Celestial Hellscapes: Cosmology As the Key to the Strugatskiis’ Science Fictions 9781618119797

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CELESTIAL HELLSCAPES COSMOLOGY AS THE KEY TO THE

STRUGATSKIIS’ SCIENCE FICTIONS

The Real Twentieth Century Series Editor Thomas Seifrid (University of Southern California, Los Angeles) Editorial Board Stephen Blackwell (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) Jonathan Bolton (Harvard University) Clare Cavanagh (Northwestern University) Nancy Condee (Pittsburgh University, Pittsburgh) Caryl Emerson (Princeton University, Princeton) Beth Holmgren (Duke University) Mikhail Iampolskii (New York University, New York) Galin Tihanov (Manchester University, Manchester) Ronald Vroon (UCLA)

CELESTIAL HELLSCAPES COSMOLOGY AS THE KEY TO THE

STRUGATSKIIS’ SCIENCE FICTIONS KEVIN REESE

BOSTON 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Reese, Kevin, author. Title: Celestial hellscapes : cosmology as the key to the Strugatskiis' science fictions / Kevin Reese. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2019. | Series: Real twentieth century Identifiers: LCCN 2019001629 (print) | LCCN 2019003686 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618119803 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618119797 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Strugatskii, Arkadii, 1925-1991--Criticism and interpretation. | Strugatskii, Boris, 1933-2012--Criticism and interpretation. | Science fiction, Russian--Soviet Union--History and criticism. | Cosmology in literature. | Astronomy in literature. Classification: LCC PG3476.S78835 (ebook) | LCC PG3476.S78835 Z86 2019 (print) | DDC 891.73/44--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001629 Copyright © 2019 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-61811-979-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-980-3 (ebook) Book design by Lapiz Digital Services.

Cover design by Ivan Grave. On the cover: Top: Andrei Sokolov and Aleksei Leonov, "The Planet of Two Suns," 1964 (in public domain); Bottom: Arkadii Strugatskii’s sketch of a conjunction of the Moon and Venus on 28 January 1953 (reproduced by permission). Published by Academic Studies Press. 1577 Beacon St. Brookline, MA, 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Acknowledgementsviii A Note on the Names of Our “Author” The Strugatskiis’ Pushkinian Cosmology

xiii xv

Introductionxvii Chapter 1. A Biography through Astronomy

1

Chapter 2. Minor Planets: The Strugatskiis’ Earlier Experiments in Cosmology 

21

Chapter 3. The Hell of the Ignorant: The Second Martian Invasion 

34

Chapter 4. Poincaré’s Starless Hell: The Inhabited Island 

59

Chapter 5. Exceptions to the Laws of Thermodynamics: Roadside Picnic

77

Chapter 6. “Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World 

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Chapter 7. The Island Universe and the Copper Doorknob: The Doomed City 

137

Chapter 8. Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil 

191

Coda. “Day and night my Man in Black gives me no peace…”: The Yids of the City of Peter

225

Afterword235 Bibliography236 Appendix: The Altitude of Vega

242

Index246

This book is dedicated to Books Do Furnish a Room in Durham, North Carolina, the bookstore where, in the fall of 1999, I came across the paperback that introduced me to the Strugatskii brothers: Soviet Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov. I am grateful to Asimov for having introduced me to this world, and to Violet Dutt for having translated “Spontaneous Reflex” (one entry in the collection), the first text by the Strugatskiis I ever read.

Acknowledgements

First, I would like to thank Jehanne Gheith, my thesis advisor at Duke, who, in January of 2004, read a short paper that was the first, poorly formulated version of what would later become this book. I also wish to thank Yvonne Howell, who, moved by Boris Natanovich’s death (the news of which spread among the Soviet science fiction researchers at ASEEES in New Orleans in late November of 2012), suggested that I contribute a paper to a panel on the Strugatskii brothers and science. This conversation prompted me to dig out that old essay and to work it into a paper that I presented at ASEEES in Boston the following fall. I doubt very much that I would have taken those first steps towards writing this book had Professor Howell and I not spoken that day. I would also like to thank Ivana Vuletic, my dissertation advisor at UNC, who supported me in my quest to fuse poetry and science fiction (Maiakovskii, the Strugatskii brothers, and the New Soviet Man), an experience that prepared me to explore the role of Pushkin’s poetic texts in the works of the Strugatskiis that I investigate here. I wish to thank Sibelan Forrester, whom I met when she served as the panel discussant at AATSEEL in December of 2008, at which I was presenting a paper on Maiakovskii, the Strugatskiis, and “functional immortality.” She made me feel, even when I was a graduate student, that I was a co-equal member of the relatively small number of those who study Soviet science fiction. Scholarship cannot thrive without the active intervention of influential persons like Professor Forrester on the behalf of those coming up. Outside of Slavic studies, I owe a great deal to the excellent math professors under whom I studied at both Duke and UNC, particularly to Robert Proctor, in whose classes I most thoroughly learned the rigorous art of writing mathematical proofs. Training in this art has benefited me both as a teacher and as a writer—logical rigor is a tool with myriad uses. I was fortunate to have two careful readers, Jasmine Trinks and John Wright, who helped me tighten the manuscript up before submission. My

Acknowledgements

two anonymous readers provided invaluable insights that aided me in my post-submission revisions. Additionally, Thomas Seifrid, the series editor of “The Real Twentieth Century,” helped me early on with a fundamental reframing of the book project, suggesting that I move the focus away from astronomy and place cosmology at the center of the book’s “universe.” For nearly twenty years I have been corresponding via email with Alla Kuznetsova, a prominent member of the “Liudeny,” the Russian fan collective devoted to researching the Strugatskiis. In addition to serving as a sounding-board for ideas, Ms. Kuznetsova was kind enough to find for me books that I needed for my research that are available in no American library. Among these was Polak’s 1939 Kurs obshchei astronomii, which Arkadii Strugatskii used for self-study during the Blockade, and the 1933 Russian translation of Jeans’s The Stars in their Courses, another childhood favorite of Arkadii Natanovich. Lacking access to these texts would have left gaps in my research, and I am very grateful to Ms. Kuznetsova for having mailed these volumes to me across the world. In the years that I have been working on this book, I have been in contact with four acquisitions editors at Academic Studies Press, beginning with Sharona Vedol, who first got in touch to encourage me to submit a proposal. Since then, I have corresponded with Meghan Vicks (who oversaw the drafting and signing of the contract), Oleh Kotsyuba (who facilitated the final submission and reader reviews), and Ekaterina Yanduganova (who has kept me abreast of the copy-editing and other final stages). Each of the four has been very helpful, always willing to field my myriad questions. Finally, Kira Nemirovsky, the production editor, brought the book to its final, polished form. My thanks go out to these and all other persons at ASP who worked on bringing this thing into the world. In the very final stages of editing the book, a potential discrepancy arose regarding the calculations I had done on the altitude of Vega across various dates in 1937—calculations that are crucial to one of the conclusions I make in Chapter Seven on The Doomed City. I would like to thank my former Russian student Patrick Wise for putting me in touch with Amy Sayle of UNC’s Morehead Planetarium. I would like to thank Dr. Sayle herself for putting a second set of eyes on my reasoning and on my math—and for pointing out that the timing of sunset should be incorporated in the discussion. I thank my parents for their support during this process, and my son Henry—who grew from a toddler to a third-grader while this book was being written—for being a model of curious inquiry. I would also like to thank Karin Breiwitz for making a professional version of my hand-drawn chart of the altitude of Vega that appears in the Appendix.

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Rarely have I taught a class in literature without reaching new insights into the works I teach. Until I was working on my lesson plans for A Billion Years Until the End of the World in the spring of 2012, for instance, I had not noticed its crucial poetic substructure, despite having read it numerous times. In the years that I have been teaching, I have been very fortunate to have worked with students whose own ideas deepen my understanding of works I have read more times than I can recall. No great work of art has a bottom—teaching reminds me of this repeatedly. Access to the minds of others has consistently served to sharpen my own; channeling this energy source has proven a key part of my creative process. Though I have thanked some of my students in the body of the text, I would like to take this opportunity to extend my gratitude to their entire collective. I am fortunate to have known them and to have worked with them.

Пугачев бежал по берегу Волги. Тут он встретил астронома Ловица и спросил, что он за человек. Услыша, что Ловиц наблюдал течение светил небесных, он велел его повесить поближе к звездам. Адъюнкт Иноходцев, бывший тут же, успел убежать. Pugachev fled along the Volga. On the riverbank he chanced on the astronomer Lowitz and asked him who he was. Hearing that Lowitz observed the movement of the heavenly bodies, he ordered him hanged “as close to the stars as they could pull him.” Lowitz’s adjunct Inokhodtsev managed to escape.1 Pushkin, Istoriia Pugacheva [The History of Pugachev, 1833] Земля недвижна; неба своды, Творец, поддержаны тобой, Да не падут на сушь и воды И не подавят нас собой. The Earth is motionless; the vault of heaven, Creator, is held up by you, That it may not fall on the land and waters Nor crush us. Pushkin, “Podrazhaniia Koranu” [Imitations of the Koran, 1824]

1 This is the late Paul Debreczeny’s translation, from his 1983 Aleksander Pushkin: Collected Stories (Stanford University Press, 535). All other translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.

