I have just reread all of the above and suddenly feel a vague anxiety that I will be misunderstood by the contemporary reader, the reader of the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first.
First, the reader might have gotten the idea that all this time the Strugatskys did nothing else except run around editorial offices, begging them for pity’s sake to print the book, and sobbing into each other’s waistcoats, mutilating their own texts as they sobbed. Well, naturally, all that really did happen—we ran, and sobbed, and mutilated—but it only took up a small part of our working time. After all, it was during these months that our first (and last) science fiction detective novel (The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn) was written, the story Space Mowgli was begun and finished, our “secret” novel The Doomed City was begun and the draft of three parts was finished, and Roadside Picnic was conceived and begun. So, for all the sobbing, both life and work carried on as usual, and we had no time to hang our heads and wring our hands “in violent grief.”
And now for “second.” Second, I recall what the well-known writer Svyatoslav Loginov (“the instant patriarch of Russian fantasy”) said about his recent talk to present-day schoolkids, when he attempted, inter alia, to astound them with the incredible and ludicrous difficulties that a writer encountered in the mid-1970s and suddenly heard a bewildered question from the rows of seats: “If it was so hard to get printed, why didn’t you organize your own publishing house?” The present-day reader simply can’t imagine what we writers of the 1960s and ’70s had to deal with, how ruthlessly and talentlessly the all-powerful Party and state press suppressed literature and culture in general, what a narrow, flimsy little bridge any self-respecting writer had to make his way across: A step to the right and there waiting for you is Article 70 (or 90) of the Criminal Code, trial, prison camp, the nuthouse; in the best-case scenario you are blacklisted and excluded from the literary process for ten years or so. A step to the left and you’re clutched in the embrace of vulgar slobs and talentless botchers, a traitor to your own work, an elastic conscience, a Judas, counting and recounting your vile pieces of silver. The present-day reader is evidently no longer capable of understanding these dilemmas. The psychological gulf between him and people of my time gapes wide, and you can hardly expect to fill it with texts like my commentaries—but, then, no other means exists, does it? Freedom is like the air or good health: while you have it, you don’t notice it and don’t understand how bad things are without it or outside it.
One school of thought, it is true, holds that no one actually even needs freedom—all they need is to be liberated from the need to make decisions. This opinion is quite popular just at present. For it has been said, “It is often the best kind of liberty—liberty from care.” Possibly, possibly… But, then, that is a subject for an entirely different conversation.
Copyright
Copyright © 1969, 1971 by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Afterword copyright © 2001 by Boris Strugatsky
English language translation copyright © 2020 by Andrew Bromfield
All rights reserved
Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
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Chicago, IL 60610
ISBN 978-1-61373-600-5
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Cover photo and design: Jonathan Hahn
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