Читать онлайн "The Doomed City" - Стругацкий Аркадий Натанович - RuLit

Nowadays no reader or publisher is going to be astounded, let alone frightened, by all these themes, but back then, twenty-five years ago, when the authors were working on the novel, we constantly repeated to each other, like an incantation, “You have to write for the desk drawer in a way that makes it impossible to publish, but also makes it seem like there’s nothing they can put you away for.” At the same time, the authors realized that you could be put away for absolutely anything at any moment, even for improperly crossing the street, but nonetheless we were counting on the context of a “nonprejudicial approach,” in which the order to put someone away has not yet been handed down from the top but is still only maturing, so to speak, down below.

The primary goal of our novel was not clear from the very beginning, but gradually assumed the following form: to demonstrate how, under the pressure of the circumstances of life, a young man’s worldview radically changes, how he shifts from the position of an unshakable fanatic to the condition of a man suspended, as it were, in an airless ideological void, without even the slightest purchase for his feet. A life trajectory very familiar to the authors, and one which we consider not merely dramatic but also instructive. After all, an entire generation traveled this path over the period from 1940 to 1985.

How to live in conditions of ideological vacuum? How and what for? In my opinion this question remains highly relevant even today—which is why City, despite being so vehemently politicized and so categorically of its own time, potentially remains of interest to the present-day reader—provided that this reader has any interest at all in problems of this kind.

Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, IL 60610

ISBN 978-1-61374-996-8

This publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Strugaëtìskiæi, Arkadiæi, 1925–1991, author. | Strugaëtìskiæi, Boris, 1933–2012, author. | Bromfield, Andrew, translator.

Title: The doomed city / Arkady and Boris Strugatsky ; translated by Andrew Bromfield.

Other titles: Grad obrechennyæi. English

Description: Chicago: Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated, 2016.

Classification: LCC PG3476.S78835 G7313 2016 (print) | LCC PG3476.S78835 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/44—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016009300

Typesetting: Nord Compo

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