Сижу у телескопа.
 Отмерзла моя ж…па.
 Сижу и в небо ясное смотрю. Ищу я до рассвета Проклятую комету
 И шепотом полсвета матерю. Ой, папа, милый папа,
 Твой сын — большая шляпа, Обидно, ето самое, до слез!
 Он мог бы стать артистом, Извозчиком, дантистом —
 Но черт его в астрономы понес. I sit at the telescope. My ass has frozen off. I sit and look into the clear sky. Until dawn I look For the damned comet And curse half the world in a whisper. Oh, papa, dear papa, Your son is a big nobody, It’s enough to make you cry! He could have become an artist, A cab driver, a dentist— But the devil made him an astronomer. An early unpublished poem by Boris Strugatskii

A Note on the Names of Our “Author”

In a 1995 interview with Boris Vishnevskii, when asked about the Strugatskii brothers’ inseparability, Boris Strugatskii replied: “[t]hat we were inseparable is what you would call a ‘medical fact’: two authors, Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, writing in collaboration, did not exist; there was one author—the Strugatskii brothers.”1 So firm was their conviction on this matter that, upon the death of his brother, Boris Natanovich resolved never to attach their name to anything he wrote. This resolution is an extension of the agreement between the two that anything either wrote individually would be published under a pseudonym. Boris Natanovich wrote his two post-Strugatskii-brothers works—Poisk prednaznacheniia [A Search for Purpose, 1995] and Bessilˊnye mira sego [The Powerless of this World, 2002]— under the name S. Vititskii. Arkadii Natanovich wrote three works— Podrobnosti zhizni Nikity Vorontsova [The Particulars of Nikita Vorontsov’s Life, 1984], Ekspeditsiia v preispodniuiu [The Expedition to Hades, 1988], Dˊiavol sredi liudei [The Devil among Humans, 1993 (published posthumously)]—as S. Iaroslavtsev. For this reason, here “the Strugatskii Brothers” will be referred to as one writer. In his 2008 biography of the brothers, Ant Skalandis includes a very elegant metaphor for their partnership, supplied by their fellow science fiction writer Vladimir Mikhailov: They were like two bouncy balls: when they were pressed to one another, at the tangent point of their spherical surfaces would form a plane, a new essence, which was the very result of their joint creative work. But they could not remain for long in such a strained state, the repulsive force would win 1

Boris Vishnevskii, Arkadii i Boris Strugatskie (St. Petersburg: Terra Fantastika, 2003), 30.

xiv

A Note on the Names of Our “Author”

out, and both would roll on independently along their own paths, until the next inevitable meeting.2

This plane that Mikhailov describes is “The Strugatskii Brothers.” It will nonetheless be necessary frequently to address the brothers as individuals. To refer to them only as “Arkadii” and “Boris” is too informal for an academic study, while the constant repetition of “Arkadii Natanovich” and “Boris Natanovich” would crowd the discussion. Thus I will adopt the abbreviations AN and BN, used by the brothers themselves in their notes and by Russian researchers and fans of the Strugatskiis’ works. Related is the abbreviation ABS (Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii), one which I myself will deploy sparingly, but which the reader will encounter occasionally in quotations.

2 Ant Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie (Moscow: AST, 2008), 186

The Strugatskiis’ Pushkinian Cosmology

Что в имени тебе моем? Оно умрет, как шум печальный Волны, плеснувшей в берег дальный, Как звук ночной в лесу глухом. Оно на памятном листке Оставит мертвый след, подобный Узору надписи надгробной На непонятном языке. What’s there in my name for you? It will die, like the sorrowful sound Of a wave splashing on a distant shore, Like a nighttime sound in an impenetrable wood. On a memorial card It will leave a dead mark, like The pattern of a grave inscription In an incomprehensible language. Pushkin, 1830

Many of my first-time literature students are surprised and dismayed by just how often Pushkin comes up in courses in which his works are not being read. They, being new to Russian literature, do not understand that all

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The Strugatskiis’ Pushkinian Cosmology

Russian writers exist in a universe of Pushkin’s devising, and that his influence is all-pervasive. That being said, I could not have anticipated, when I began this project, the major role that Pushkin would end up playing in the second half of the book. While the references to Pushkin in Piknik na obochine [Roadside Picnic, 1971], Za milliard let do kontsa sveta [A Billion Years until the End of the World, 1974], Grad obrechennyi [The Doomed City, 1975], and Otiagoshchennye zlom, ili Sorok let spustia [Those Burdened by Evil, or Forty Years Later, 1988] were known to me as I began the process of rereading, I had given far too little thought to their function within each text and had not considered Pushkin as a thread running through these multiple late works. Whether the Strugatskiis chose to engage Pushkin more directly towards the end of their career is less of a salient question than that of why such an engagement is crucial or even inevitable. Pushkin is—or at least defines—the cosmology of Russian literature, and the metaliterary elements stitched into the cosmologies of these four works by the Strugatskiis make a dialogue with Pushkin natural, or even necessary. To ignore Pushkin in this context would be akin to writing a history of astronomy making no mention of Galileo. And while it might seem odd to offer a justification for including so much Pushkin in a study of Russian literature, the strange and special outsider status of science fiction might lead some to see the poet as out of place here. To these readers, I will say only, paraphrasing Gogol, that I did not at first seek to feature Pushkin so prominently, but that the circumstances of my study made it impossible to do otherwise. I would say, too, that I include him gladly, and that the centrality of Pushkinian subtexts in the later works of the Strugatskii brothers has been the happiest discovery of what has been a very fulfilling investigation.

Introduction

До свода адского касалася вершиной Гора стеклянная, как Арарат остра — И разлегалася над темною равниной. A mountain of glass, knife-edged like Ararat, Touched its peak to the top of hell’s vault— And sprawled over the darkling plain. Pushkin, “I dale my poshli…” [And we went on further …, 1832]

The first two pages of the Strugatskiis’ 1958 novella Putˊ na Amalˊteiu [The Way to Amalthea] consist of what was at the time a scientifically accurate depiction of the night sky as it would be seen by an observer on the surface of Amalthea, then thought to be the only non-Galilean moon of Jupiter.1 The earliest origins of this work, in fact, are bound up with the observational data presented in this opening passage: in a letter dated June 5, 1957, AN requests from BN all the latest scientific information on Jupiter and its satellites. He writes: …find for me without delay all data about Jupiter and its satellites: everything possible, hypothetical, and conjectural, etc. Their distance to Jupiter, their dimensions, their rotation periods, their atmospheres, their environments, etc. About Jupiter itself I need everything, starting with its distance from the Sun and ending with hypotheses on its interior structure. Then I need

1 The current count of Jupiter’s satellites is seventy-nine, most of them small, irregular bodies captured by the gas giant from solar orbits.

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to know whether it’s advisable to take Jupiter as the best possible object for testing the “Kozyrev Effect.”2 I need all these data WITHOUT DELAY.3

The first pages of Putˊ na Amalˊteiu show that these requested data were indeed deployed in the writing of the novella: it begins with a brief summary of the moon’s orbital and rotational characteristics, followed by a description of the rising of Jupiter over the close horizon, the occultation of the Sun by the gas giant, and other phenomena that presumably can be observed from the surface of Amalthea. It is made clear early on that the reader is being placed “at the eyepiece,” in the seat of an observer within the Jupiter system itself, not in the position of a then-contemporary astronomer who could imagine the scene only on paper, through observational data and orbital calculations. The narrator advises the reader that, to see these sights, one needs only to take the elevator to the top floor, to the area “under the clear spectrolite dome.”4 The Strugatskiis were writing in the late 1950s, long before the Pioneer and Voyager missions were to bring back pictures of Jupiter and its moons, and so they could depict the view of an Amalthea-based observer only by first doing extensive astronomical “homework.” Equipped with BN’s graduate and professional work in the field and their years of youthful experience as devoted amateur astronomers, the brothers were more than up to the task. Yet Putˊ na Amalˊteiu is far from an astronomical treatise disguised as a novella. It depicts the plight of scientists who are threatened with starvation due to a fungal outbreak that has consumed the stores at their distant outpost and the heroic efforts of a crew of mezhplanetniki5 on the spaceship Takhmasib, hurtling towards them on a desperate resupply mission. The 2 AN is referring to Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev, who was a young astrophysicist during the purge of astronomers at the Pulkovo Observatory. He was arrested on November 3, 1936 and served ten years. Eremeeva, “Political Repression and Personality: The History of Political Repression against Soviet Astronomers,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 26, no. 4 (1995): 297–324, see in particular p. 308. AN is referencing Kozyrev’s assertion of a certain asymmetry in the shape of Jupiter’s disc, a problem on which BN worked—and which he refuted—during his time at Pulkovo. Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 226. 3 Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh (Donetsk: Stalker, 2001), 1: 663. 4 Ibid., 1: 549. 5 Mezhplanetniki (singular, mezhplanetnik, “one who is between planets”) is a neologism commonly encountered in the Strugatskiis’ early works, all of which focus on the assimilation of the Solar System by Soviet scientists and explorers.

Introduction

parallels with the Blockade of Leningrad—an event through which both AN and BN had lived and which killed their father Natan Zalmanovich—are readily apparent. For the reader of 1958, the connection would have been obvious, but the Blockade is explicitly mentioned by a minor character— Zoika Ivanova, an astrometry lab assistant—just to drive the point home: “But is this really starvation? […] I just read a book about the war with the Nazis: that was real starvation. In Leningrad, during the Blockade.”6 As the Takhmasib approaches Jupiter, it is crippled by micro-meteorite impacts and pulled into the gas giant’s gravitational well. The Strugatskiis’ depiction of the ways in which humans would cope in a high-gravity environment is not only the kind of science fiction thought experiment that only an astronomer could pull off effectively, but also is an opportunity to depict the “extreme environment” of the Blockade via fantastic scenario. The numerous descriptions of the crew crawling along the corridors of the crippled ship, hardly able to lift their heads, cannot but evoke images of Leningraders, weakened by starvation and unable to walk. The most direct of these oblique references to the Blockade comes when the crew, barely able to sit up, attempt to eat soup. Their captain Bykov sternly warns them that the added weight of the soup in their bodies could very well be fatal. He says: “This soup will kill you. […] Eat it, and you will never stand up again. It will crush you, do you understand?”7 This scene is a painful reminder of those evacuees from Leningrad who were killed by being given food that their weakened bodies could not digest. AN’s letter8 from evacuation to his classmate Igorˊ Ashmarin, who lived across the hall from the Strugatskiis,9 describes just such an instance. Just after the group in which AN and his father had crossed the frozen Ladoga reached Zhikharevo, the first train station on the other side of the lake, everyone was treated to food that overwhelmed their weakened digestive systems: With almost no strength left, we crawled out [of the truck] and went into the barracks. Here it’s likely that the head of the evacuation center had been committing an enormous crime the whole time the evacuation had been underway: he had been giving each evacuee a loaf of bread and mess-tin of 6 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 575. 7 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 606. 8 This letter is also reproduced in Vishnevskii, Arkadii i Boris Strugatskie, 18–20, Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 35–36, and Dmitrii Volodikhin and Gennadii Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2017), 12–13. 9 AN also wrote to his mother, but the letter never reached her. Lost letters (both those he sent and those addressed to him) are an ongoing theme of AN’s correspondence throughout his military career.

