We set about The Inhabited Island without enthusiasm, but very soon the work enthralled us. It turned to be a damned thrilling occupation—writing a toothless, strictly entertaining novel! Especially since quite soon it stopped seeming so very toothless to us. The radiation towers, and the degenerates, and the Battle Guards—everything fell into place like cartridges slipping into the magazine, everything found its prototype in our adorable reality, everything proved to be a vehicle for a subtext. Moreover, it happened quite regardless of our will, seemingly of its own accord, like the multicolored candy crumbs in some magical kaleidoscope that transforms chaos and a random mishmash into an elegant, coherent, and entirely symmetrical little picture.
It was splendid, inventing a new, fantastic world—and it was even more splendid endowing it with highly familiar attributes and various realia. I’m looking through the work journal at the moment: November 1967, the Komarovo Writers’ House, we only worked during the day, but how we worked: seven, ten, eleven(!) pages a day. Not fair copy, of course, but draft text, created and extracted out of nothing, out of oblivion! At that rate we finished the draft in only two passes, 296 pages in thirty-two working days. The clean copy was written even faster, twelve to sixteen pages a day, and in May the completed manuscript was taken off to Detgiz in Moscow and, almost simultaneously, to the Leningrad journal Neva.
Thus the novel (an unprecedentedly thick Strugatsky novel for that time) was written in a period of six months. Its entire subsequent history is an agonizing story of polishing, smoothing out, ideologically deburring, adapting, and adjusting the text to conform to the various and often absolutely unpredictable demands of the Great and Mighty Censoring Machine.
“What is a telegraph pole? It’s a well-edited pine tree.” They failed to reduce The Inhabited Island to the condition of a pole—in fact the pine tree remained a pine tree, despite all the ingenious efforts of the delimbers in plainclothes—but nonetheless a more than ample hash was made of things, with even more authorial blood set boiling and authorial nerves frayed. And this grueling struggle for definitive and irreproachable ideological decontamination went on for very nearly a year.
Two factors played an absolutely essential role in this battle. First, we (and the novel) were damn lucky with our editors—both at Detgiz and at Neva. At Detgiz the novel was handled by Nina Matveevna Berkova, an old friend and defender of ours, a highly experienced editor who had been through hell and high water, who knew the theory and practice of Soviet literature from A to Z, who never gave way to despair, who knew how to retreat and was always ready to advance. And in Neva we were overseen by Samuil Aronovich Lurie, a supremely subtle stylist and natural-born literary scholar, as intelligent and vitriolic as the devil, a connoisseur of the psychology of Soviet ideological bosses in general and the psychology of A. F. Popov, the editor-in-chief of Neva at the time, in particular. If not for the efforts of these friends who were our editors, the fate of the novel could have been different—it would either not have appeared at all or would have been so badly mutilated as to be unrecognizable.
Second, the general political context of that time. It was 1968, “the year of Czechoslovakia,” when the Czech Gorbachevs were desperately attempting to prove to the Soviet monsters that “socialism with a human face” was possible and even inevitable. At times it seemed that they were pulling it off, that at any moment the Stalinists would retreat and give way. No one knew what would happen in a month’s time—whether freedom would triumph, as in Prague, or whether everything would finally come full circle, back to remorseless ideological glaciation, perhaps even to the total triumph of the proponents of the GULAG.
With one accord the liberal intelligentsia expressed their opposition, all eagerly trying to convince each other (in their kitchens) that Dubček was certain to win, because it was impossible to strike down the ideological rebellion by force—that would be against the mood of the times, this wasn’t Hungary in 1956, and all these Brezhnev-Suslovs were too spineless, they didn’t have the good old Stalinist tempering, they didn’t have enough fire in their bellies, and the army these days wasn’t what it used to be. “Yes it is, our army’s still what it used to be,” the cleverest of us objected. “And their bellies have enough fire in them, don’t you worry. You can be sure the Brezhnev-Suslovs won’t flinch, and they’ll never give way to any Dubčeks, because it’s a matter of the Brezhnevs’ own survival.”
And there was deadly silence from those few individuals who generally could not be directly contacted, who already knew in May that the matter had been decided. And, of course, nothing was said by those who didn’t know anything for certain but sensed it, sensed it with their very skin: everything will be as it should be, everything will be the way it’s supposed to be, everything will be the way it always has been—the midlevel bosses, naturally including the junior officers of the ideological army, and the editors-in-chief of journals, the handlers of the Party’s regional committees and city committees, the staff of Glavlit…[2]
The scales were wavering in the balance. No one wanted to make the final decisions; everyone was waiting to see which way the drawbar of history would turn. Those in positions of responsibility tried not to read any manuscripts at all, and when they did, they put forward mind-boggling demands to authors, and when those had been taken into account, they put forward others, even more mind-boggling.
In Neva they demanded that we: shorten it; take out words such as “homeland,” “patriot” and “fatherland”; it wasn’t permissible for Mak to have forgotten what Hitler was called; clarify the role of Wanderer; emphasize the presence of social inequality in the Land of the Fathers; replace the Galactic Security Commission with a different term, with different initials…[3]
At Detgiz (to begin with) they demanded that we: shorten it; take out the naturalism in the description of war; clarify the role of Wanderer; obfuscate the social order of the Land of the Fathers; emphatically exclude the very concept of “Guards” (replace it, say, with “Legion”); emphatically alter the very concept of “Unknown Fathers”; remove terms such as “social democrats,” “communists,” etc.
However, as Vladimir Vysotsky sang in those years, “but that was just for starters.” The full implications were waiting for us up ahead.
In early 1969 the serial version of the novel appeared in Neva. Despite the general toughening up of the ideological climate as a consequence of the Czechoslovak “disgrace,” despite the sacred horror that had seized the obsequiously and fearfully trembling ideological bosses, despite the fact that at that precise moment several articles berating the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction had all simultaneously drawn to a head and burst—despite all of this, we managed to publish the novel, and with only limited, in effect minimal, losses. This was a success. Indeed, you could say it was a victory that had seemed unlikely and that no one had expected.
At Detgiz things also seemed to be going well. In mid-May Arkady wrote that The Inhabited Island had been allowed through unscathed, without a single remark. The book had gone off to the printers. Furthermore, the production department had promised that, although the book was planned for the third quarter, a chink might possibly be found in order to bring it out in the second, i.e., in June or July.
However, the book did not appear in either June or July. Moreover, in early June an article entitled “Leaves and Roots” appeared in the journal Soviet Literature, renowned for its incisive, one might even say extreme, national-patriotic tendency. In this article our Inhabited Island was held up as an example of literature without any roots. At the time this part of the article seemed to me (and not only to me) to be “stupid and vacuous” and therefore in no way dangerous. Big deal, so they berate the authors because they let a null-transmitter overshadow the people, and because the novel doesn’t contain any genuine artistic images. What else is new? We had heard worse things than that about ourselves! Back then we were far more alarmed by a denunciation received at the same time by the Leningrad Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from a certain true-believing candidate of sciences,[4] physicist, and colonel all in one. With the directness of a military man and Party member, the physicist-colonel quite simply, without any fuzziness or equivocation, accused the authors of the novel published in Neva of mockery of the army, anti-patriotism, and other such barefaced anti-Soviet propaganda. It was suggested that measures be taken.
2
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: “Glavlit” is short for
3
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In Russian, “Galactic Security Commission” is “
4
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The Russian degree of candidate is effectively equivalent to a doctorate.