampir na krovi,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, 22 November 2006, at www .rg.ru/2006/11/22/ampir.html (last accessed 1 March 2013); Aleksandr Balod, “lronicheskii slovar’ Empire V;'’ Novyi mir, no. 9 (September 2007): 139-57; Brouwer, Sander, “What Is lt Like to Be a Bat-Author? Viktor Pelevin's Empire V;'’ in Brouwer, Sander, ed., Dutch Contributions to the Fourteenth International Congress of Slavists: Ohrid, September 10-16, 2008 (Amsterdam, 2008), 243–56;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lipovetskii, Mark and Etkind, Aleksandr, “Vozvrashchenie tritona: Sovetskaia katastrofa i postsovetskii roman,'’ Novae literaturnoe obozrenie 94, no. 6 (December 2008): 181–84;Google Scholar and Etkind, Alexander, “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” Slavic Review 68, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 646.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56. On biopolitics in Empire V, see Khagi, Sofya, “The Monstrous Aggregate of the Social: Toward Biopolitics in Victor Pelevin's Work,” Slavic and East European Journal 55, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 452–54.Google Scholar

57. Pelevin, Viktor, Empire V/Ampir V; povest’ o nastoiashchem sverkhcheloveke (Moscow, 2006), 22.Google Scholar

58. Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 4:288. Their first epigraph is taken from Boris Pasternak's “Za povorotom” (Around the Bend, 1946), about a future that cannot be “drawn into arguments or petted away.” Ibid., 4:288.

59. Pelevin, Empire V,22.

60. Ibid., 38. 61. Ibid., 213.

62. Ibid., 406-8.

63. Ibid., 408. Compare “The top of Fuji, time winter,” the last line of Pelevin's novel, and the Strugatskiis’ title, Noon: 22nd Century.

64. See Hard to Be a God: “They were nevertheless humans, carriers of the spark of reason. And constantly, sometimes here, sometimes there, the little fires of an incredibly distant but inevitable future would flare up in their midst.” See Strugatskie, , Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 3:358 Google Scholar. For Bykov “today the Strugatskiis’ intonation is important-an intonation that is courageous and joyful. The sense that man cannot win but can preserve bis dignity.” See Bykov, , “Strugatskie i drugie,” 47.Google Scholar

65. Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 111.

66. On the fin-de-siècle feeling of catastrophe that still bodied forth “a heroic stance at the ‘edge of an abyss“’ and could be viewed through a Benjaminian “prism of revolutionary and redemptive dialectics,” see Steinberg, Mark D., Petersburg Fin de Siècle (New Haven, 2011), 9, 271.Google Scholar

67. In the Strugatskiis, by contrast, “the more ingenious and the more senseless the obstacles put up by the unpredictable Homeostatic Universe, the more meaning is ac- corded to heroic attempts to work [by the scientists].” See Kaspe, Irina, “The Meaning of (Private) Life, or Why Do We Read the Strugatskys?” Russian Studies in Literature 47, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68. I am grateful to my second anonymous reviewer for suggesting this extension of the argument.

69. Dina Khapaeva, “Vampir-geroi nashego vremeni,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 109, no. 3 (June 2011): 50, 51. A “consistent disclosure of contemporary culture's gothic themes leads inescapably to the negation of the human and civilization as the highest value.” See Khapaeva, , Koshmar: Literatura i zhizn’ (Moscow, 2010), 293.Google Scholar On the degradation of the intellectuals in a society under the sway of the technological imperative, see Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 48: “The transmission of knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions.” On the intelligentsia's false consciousness in a society dominated by instrumental rationality, see Sloterdijk, Peter, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis, 1988).Google Scholar

70. The writers under consideration display the humanist's fears more than the postmodernist's skepticism. As I see it, remaining within the humanistic paradigm is a deliberate ethical and ideological choice, rather than something done out of naïveté. These writers are familiar with the poststructuralist critique of the Enlightenment initiated by Friedrich Nietzsche and exemplified by Michel Foucault (asserting the historicity of human experience, questioning the universality of knowledge and moral action, exposing the linkage between metaphysics and violence and between education and power).

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73. Pelevin, Empire V, 323. “Everything will be so accurately calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world.” See Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Notes /rom Underground and The Gambier (Oxford, 1991), 26.Google Scholar In Mark Amusin's opinion, “today Christianity (as Dostoevsky understood it) and socialism in its humanist variant both confront powerful entropie forces and tendencies.” See Amusin, , “A Selective Similarity: Dostoevsky in the Worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers,” Russian Studies in Literature 47, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

74. Jameson, , Archaeologies of the Future, 82.Google Scholar