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kasha. Everyone threw themselves on the food, and when, later that day, our train was to leave for Vologda, no one could get up. Everyone had dysentery. The snow around the barracks and the latrines turned red in one night.10

In the Soviet Union of 1958, writing openly about one’s experiences under the Blockade was avoided for a variety of reasons, not least of them a reluctance among those who had survived to relive what had been the darkest days of their lives. The malnutrition that AN suffered under the Blockade caused him to lose practically all of his teeth by 1945,11 and the mustache that he wore for most of his post-military adult life was partially intended to conceal this fact. His reasons, then, for strenuously avoiding discussion of his experiences under the Blockade are quite understandable. Volodikhin and Prashkevich argue, on the one hand, that there was a kind of “taboo” against mention of the Blockade in the Strugatskiis’ works, while, on the other hand, the Soviet science fiction writer Aleksandr Mirer, who wrote criticism under the pseudonym Aleksandr Zerkalov, holds that the Blockade is the Strugatskiis’ crucial turning-point [perelom], without knowledge of which their work cannot be properly understood. Mirer’s argument is by far the more convincing of the two: the Blockade is a central motif of Grad obrechennyi and Khromaia sudˊba [A Lame Fate, 1982], two of the brothers’ most personal works. A mostly autobiographical account of BN’s memories of the Blockade occupies the first several chapters of his first “S. Vititskii” novel Poisk prednaznacheniia. But before all these comes Putˊ na Amalˊteiu, a tale of heroism in space in which the Strugatskiis’ beloved astronomy is used to address the terrible event that scattered their family and killed their father. So while Putˊ na Amalˊteiu serves as probably the earliest example of the Strugatskiis’ “Aesopian” technique of depicting problems of Soviet existence clothed in alien settings, one must keep in mind that the brothers are in fact exploring their own story, one that, in this case, just happens to intersect with a major event in Soviet history. More relevant to the present discussion is the status of Putˊ na Amalˊteiu as the Strugatskiis’ first experiment in cosmology: they have taken the conditions to which they expected humans trapped in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere would be subjected and have adapted them to create a kind of “cosmological microclimate” that mimics the experience of life under the Blockade. Each work to be examined in this book contains what 10 Strugatskii, Kommentarii k proidennomu (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2003), 10–11. 11 Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 79.

Introduction

can be characterized as some “cosmology of hell,” a universe in which the laws are changed such that certain “physical parameters” (defined loosely) mark it as different from the assumed consensus cosmology inhabited by the author and reader. In the Strugatskiis’ works, such changes are always for the worse. As their first work to vary these parameters, Putˊ na Amalˊteiu is their most modest such effort, and their only invented cosmology with a real-world analogue. There are indications, however, of a fantastic cosmology that is still more terrible than a high-gravity environment that induces an analogue of starvation and weakness: towards the end of the novella, the planetologists on the Takhmasib are able to observe a previously unknown “graveyard of worlds” [kladbishche mirov], in which they find a kind of gallery of planets that Jupiter has “swallowed.”12 Having already established the novella’s parallels between Leningrad and the Jupiter system, it is relatively simple to see the swallowing of worlds as a metaphor for all that the Blockade swept away. This metaphor becomes pointed if the prologue’s “celestial ballet” is read as a reflection of the kind of peaceful observing sessions that the brothers had enjoyed before the war. This world ceased to exist after the Blockade—it had been swallowed. Notably, while Putˊ na Amalˊteiu has a happy ending, the first version of the work markedly does not. While Putˊ concludes with the Takhmasib limping to J-Station on Amalthea, crippled but intact, thus lifting the “blockade” of the planetoid, the draft version of the novella, titled “Strashnaia bolˊshaia planeta” [The Terrible Big Planet] and written by AN alone in 1957, chronicles a similar disaster—a spaceship on a resupply mission in the Jupiter system hobbled by multiple meteorite impacts. This story opens in the aftermath of the impact, and the first few pages are a careful, grisly accounting of the injured and dead. It ends with the steely decision of the remaining scientists and crew, beyond all hope of saving themselves, to continue the observations of Jupiter as long as they are alive. Such grim details reflect a more accurate cosmology of the Blockade, one that the Strugatskiis do not allow to glimmer in their writing until much later, in works that will be discussed in the chapters to come. The “graveyard of worlds” is the crucial cosmological link between the two works, and its inclusion in Putˊ na Amalˊteiu is a preview of far more terrible hells to come. There is another moment in the novella that anticipates the Strugatskiis’ later cosmologies of hell. Zhilin, the ship’s engineer of the Takhmasib, fresh 12 As the most massive object in the Solar System save for the sun, Jupiter acts as a kind of “vacuum cleaner,” drawing in bodies large and small. This function of the gas giant was witnessed when the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted it in July of 1994. Such objects, however, would not hover intact in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.

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out of school, reflects on having seen late in his training an unmanned vessel that just has returned from a flight outside the Solar System: In the hanger was suspended the recently returned photon tanker-automaton that six months ago had been hurled into the zone of absolutely free flight. The tanker, a huge, awkward construction, had ventured one light month away from the Sun. Its color surprised everyone. Its plating had become turquois-green and came off in hunks—all you had to do was to touch it with your hand. It simply crumbled like bread. […] The cadets asked Liakhov what had happened, and Liakhov answered that he didn’t know. “At great distances from the Sun there’s something we don’t yet know about,” said Liakhov.13

The state of this vessel is an early variation of the Strugatskiis’ anxieties over the deleterious effects on those who must inhabit or explore their cosmologies of hell. Given their experience living under the Blockade, this is far from an abstract problem for them, and much of their literary practice involves the crafting of means to bring the reader into the noxious environments that they create. The cosmologies that the Strugatskiis build in subsequent works can be based on ignorance and false logic (as is the case with those presented in Vtoroe nashestvie marsian [The Second Martian Invasion, 1966] and Obitaemyi ostrov [The Inhabited Island, 1967]), where the setting represents a kind of isolated bubble inside the larger, “correct” cosmology in which the work takes place. Most often—and this is the case with all the remaining works to be examined (Piknik na obochine [Roadside Picnic], Za milliard let do kontsa sveta [A Billion Years until the End of the World], Grad obrechennyi [The Doomed City], Otiagoshchennye zlom [Those Burdened by Evil], Zhidy goroda Pitera, ili neveselye besedy pri svechakh [The Yids of the City of Peter, or Cheerless Conversations by Candlelight, 1990])—this skewed cosmology is that in which the work is set: the characters, and hence the reader, are trapped within it. It will be convenient to have on hand a succinct term for the disconnect, experienced by both character and reader, that results from the realization that the cosmology of the work in question differs markedly, even terrifyingly, from that which defines the “outer Universe” of the author and reader. This term will be cosmological disorientation. The particular way in which this concept—really a special case of defamiliarization—illuminates any given work will be addressed in each 13 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 1: 569.

Introduction

chapter, and, as such, the problem of cosmological disorientation will be the key unifying feature of this study. The more the reader of the Strugatskiis keeps themselves cosmologically disoriented, the deeper will be their understanding of the work in question. The Strugatskiis remind the reader of this sufficiently often that doing so is no great strain—indeed, one of their central goals is to sustain cosmological disorientation. This is fostered by a writing principle that the Strugatskiis developed early in their career, even fixing it in place it with a name: the otkaz ot ob”iasenii [the rejection of explanations, hereafter the otkaz]. This otkaz came about as a result of the first writer’s block of the brothers’ collaboration. While working on the novel Popytka k begstvu [Escape Attempt, 1962], the two found that they could not account for the inexplicable time-travel of one the main characters, Saul, a Soviet soldier in a German POW camp who has found himself in the twenty-second century. After a great deal of fruitless effort, they decided simply not to explain how or why Saul has been transported, but resolved instead to leave the process concealed. The main thing for the novel, after all, is the insights that Saul brings from the past to the future, not the mechanism by which he travels. In his commentary to the novel, BN expands on his and his brother’s thinking: You can break any rule, be it literary or from real life. You can renounce logic and destroy authenticity, you can work in defiance of everything, in defiance of all conceivable and inconceivable rules and regulations, just as long as in the end you reach the main goal—that in the reader there flares up a readiness to empathize. The greater this readiness, the more violation and destruction is allowed the author.14

In the works to be examined in this book, the Strugatskiis’ otkaz plays an integral role in promoting cosmological disorientation. The hell-like cosmologies that the brothers develop are almost never described in a key passage by which the reader can orient. Rather, the structure of the cosmology in question must be determined through careful reading and rereading. Even then, elements of this structure are absent: no “view from above” is ever possible, a restriction that parallels the impossibility of observing the universe one inhabits “from without”—in the Strugatskiis’ works there is no stationary point of reference. In this sense, the otkaz is a fundamental

14 Ibid., 3: 682–83.

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means of deepening the unease made possible—or inevitable—by cosmological disorientation. Both concepts will feature throughout this book. In the conclusion to her 1994 Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Yvonne Howell writes: It has been made abundantly clear that “apocalyptic realism” does not rely on the hard sciences and technology for its imagery, or to motivate the plot. The role of science in the Strugatskys’ fiction is at once more subtle, and more profound. The paradigms of science, as much as the paradigms of religion and the arts, have a powerful prefigurative presence in all of the Strugatskys’ writing.15

In some ways, the pages to come should be considered an expansion of Howell’s observation, as the dicussion will often revolve around the subtle distortion of something as minute as a single scientific fact or as vast as a sweeping scientific paradigm. The human pursuits of cosmology and astronomy, among the most ancient of scientific modes of inquiry, serve as the raw materials out of which the Strugatskiis build their hells, and their literary practice depends on this history of quantitative inquiry no less than it does on the work of the writers and poets from whose work they draw inspiration. In standing on the shoulders of giants, literary and scientific, the Strugatskiis seek to leave the reader shaken and disoriented, but, more importantly, ready to think.

15 Yvonne Howell, Apocalyptic Realism (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 151.

A Biography through Astronomy Звук привычный, звук живой, Сколь ты часто раздавался Там, где тихо развивался Я давнишнею порой. Familiar sound, living sound, How often you would ring out There, where I quietly blossomed In that time long ago. Pushkin, “Zoriu bˊiut…” [They’re ringing dusk …, 1829]

The Strugatskiis’ brief autobiographical sketch “Nasha biografiia” [Our Biography] was written at some point in the mid-1980s by AN, apparently at the behest of an Italian translator who wanted biographical materials to go into a translation of one of their novels. The unfinished work remained in AN’s archive, where BN discovered it in 1993, two years after his brother’s death. Recognizing that AN wrote the autobiography “when there were as yet only glimmers of perestroika” [kogda perestroika eshche lishˊ tlela], a circumstance that hemmed their personal narrative within certain state-approved modes of expression, BN decided to intersperse his own recollections among those of his brother.1 The result is a kind of dialogue. AN begins the work with the dates and places of the brothers’ births. BN adds:

1 Vishnevskii, Arkadii i Boris Strugatskie, 13.

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Many years later we entertained ourselves with calculating the “birthday of the Strugatskii brothers,” that is, the date equidistant from 08.28.1925 and 04.15.1933. For people who are familiar with the (purely astronomical) concept of the Julian day, such a problem presents no difficulty at all. The birthday of ABS is, it turns out, 21 June 1929, the day of the summer solstice. Those who desire to do so may take this circumstance into account to make any number of far-ranging astrological conclusions.2

The Julian day is a system whereby each day from 1 January 4713 BC (day zero) is given an integer value, with decimal values denoting intervals of each day. This concept is useful in astronomy because it simplifies discussion of astronomical phenomena that occur over long spans of time, such as the 332-day period of the variable star Mira. To perform their calculation, the Strugatskiis would have converted their birthdays to Julian days, found the decimal midpoint between them, and then would have converted this Julian date back to the integer calendar date. As BN indicates, this is a concept with little use outside of astronomical circles, and yet is one that served the brothers as a pleasant diversion at some point after their combined identity as “the Strugatskii brothers” had been established. One of the purposes of this book is to catalog the ways in which astronomy served the Strugatskiis not as an entertainment on an idle afternoon, but as a fundamental element of their art, one on which rest all their cosmological experiments. Towards this end, it will be useful to show just how wide and strong a foundation in astronomy the brothers built in their youth. AN, as the older brother, was the first to become interested in astronomy, and thus was responsible for introducing his younger brother to the science. A compelling illustration of AN’s love for the field is a journal entry from December of 1941 that begins with a brief account of Blockade bread rations, but with the better part being taken up by his plan of study in mathematics and astronomy: 25/XII–1941. Today they gave us more bread. They’re giving 200 grams. After the New Year we can expect an additional 100 grams, but I’m still happy with what I got today. What a piece of bread! Admittedly, I joyfully ate it well before evening tea with half a jar of jam… Starting on the 28th I think that I’ll really get down to work.

2 Ibid., 14.

A Biography through Astronomy

Subjects: mathematics (as preparation for theoretical astronomy), spherical astronomy (using Polak),3 and variable stars (using Bruggennat). I will use Filips to study mathematics. What a fine textbook! I will have four “courses”: 1.  “Secondary topics” (mathematics and spherical astronomy); 2.  “Theoretical Astronomy”; 3.  “Variable Stars”; 4.  “Observing.” This will be good. Nothing will be in my way. Besides this, there will be the clandestine course “Gastronomy.” I will set aside about an hour for this every day…4

Immediately following this entry is a note on the death of a schoolmate: “They are making a coffin for Fridman at school.” The entry for December 27 reads: “My comrade Aleksandr Evgenˊevich Pashkovskii died (starvation and tuberculosis)…” Though the extreme privations of the Blockade apparently did not blunt AN’s passion for astronomy, events connected to the War ultimately did preclude the possibility of his pursuing studies in his beloved science. Following his and his father’s evacuation from Leningrad in 1942, during which Natan Zalmanovich died (see the previous chapter), AN was drafted into the army. He was trained as an artilleryman, but, two weeks before being sent into combat, a lucky chance to demonstrate his excellent grammar got him plucked out of artillery training and sent him to Kuibyshev to study as a military translator at the newly formed Red Army Military Institute of Foreign Languages [Voennyi institut inostrannykh iazykov Krasnoi armii, VIIIa KA].5 This change in military designation saved his life, as almost all the men with whom he had trained were sent to the Kursk salient, from which not one returned alive.6 AN received training primarily in Japanese, and spent the rest of the decade at various locations in central Russia and the Soviet Far East, including Kansk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii,

3 First published in 1929, I. F. Polak’s Kurs obshchei astronomii [A Course in General Astronomy] went through mutiple printings, the final (sixth) edition having been published in 1951. Polak’s mathematical approach is ideal for self-directed study, as each chapter ends with exercises, with solutions provided to selected problems. 4 Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 11. 5 Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 56–7. 6 Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊa Strugatskie, 282–83.

3

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Chapter 1

where he witnessed the 1952 Severo-Kurilsk tsunami.7 He was demobilized in 1955, after which he worked as a translator from Japanese (among other languages, including English) and as an editor. Though he derived a great deal of pleasure from the career that his military training made possible, AN always spoke of astronomy as the path that he would have chosen had history not intervened. In a short essay entitled “Moi Zhiulˊ Vern” [My Jules Verne], published in Pionerskaia pravda on 10 February 1978, AN recalls how the scientific wonder he experienced at reading Verne’s 1877 novel Hector Servadac (known in English as Off on a Comet) stimulated him to learn astronomy: I studied mathematics, spherical astronomy, built homemade telescopes from eyeglass lenses, observed variable stars, dreamed of learning to calculate an orbit from three observations, and generally had firmly resolved to become an astronomer. And I probably would have become an astronomer, had it not been for the war…8

Other interviews with AN feature permutations of this sentiment. His youthful obsession with astronomy appears even in the thoughts of Dmitrii Malianov, the protagonist of the Strugatskiis’ 1974 Za milliard let do kontsa sveta [A Billion Years until the End of the World], whose childhood memories of homemade telescopes and calculations from Wolf numbers9 reflect AN’s autobiographical recollections. Malianov’s memories will be examined in detail in Chapter Six, and it will be sufficient to note at present that AN mentions Wolf numbers in another recollection of his childhood: It’s the eve of war. I have strict parents. Well, not quite: both good and strict. I’m deeply interested in astronomy and mathematics. I’m diligently working

7 Ibid., 340–41. 8 Arkadii Strugatskii, “Moi Zhiulˊ Vern” (Pionerskaia pravda, February 10, 1978), 7. 9 A Wolf number, or international sunspot number, or relative sunspot number, refers to a formula used to index sunspot activity. The number, r, is given by r = k(f + 10g) “where g is the number of groups of sunspots, irrespective of the number of spots each contains, and f is the total number of spots in all the groups; k is a factor based on the estimated efficiency of the observer and telescope.” Ian Ridpath and John Woodruff, Cambridge Astronomy Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 173.

A Biography through Astronomy

through five years of observations by the observatory at the Building of Scholars.10 I’m calculating the so-called Wolf number according to sunspots.11

All these fragments support what BN said in the years following his brother’s death: that his interest in astronomy was imparted to him primarily by his older brother. He says in a 1995 interview with Boris Vishnevskii: To begin with, he loved astronomy from childhood on: it was he, after all, who schooled me in it; as a schoolboy he made homemade telescopes, observed sunspots and taught me to make such observations. So ninety percent of the astronomical data in our books (with the exception of the most specialized data) come directly from him…12

In this same thought, BN mentions that one manifestation of his brother’s lifelong relationship with astronomy was a passion for optics: By the way, he kept a tender love for fine optics to the end of his days. You could not give him a better present than a powerful pair of binoculars or some sort of special spy-glass.13

In BN’s observations one can glimpse AN’s youthful joy for astronomy— that of a boy who had access only to crude telescopes that he made himself out of eyeglass lenses—quite unchanged by all the intervening years. Thus, BN’s interest in astronomy was inherited primarily from his older brother, whom the young man saw both as a father and teacher.14 When, in 1950, it came time for BN to select a course of study at the university, his first choice was actually physics, at the fizfak [the school of physics] of Leningrad State University. Despite having finished school with a silver medal,15 BN was not accepted. He recalls in another interview with Vishnevskii (August 2000) that, of the fifty medalists who applied to 10 What AN calls the Dom uchenykh [the House of Scholars] is probably the Dom zanimatelˊnoi nauki [House of Entertaining Science], a popular science museum that was open from 1935 to 1941, housed at Fontanka 34. In an interview after AN’s death, BN recalls his brother having gone to this museum right before the War to get “a huge folder of solar and sunspot observations.” S. Bondarenko, Neizvestnye Strugatskie: pisˊma, rabochie dnevniki: 1942–1962 gg. (Moscow: AST, 2008), 29. 11 Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 10. 12 Vishnevskii, Arkadii and Boris Strugatskie, 33. 13 Ibid., 33. 14 Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 306. 15 In the Soviet Union, students of distinction were awarded medals upon completion of their studies. Gold medals were given to students with all 5s, silver to students with mostly 5s and not more than two 4s.

5

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Chapter 1

the fizfak that year, only two were rejected, BN and a woman whose last name he recalls as being similar to Einstein’s.16 While it cannot be determined just why BN and this half-remembered woman were not accepted, there is a strong possibility that anti-Semitism played a role.17 (Recall that the Delo vrachei—mercifully cut short by Stalin’s death—was unfolding at the same time.) The Strugatskiis always identified themselves on their passports as “Russian,” and even their father, Natan Zalmanovich, an ardent member of the first generation of “Old Bolsheviks,” did not consider himself a practicing Jew.18 Yet they could not hide the fact that their patronymic—Natanovich—was a clear marker of Jewish heritage. Skalandis writes that AN, while in the military, may have falsified his patronymic as “Nikolaevich” in order to avoid scrutiny.19 BN suggests in his interview with Vishnevskii that he was initially naïve about the problems that his parentage might bring him: And though according to my passport I was registered as Russian, the fact that I was Natanovich was impossible to hide, and it didn’t even occur to me to hide it. Mama may have understood something about the situation then, but I of course was a completely hopeless doofus. So it’s possible that the matter was in my patronymic. Particularly when you take into account that at the colloquium I honestly and directly declared that I wanted to work specifically in atomic physics. That was, of course, an imprudent action.20

BN goes on to acknowledge that there were more than a few figures in Russian physics with “problematic” patronymics, and that the perception at the time was that the number of Jewish persons in the field was “sufficient” and that “it was time to put a stop to this disgrace” [pora by eto bezobrazie prekratitˊ].21 This supposed “surplus” of Jewish professionals was called “contamination of the cadres” [zasorennostˊ kadrov]. The other mitigating factors for BN were likely the expulsion of their father from the Party in 1937, apparently for having asserted that the Socialist Realism author Nikolai Ostrovskii was a “puppy” compared to Pushkin, 16 Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 39. 17 BN’s rejection by the fizfak features as a biographical detail of Aleksandr Ruvimovich Pinskii in the Strugatskiis’ final work, the “comedy” Zhidy goroda Pitera. This detail will be considered in more detail in the final chapter. 18 Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 17. 19 Ibid., 75. 20 Vishnevskii, Arkadii and Boris Strugatskie, 39. 21 Ibid., 39.

A Biography through Astronomy

and that Soviet artists could learn something from the icon painter Andrei Rublev.22 Natan Zalmanovich narrowly escaped arrest and execution that same year: returning from work to his Moscow apartment, he learned from the dvornik that “they had come by for him” [za nim prikhodili].23 He left immediately for Leningrad, and the order for his arrest was apparently forgotten. His brother Aleksandr was not so fortunate, and was shot that same year. At any rate, BN’s path into physics was shut, but a friend of the family suggested applying to the matmekh [the school of mathematics and mechanics], where it would be possible to study astronomy. BN recalls: I did not mourn too much being left without atomic physics: after all, astronomy was still a love of mine, even if it was second, and after this I studied astronomy and mathematics with great pleasure and diligence.24

In his second year of school, in 1951, BN was sent to the Almaty Observatory in Kazakhstan to study under Gavriil Adriandovich Tikhov, then one of the most prominent Soviet astronomers, now known as an early developer of astrobotany. In a 2010 letter, BN wonders whether Tikhov was kindly exiled to Almaty as one of the last luminaries of the old astrophysics.25 In this same letter, he recalls a cake that the Observatory cook made for Tikhov’s sixty-fifth birthday that read: “To Gavriil Adriandovich from the Mortians Who Love Him” [Gavrillu Adrianovichu ot vliublennykh morsian].26 In 1954, BN did his pre-diploma practical work at the Abastumani Astrophysical Observatory, in modern-day Georgia.27 It would have been natural for a student in BN’s position to continue as a graduate student in astronomy at LGU once he finished his undergraduate work in 1955, but he was made to understand that his Jewish parentage would bar this path to him just as it had prevented him from studying physics.28 Fortunately, he was able to do his graduate work at 22 Ibid., 15–16. 23 Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 9. 24 Vishnevskii, Arkadii and Boris Strugatskie, 40–41. 25 Many astrophysicists of the old school refused to accept the discovery—by Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle—of nucleosynthesis in stars. Their results were published in Reviews of Modern Physics in 1957 under the title “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars.” The work is so famous that it is known colloquially as the “B2FH paper.”  26 Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 23. 27 Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 157. 28 The Strugatskiis’ ethnic background continued to be an issue throughout their career. Their acceptance into the Writers’ Union was apparently delayed by the confusion of “one” writer living in different cities, but also both by anti-Semitists on the membership

7

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Pulkovo, an observatory located on the Pulkovo Heights south of Leningrad, studying under Kirill Fedorovich Ogorodnikov (1900–1985). Founded in 1839, Pulkovo is still the main observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The centrality of Pulkovo to Russian science is reflected in the fact that all Tsarist maps of Russia used as their prime meridian the so-called “Pulkovo meridian,” which passed through the center of the main building of the Observatory. The position of the Observatory at a high elevation above Leningrad made it a target of German forces, who bombed the complex into rubble, though they were never able to occupy the Pulkovo Heights themselves. Members of the Strugatskii family were witness to two events taking place at or near Pulkovo during the War, both associated with the Heights’ strategic significance. AN, at the very beginning of the Blockade, was participating in the building of fortifications on the Moskovskoe Highway near the Pulkovo Heights; all the workers were given old English rifles. The then sixteen-year-old AN shot at a German soldier, and to the end of his life was not certain whether he had killed the man.29 Natan Zalmanovich later witnessed the destruction by bombing of the Pulkovo complex. AN writes about this in a September 1950 letter to BN: By the way, it might interest you to know that our dad saw the destruction of the Observatory. He was escorting ammunition to the Front and was witness to the bombardment of Pulkovo (in particular of the Observatory) by the Germans’ long-range guns. I remember him telling me about this in the kitchen while he warmed his feet with hot water in the washbasin: he was unkempt, filthy. What a time that was!30

Strangely enough, though the writer “the Strugatskii brothers” would derive great benefit from BN’s association with Pulkovo (Skalandis calls it a “magical place” for them), AN never once visited the Observatory itself.31 committee and by Jewish members who resented the brothers’ identifying as Russian. Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 135. Later in their career, particularly during their ten years of publishing difficulties in the seventies, there were persistent rumors that that Strugatskiis were emigrating to America or Israel, this despite the fact that they never expressed any intention of leaving Russia. 29 Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 31. Skalandis also recounts AN working, in the early days of the Blockade, at a workshop where hand grenades were assembled, “putting into each one all of his hatred of the enemy” [vkladyvaia v kazhduiu iz nikh vsiu svoiu nenavistˊ k vragam]. Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 32. 30 Ibid., 155. 31 Ibid., 155, 186.

A Biography through Astronomy

BN’s dissertation concentrated on the physics of so-called “wide” stellar pairs, which are, in his words, “double stars in which the distance between the components is comparable to the mean distance among field32 stars.”33 He was unable to complete his work because in 1957, late in the process of writing, he discovered that he had been inadvertently duplicating a result published by the great Indian-American astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. BN recalls in a 2000 interview with Vishnevskii: […] and later it came to light (I brought it to light myself, digging in the Observatory library), that my work had already been done in 1943 by Chandrasekhar.34 It was, of course, extremely gratifying to follow independently the same path as the great Chandrasekhar, but not at such a price! Then I had nothing to defend, and it was pointless to begin a new dissertation half a year before the end of the term, and the final result was that I didn’t manage to write a dissertation, and covered only, as it was then called, the theoretical course of graduate school. This business threw me out of whack to a significant degree, but even this time everything turned out relatively smoothly. I went to work at the Pulkovo Observatory calculating station: even then there was a section with punch-card computers on which scientific calculations were performed.35

BN began working at Pulkovo in this capacity in 1958, and continued until he and AN joined the Writers’ Union in 1964, which made it possible for them to devote all of their energies to writing. During this time, BN continued to do research in astronomy, which he sums up in one of his “Offline Interview”36 responses: 32 Field stars are stars that do not belong to any stellar cluster or association. Most telescopic stars are field stars. 33 Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 21. 34 BN is referring to two articles addressing the problem of dynamical friction in stellar systems published by Chandrasekhar in issues 97 and 98 of the Astrophysical Journal in 1943 under the general title “Dynamical Friction” and the respective subtitles “General Considerations: The Coefficient of Dynamical Friction” and “The Rate of Escape of Stars from Clusters and the Evidence for the Operation of Dynamical Friction.” 35 Vishnevskii, Arkadii i Boris Strugatskie, 41–42. 36 This informal “interview” lasted from 1998 until the author’s death in 2012. Housed at the central Strugatskii fan site (rusf.ru.abs), the interview allowed fans to send BN questions electronically, which he would then answer at his leisure. Selected answers were compiled by the Strugatskii researcher Svetlana Bondarenko in Intervˊiu dlinoiu v gody: po materialam oflain-interv′iu [An Interview Years in Length compiled from the Contents of the Offline Interview] (Moscow: AST, 2009).

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I worked on the dynamics of double stars (mainly of so-called “wide pairs”): how they occur, how and why they collapse, how long they live, etc. My other topic: the movement of stars through dust clouds; this was also interesting. And I also spent a fairly large amount of time on studying the rotation of globular clusters. I had only a few publications, and all of them, it seems, had multiple authors.37

While he was still at Pulkovo, the biographical blurbs that were included in some of their books identify BN as a “research associate” [nauchnyi sotrudnik] at Pulkovo. In 1960, he participated in an expedition to the northern Caucasus, scouting locations for the building of the so-called Bolˊshoi teleskop (BTA-6), a six-meter-aperture instrument built in 1975 that at the time was the largest in the world.38 One interesting artistic endeavor in which BN participated while at Pulkovo was a film made in celebration of the 1957 launch of Sputnik. He recalls, also in his “Offline Interview”: Insofar as I can remember, it was sheer childlike joy [teliachii vostorg]: songs, dancing, carnivals and Saturnalia. Our cohort at Pulkovo made an entire film about Sputnik: hand-drawn, with music and poems, recorded (I think) on our MAG-8 laboratory tape machine. We worked at night, burning in a flame of enthusiasm. It was happiness and the feeling of a leap forward into the future.39

BN composed the poems for the film, which was apparently shown at a handful of international conferences.40 Though BN left the field of astronomy in 1964, his life-long social circle was defined by his years there. As Skalandis puts it: Having arrived to work at the GAO [Glavnaia astronomicheskaia observatoriia, Main Astronomical Observatory] and having gotten married relatively quickly, he severely narrowed down his social circle. There, at Pulkovo, around BN formed a cohort of like-minded people; in this group it was customary to both work and relax together. These friendships lasted without exaggeration, for their entire lives. No one was lost, save for those who left forever.41 37 Boris Strugatskii, Intervˊiu dlinoiu v gody, 27. 38 Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 222–24; Vishnevskii, Arkadii i Boris Strugatskie, 44; O. N. Korottsev, Astronomiia dlia vsekh (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2004), 16–17. 39 Strugatskii, Intervˊiu dlinoiu v gody, 29. 40 Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 199. 41 Ibid., 198.

A Biography through Astronomy

BN counted among his closest friends Aleksandr Ivanovich Kopylov (one of the designers of the RATAN-600 radio telescope, which is housed at the same facility as the BTA-6), Iurii Nikolaevich Chistiakov (a fellow student of the matmekh and co-worker at Pulkovo), Natalˊia Aleksandrovna Sventsitskaia (wife of Chistiakov, a physicist who worked both at Pulkovo and the Vavilov State Optical Institute), and Vladimir Semenovich Korepanov (an engineer and inventor at Pulkovo).42 Most importantly, it was in BN’s first year at the matmekh that he met his future wife, Adelaida Andreevna Karpeliuk (Ada), who was also studying astronomy.43 She also worked at Pulkovo, and continued to do so after he left, even doing some observations on the BTA. Following the birth of their son Andrei, the couple, who had been living with BN’s mother, moved to the hotel-dormitory at Pulkovo, where they lived until 1964,44 when they moved to the apartment near Moskovskii Prospect where both BN and Adelaida would live until their deaths.45 Perhaps because BN was able to work in astronomy for more than fifteen years, his comments on the science are not characterized by the warmth and enthusiasm that are typical of AN when talking on the same subject. For example, in answer to the question—posed in 1999—as to whether he still does astronomy, BN answers: Unfortunately, I ceased doing astronomy (even for my own pleasure) about ten years ago. I’ve neither the time nor the passion for it. For it’s clear that I won’t manage to do anything serious in it, not to mention the fact that I’ve fallen far behind the world standard.46

BN often qualifies his love for astronomy, even when talking about his time at Pulkovo. Though he often says that he retains very fond memories of his years at the Observatory, his answer is dominated by his characteristic laconicism: “For in those days I was inert, inclined to philosophicity and indifferent to success in anything at all, except, possibly, in astronomy, to which, it must be said, I wasn’t especially devoted.”47 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 198. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 226, 277. Adelaida Andreevna died 20 December 2013, having outlived her husband by just over a year. 46 Strugatskii, Intervˊiu dlinoiu v gody, 29. 47 Skalandis, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 161; Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Bratˊia Strugatskie, 32.

11

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From the discussion above we can make the preliminary observation that the astronomer-protagonists to be examined in the coming chapters combine AN’s love for astronomy and his regrets at a path not taken with BN’s practical experience in a field that he regards much more dispassionately than does his brother. This combination will sustain both the scientific detachment necessary to build the alien cosmologies that define the works to be discussed and the emotional investment in the characters who must inhabit these constructed hells. But in order to best understand this balance, the historical “field of view” must be widened to observe the state of Soviet astronomy in the years before the War, since the ideologically motivated hollowing out of the profession impacted Pulkovo far more than any other institution connected to the science. Excellent coverage of these events is given in two articles: Robert McCutcheon’s 1991 “The 1936– 1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers” and A. I. Eremeeva’s 1995 “Political Repression and Personality: The History of Political Repression against Soviet Astronomers.” The remainder of this chapter will offer a thumbnail sketch of this purge of astronomers. Russian observatories and institutes of astronomy could not isolate themselves from the political changes that accompanied the arrival of Soviet power. In many disciplines, scientists and engineers who had already established their reputations before the Revolution suffered from their ties to the Tsarist regime. This was the case even for professionals who embraced the Revolution and sincerely devoted themselves to the building of Socialism. One of the best monographs on the kinds of tragedies that unfolded in such situations is Loren Graham’s 1993 The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union, an account of the career of the engineer Petr Palˊchinskii (1875–1929), which ended, as did many, with his arrest and execution.48 Soviet astronomy was in a particularly vulnerable position due primarily to two factors. The first problem was the relatively small number of individuals in the field: McCutcheon estimates that, “In the mid-1930s the Soviet Union had approximately two hundred professional astronomers and sixteen astronomical observatories, most of which were associated with universities and had staffs of only two or three people.”49 The second factor was the international nature of astronomy: Russian 48 Loren Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 49 Robert A. McCutcheon, “The 1936–1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 100.

A Biography through Astronomy

astronomers before the Revolution had extensive contacts in Europe and America. For example, Boris Petrovich Gerasimovich (1889–1937) maintained close ties with astronomers at Harvard (he was close friends with Harlow Shapley, then the director of the Harvard College Observatory), and had traveled to America several times.50 Such ties were used as ammunition by those who sought to bring politics into every vestige of Soviet life. One such person, Anton D. Drozd, had been the head of Pulkovo before Gerasimovich. Drozd, having joined the Pulkovo staff in 1917 as an observing assistant, “declared himself a Bolshevik and charged that scientific work at the observatory was not being carried out with sufficient energy.”51 When these charges were found to be baseless, Drozd was disgraced, and left Pulkovo in 1920, only to return as the director in 1930 when the Narkompros52 invalidated the election of the celestial mechanician Boris V. Numerov and appointed Drozd in his place. According to McCutcheon: One astronomer later described Drozd as a near-manic who conducted himself more like Pulkovo’s conqueror than like its director. Indeed, Drozd’s main concern at Pulkovo, other than organizing seminars on dialectical materialism, seemed to be exacting revenge from senior staff who had humiliated him ten years earlier. He did have some support among graduate students and junior astronomers, such as Nikolai A. Kozyrev (1908–1983), Dmitrii I. Eropkin (1908–1939), and Viktor A. Ambartsumian (b. 1908)53.54

These young astronomers would prove to be Gerasimovich’s enemies following his appointment as director of the observatory in 1933. Their mutual animosity is called by some the “Pulkovo Schism.”55 The astronomer M. N. Gnevshev recalls an incident in which Kozyrev and Eropkin sent a telegram to the Academy of Sciences with news that Gerasimovich had died, requesting that the Academy make arrangements for the funeral.56 The enmity between the director and Ambartsumian was particularly severe, as the two had been at odds over the position of the head of a new astrophysical sector when 50 Ibid., 102. 51 Ibid., 101. 52 The Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia [Peoples’s Commissariat for Education] oversaw the activities of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 53 Ambartsumian died in 1996. 54 McCutcheon, “The 1936–1937 Purge,” 101. 55 A. I. Eremeeva, “Political Repression and Personality,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 26, vol. 4 (1995): 303. 56 McCutcheon, “The 1936–1937 Purge,” 102–3.

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Drozd had been in charge.57 The three young astronomers used the pretext of a scandal surrounding a young celestial mechanician named Nikolai Voronov to press for Gerasimovich’s ouster. Voronov was only eighteen when, in 1931, he was invited to join the Tashkent Astronomical Observatory. His apparent successes in finding quicker and more reliable mathematical means of determining the orbits of minor planets caused a sensation in astronomy circles both in the Soviet Union and abroad, until it became apparent in 1936 that Voronov had been forging his results. Gerasimovich, having hired Voronov only in 1935, dismissed him on March 9, 1936, after which the disgraced astronomer was drafted by the Red Army and then disappeared from the historical record.58 During the scandal, in February of 1936, Gerasimovich used the fact that Kozyrev and Eropkin had been drawing two salaries during a 1935 expedition funded by the Academy of Sciences to dismiss them from Pulkovo;59 he had already fired Ambartsumian in 1935 as the ring-leader of the young astronomers. The Voronov scandal (Voronovshchina) was covered in several articles in Leningradskaia pravda in the summer of 1936.60 By the fall, the NKVD was already arresting astronomers in large numbers (among them Kozyrev and Eropkin), leading to a cessation of all research at Pulkovo.61 Gerasimovich was arrested later, on June 28, 1937, and was executed on November 30 of that year.62 Eropkin was executed on January 20, 1939, and Kozyrev was released from a labor camp on January 1, 1947.63 Of the individuals discussed, only Ambartsumian managed to avoid arrest, perhaps because he was warned and was able to leave Leningrad in time.64 However, he did come under attack from the Leningrad popular science writer V. E. Lˊvov, who in 1938 published articles in the journal Pod znamenem marksizma [Under the Banner of Marxism] condemning the astrophysicist as a “cleverly masked enemy of Marxism-Leninism” for having supported the Belgian astronomer-priest Georges Lemaître’s “idealistic” theory that the universe is expanding.65 Eremeeva quotes from unpublished letters in 57 Ibid., 101–2. 58 McCutcheon, “The 1936–1937 Purge,” 104–5; Eremeeva, “Political Repression,” 303, 320–21. 59 Eremeeva, “Political Repression,” 105–6. 60 Ibid., 107–8. 61 Ibid., 108–9. 62 Ibid., 110, 112. 63 Ibid., 112. 64 Ibid., 310. 65 Ibid., 310.

A Biography through Astronomy

which Ambartsumian attempts to defend himself, letters in which she sees the astrophysicist’s “state of panic.” In one he asserts, “I unmasked the true face of Gerasimovich. Lˊvov also knows that Gerasimovich’s gang accused me of persecuting Gerasimovich, to which I always answered that mad dogs should be destroyed.”66 Ambartsumian weathered this storm, went on to achieve the title of akademik, and later was the head editor of Razvitie astronomii v SSSR [The Development of Astronomy in the USSR], a compendium published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution. This volume mentions Gerasimovich as having been the director of Pulkovo “up until his tragic death in 1937” [vplotˊ do svoei tragicheskoi gibeli v 1937 g.].67 The reader is left to note the year of Gerasimovich’s death and to draw the appropriate conclusions. McCutcheon estimates that at least twenty-nine astronomers were arrested during the 1936–1937 purge, a group that made up from ten to twenty percent of the entire profession as it existed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.68 The astronomer Grigorii A. Shain, director of the Semeiz Observatory in the Crimea (now the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory), states in a 1938 letter to A. Ia. Vyshinskii, one of the organizers of the Purges, that the damage to Soviet astronomy could not be measured in numbers alone: The number of actively working astronomers in our country is small (80–90 people), and therefore the arrest of a large group (about twenty people) is very striking. The matter is made worse by the fact that the most outstanding astronomers were among those who were arrested. It would hardly be an exaggeration to state that Soviet astronomy has lost no less than 30 percent of its effective personnel.69

Given the international nature of the profession, the hollowing out of Soviet astronomy could not be concealed from astronomers abroad. For example, the Russian-American astronomer Otto Struve, a descendant of the Russianized German Struve family that had founded the Pulkovo Observatory, recalled that Gerasimovich wrote him in the spring of 1937 that it would no longer be possible for them to correspond, adding that “the breath of fear and utter despondency pervaded every word” of 66 67 68 69

Ibid., 311. V. A. Ambartsumian, Razvitie astronomii v SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), 215. McCutcheon, “The 1936–1937 Purge,” 111. Ibid., 111.

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Gerasimovich’s letter.70 Cecilia Payne, author of the ground-breaking 1925 dissertation “Stellar Atmospheres,” had visited Pulkovo earlier, in the spring of 1934, and her autobiography, The Dyer’s Hand, contains a handful of wrenching depictions of the Purges from a foreign perspective: Everyone was afraid—afraid to talk lest they should be overheard. One of the young women—she has long been dead now—led me to the middle of a wide field and begged me in a whisper to help her to go abroad—“I would wash dishes”, she said, “I would do anything to get away from here”. And what could I do? What could I possibly have done? I was appalled. […] The two weeks I spent at Pulkova [sic] would never be effaced. I felt that my personal griefs had been obliterated by the human tragedy. We all sensed, I think, that we should not meet again. When I left, Gerasomovič [sic] made me a present of an embroidered tablecloth. I shall never forget the sadness in his face as he said “It is a custom with us, when a friend is going away on a journey, to give him a tablecloth”. And he died a few years later, a victim of the Stalinist persecution. He knew what was in store for him. He spoke very little of the situation, but once he said: ”When I saw what was becoming of my beloved country, I wanted to kill myself ”.71

McCutcheon concludes: Pulkovo’s reputation as a leading international center for astronomy, already in decline, had been lost completely. An era had ended, and now only a few astronomers were left who could remember the distant days when Pulkovo had been known as “the astronomical capital of the world.72

Though neither AN nor BN had any personal connections to Pulkovo in the late 1930s, when both brothers lived in Leningrad, they were still part of the local amateur astronomy community of which the observatory was the pinnacle. It is a virtual certainty that AN was a reader of the Soviet amateur astronomy journal Mirovedenie [Knowing the World],73 which in 1930 came under the editorship of Vartan T. Ter-Oganezov, whom McCutcheon calls “a pseudo-astronomer who barely graduated from Petrograd University in 70 Eremeeva, “Political Repression,” 312. 71 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections, ed. Katherine Haramundanis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 194, 195. 72 McCutcheon, “The 1936–1937 Purge,” 117. 73 Mirovedenie, from mir [world] and vedat’ [to know] is an old synonym for astronomy.

A Biography through Astronomy

1916.” Under his direction, Mirovedenie “became a militant vehicle for the rapid introduction of dialectical materialism into all aspects of astronomical research.”74 It was on the pages of this journal that the feats of Voronov were shared with the world in 1936, when AN was eleven years old, already an ardent amateur astronomer. It is difficult to imagine that BN—having worked at Pulkovo for nearly a decade and counting among his closest friends (not to mention his wife) members of the Pulkovo staff—could have had no inkling of the ideological fire that had gutted his institution only about fifteen years prior to his arrival. One connection of BN to a repressed astronomer is known for certain. There had been an earlier, ideological purge of scientific institutions in 1929–1930. One effect of this purge in astronomy was the disbanding of ROLM, the Russian Amateur Astronomy Society [Russkoe obshchestvo liubitelei mirovedeniia], in 1930. This incident is noteworthy to the present study because the disbanding of ROLM led to the brief arrest of Gavriil Tikhov, who was involved in the Society.75 As was mentioned above, BN studied under Tikhov at the Almaty Observatory in Kazakhstan in 1951. BN’s work on Kozyrev’s theories on Jupiter also connected him directly to those who had been repressed, though it is uncertain whether or not he and Kozyrev interacted personally. BN was almost certainly present in the spring of 1957 when the older astronomer presented at Pulkovo his paper “Causal or Non-symmetrical Mechanics in Linear Approximation” [Prichinnaia ili nesimmetrichnaia mekhanika v lineinom priblizhenii].76 The case of Kozyrev serves as an illustration of the state of Soviet astronomy following the Purges. McCutcheon’s characterization of Pulkovo as the “astronomical capital of the world” comes from a possibly apocryphal quote ascribed to the American astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould (1824–1896) by his colleague Simon Newcomb (1835–1909) in his 1903 Reminiscences of an Astronomer.77 Gould’s (or Newcomb’s) characterization was already out of date by the middle of the 1920s, by which time Pulkovo was falling behind, continuing to emphasize positional astronomy at the expense of astrophysics.78 Gerasimovich, himself an astrophysicist, was modernizing research directions at the Observatory when the Institution 74 Ibid., 103. 75 Eremeeva, “Political Repression,” 303. 76 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 657. 77 Simon Newcomb, The Reminiscences of an Astronomer (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903), 309; Alan H. Batten, Resolute and Undertaking Characters (Dordrechet: D. Reidel, 1988), 89. 78 McCutcheon, “The 1936–1937 Purge,” 100.

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was destroyed. By the time that those who had been arrested were able to return to astronomy, they found themselves a decade or more behind the latest research. Kozyrev, released from prison in 1947 mostly due to the efforts of Shain, worked at first at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, and later returned to Pulkovo. Though he was the first person to obtain observational evidence of volcanic activity on the Moon, his contribution to his own specialty of astrophysics is minimal due to his refusal to believe that stars are powered by nuclear fusion. He spent the rest of his life working on his theory of “causal mechanics,” 79 which states that “the flow of time, not nuclear reactions, is the main energy source in stars.”80 As detailed by Solzhenitsyn in his Arkhipelag GULag [The Gulag Archipelago, 1973], Kozyrev began to develop this theory while still in the camps, where he remembers being forbidden even to look up at the sky during walks outside: the guards would shout: “Look only at your feet!” [Smotretˊ tolˊko pod nogi!].81 According to Solzhenitsyn: Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev, whose bright path in astronomy was cut short by his arrest, saved himself only through thoughts about the eternal and the boundless: about the order of the world, and about its Higher spirit; about the stars, about their inner condition; and about just what is meant by Time and the passage of Time.82

Having developed his theory as far as he could without reference to astronomical data, Kozyrev was stuck, until by chance he was able to keep an astrophysics textbook in his cell for two days before it was confiscated. Solzhenitsyn describes the appearance of the book as “a mystical arrival” [misticheskii prikhod], a characterization that probably unintentionally suggests that Kozyrev’s theory, while in the end of little scientific value, proved his means of survival; it was his variant of what Shalamov’s narrator in his 1959 story “Vykhodnoi denˊ” [A Day Off] calls each prisoner’s samoe poslednee [very last thing].83 Kozyrev’s “causal mechanics,” then, is a product of the camps, and would probably have never come to be had the astronomer 79 Kozyrev’s theory was a direct inspiration for the principle behind the “time engine” [dvigatelˊ vrememi] in the Strugatskiis’ 1959 story Zabytyi eksperiment [The Forgotten Experiment], which will be discussed briefly in Chapter Two. Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 658. 80 McCutcheon, “The 1936–1937 Purge,” 114. 81 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1973), 1: 481. 82 Ibid., 1: 484. 83 Varlam Shalamov, Kolymskie rasskazy (Moscow: AST, 2005), 125.

A Biography through Astronomy

been permitted to continue to exist within the regular scientific context of research and peer review. Though by the middle of the 1950s the Soviet government was again committed to refurbishing Pulkovo, the effects of the decimation of an entire generation of Soviet astronomers could not be undone. These factors may have contributed to the collapse of BN’s thesis. Chandrasekhar’s earlier result had been published in 1943, when a largely empty Observatory was being bombed by the Germans and Pulkovo astronomers could have spared no time to keep up with the latest research from abroad. Under normal circumstances, BN’s thesis advisor would have been sufficiently aware of recent results to steer his advisee towards unexplored regions in the field. Chandrasekhar’s research was in astrophysics, the field of many of the Pulkovo astronomers who had been imprisoned and murdered. Though Chandrasekhar was then (and now) among the world’s most famous astronomers, it was left to BN himself to discover these results. Given that Chandrasekhar had visited Pulkovo in 1934, one would think that astronomers there would have a special interest in keeping up with his work. However, photographs of Chandrasekhar’s visit (reproduced in McCutcheon’s 1989 article in Sky & Telescope84) show that most of those whom the Indian-American astrophysicist met were the same astronomers who fell victim to the Purges a few years later. It is likely that, had Pulkovo not been purged, BN would have been directed towards a defendable thesis topic and would have become a professional, fully qualified astronomer. Ogorodnikov, BN’s advisor, had been based at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow until 1934, after which he was connected with Pulkovo and Leningrad University. He served in the People’s Militia [Narodnoe opolchenie] on the Leningrad front from 1941 to 1942, and would have found himself professionally displaced by the destruction of the Pulkovo Observatory.85 While Ogorodnikov was himself an expert in stellar dynamics, a review of the 1965 translation of his 1958 Dinamika zvezdnykh sistem [Dynamics of Stellar Systems]86 suggests that the astronomer may have fallen behind certain world standards. The reviewer, Richard W. Michie of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, observes that “[n]ot all of those who work in the 84 Robert A. McCutcheon, “Stalin’s Purge of Soviet Astronomers,” Sky and Telescope 78 (October 1989): 352–57. 85 I. G. Kolchinskii et al., Astronomy: biograficheskii spravochnik (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1986), 235. 86 Ogorodnikov also wrote popular science books, including Na chem Zemlia derzhitsia [On What the Earth Rests] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelˊstvo tekhnikoteoreticheskoi literatury, 1953), and Skolˊko zvezd na nebe [How Many Stars There are in the Sky] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelˊstvo tekhniko-teoreticheskoi literatury, 1954).

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field of stellar dynamics will agree with some of the author’s ideas and techniques,” and, while allowing that the book will serve as “a valuable reference source,” states that “[i]f this book is to be used as a textbook, then it is clear that a great deal of additional material must be presented by the instructor.”87 It seems apparent that the combination of the Purges and the War inhibited Ogorodnikov’s ability to serve effectively as an advisor to BN: it was he, after all, who decided that the student’s work was ready to defend, and thus may have been unaware of Chandrasekhar’s results. Indeed, the brief bibliography of Ogorodnikov’s 1948 “Osnovy dinamiki vrashchaiushchikhsia zvezdnykh sistem” [Fundamentals of the Dynamics of Rotating Stellar Systems] (a chapter in volume four of the journal Uspekhi astronomicheskikh nauk [Successes in the Astronomical Sciences]) cites two works by Chandrasekhar—the 1939 An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure and the 1943 Stochastic Problems in Physics and Astronomy, to which the entire January 1943 issue of the Review of Modern Physics is devoted—both of them 1947 translations into Russian.88 Thus Ogorodnikov references results by Chandrasekhar that either predate or are not directly related to those of the fatal (for BN) pair of articles. Even his 1958 Dinamika zvezdnykh sistem fails to cite these articles, referencing only a 1948 translation of Chandrasekhar’s 1942 Principles of Stellar Dynamics and a 1940 article on stellar dynamics published in Astrophysical Journal.89 Given the fatal role these articles had played in the truncated academic career of his advisee, it is baffling that Ogorodnikov did not incorporate them into his own later research. This is not to say that, were it not for the gap in Ogorodnikov’s knowledge of recent publications, the Strugatskii brothers would have failed to develop into the writer we now know, as the two were already talking about working together in the early 1950s. Nonetheless, the experience of working at an institution with a recent, bloody history in which he himself experienced a crushing professional failure informs BN’s contribution to the works that he wrote with his brother and colors the way in which they depict astronomy and astronomers. The hells that the Strugatskiis would later construct for their astronomer-protagonists reflect the actual hell through which many Soviet astronomers lived in the years of the Purges, a hell that had still not cooled when BN came to Pulkovo in 1955. 87 Richard W. Michie, Review of Dynamics of Stellar Systems by K. F. Ogorodnikov, Science 3683 (July 30, 1965), 531–32. 88 K. F. Ogorodnikov, “Osnovy dinamiki vrashchaiushchikhsia sistem.” Uspekhi astronomicheskikh nauk, vol. 4 (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Akademii Nauk, 1948), 68. 89 K. F. Ogorodnikov, Dinamika zvezdnykh sistem (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo fiziko-matematicheskoi literatury, 1958), 613.

Minor Planets: The Strugatskiis’ Earlier Experiments in Cosmology Зажег ты солнце во вселенной, Да светит небу и земле, Как лен, елеем напоенный, В лампадном светит хрустале. You set the Sun ablaze in the Universe, And it shines on heaven and earth, Like flax impregnated with oil Shines in a crystal lamp. Pushkin, “Podrazhaniia Koranu” [Imitations of the Koran, 1824]

In their 1965 essay “Fantastika — literatura” [Science Fiction is Literature], the Strugatskiis put forth—and then reject—a handful of narrow definitions of science fiction. One of these describes science fiction as “a literature specifically for children,” whose central goal is “to furnish the multimillion army of Soviet schoolchildren with spiritual food, to form the communist consciousness of children, to prepare them for entrance into the wide world of science.”1 Claims that science fiction serves primarily a didactic function are not limited to the Soviet tradition: many mid-twentieth-century practitioners of and advocates for science fiction saw it as a means of awaking scientific awareness in young people. Robert Heinlein, for instance, is notorious for reminding his young readers of the holes still left to fill in their 1 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 11: 276.

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(technical) education. His 1955 Tunnel in the Sky features a scene in which the teenaged protagonist Rod Walker watches a technician attempting to match the motions of Earth’s surface to that of an alien planet that will be accessed via an “interstellar gate.” The narrator makes certain the reader knows that Rod did not have the mathematics to appreciate the difficulties. Being only about to finish high school his training had gone no further than tensor calculus, statistical mechanics, simple transfinities, generalized geometries of six dimensions, and, on the practical side, analysis for electronics, primary cybernetics and robotics, and the basic design of analog computers; he had had no advanced mathematics as yet. He was not aware of his ignorance and simply concluded that the gate operator must be thumb-fingered.2

Heinlein’s is an extreme example of this tendency in science fiction— humbling the reader by featuring a secondary-school curriculum that incorporates topics that most mathematicians and engineers will even today not encounter until graduate school. While the Strugatskiis of 1965 explicitly reject this “pedagogical suggestion” as a central function of science fiction, their earlier works are not free of didacticism, an example of which can be found in their first novel, Strana bagrovykh tuch [The Land of Crimson Clouds, 1957]. The protagonist of the novel is Aleksei Bykov, an engineer and mechanic who is recruited to serve on an expedition to Venus. Bykov is wholly ignorant of the sciences connected to space exploration, and even has to ask what the initials of the organization that has summoned him signify: the GKMPS, or the Gosudarstvennyi komitet mezhplanetnykh soobshchenii pri Sovete Ministrov [State Committee for Interplanetary Communication under the Soviet of Ministers].3 Bykov’s interviewer, Nikolai Kraiukhin (the deputy director of the GKMPS), asks him directly about his knowledge of astronomy: “So. But have you ever had any interest in astronomy?” It seemed to Bykov that Kraiukhin was making fun of him. He answered: “No, I never had any interest in astronomy.” 2 Robert A. Heinlein, Tunnel in the Sky (New York: Del Rey, 1955), 15. 3 Siddiqi mentions that the term mezhplanetnoe soobshchenie was a coded term for “space exploration” in the 1920s, when rocketry enthusiasts were compelled to avoid direct mention of the desire to travel to other planets for fear of being accused of treason. See Asif A. Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003), 4.

Minor Planets: The Strugatskiis’ Earlier Experiments in Cosmology

“That’s a shame!” “It’s possible that …” “The thing is, Aleksei Petrovich, that your work with us will to a certain degree, so to speak, be connected with that science.”4

Bykov, as an uninitiated individual, serves as a rather obvious stand-in for the (young, male) reader of the late 1950s who may just be developing interests in science and technology. Such a reader might surmise that, in order to follow the path of his literary heroes, he will have to learn, among other disciplines, astronomy. This exact path is described by the cosmonaut Georgii Grechko in the opening minutes of the second episode of the program Etot fantasticheskii mir [This Fantastic World], a show devoted to science fiction that he hosted from 1979 to 1990. The episode opens with Grechko sitting at a table covered in letters from readers, one of whom complains that his parents will not allow him to read science fiction, which they regard as frivolous. Grechko’s reaction supports the definition of science fiction that the Strugatskiis (reluctantly) give in their essay: Right away I thought to myself: if my parents had forbidden me from reading science fiction, I would not have become a cosmonaut. What called me and my cosmonaut comrades into Space? At first it was science fiction. Then, it was technical literature, and, finally, our specialized [space-sciences] literature.

The next letter that Grechko reads is from Pavlik, a fourth-grader who professes his love for science fiction and astronomy, as well as a desire to make his own telescope. Grechko comments to the viewer: You know, this makes me think: maybe this is also a future cosmonaut… Because I myself got my start exactly in this way. I really did start out with science fiction, with making my own instruments, with astronomy…

As was discussed in the previous chapter, Grechko’s path had been followed also by the young Strugatskiis, whom it is difficult to picture becoming writers of science fiction had their youth not been spent reading Wells, Verne, Aleksei Tolstoi, Beliaev, and Kazantsev, making telescopes and observing.5 In slowly initiating Bykov into the science of astronomy, the Strugatskiis 4 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 41. 5 BN has written that Strana bagrovykh tuch represented a desire to “create something worthy of the pen of Wells, or at least Beliaev.” Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii, Strana

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demonstrate an awareness of their audience as they recapitulate their own history. In the next chapter, Bykov can be found reading up on Venus in an attempt to learn a little about a planet to which he had never given a second thought. Most of the text concerning Venus consists of a compact portrait of the planet made up of then-current physical data (its distance from the Sun, orbital period, rotational period, atmospheric composition, etc.). It should be necessary to quote only the first few lines of the text that Bykov reads, which anticipate the “encyclopedia entry” opening of Putˊ na Amalˊteiu that was discussed in the introduction: Venus is the second planet in order from Sun. Its mean distance from the Sun is 0.723 astronomical units = 108 mil. km… V. completes a full orbit around the Sun in 224 days, 16 hours 40 min. 8 sec. Its mean orbital velocity is 35 km/sec.6

Much later in the novel, when Bykov and his comrades are on their way to Venus, the narrator mentions in passing that he is reading an astronomy textbook. Subsequent works set in the Strugatskiis’ “Noon Universe” depict Bykov as a fully competent mezhplanetnik, able, for instance, to check course corrections, a skill that relies on extensive knowledge of astronomy and physics. As the above “encyclopedia entry” on Venus shows, the Strugatskiis’ knowledge of astronomy extends also the allied field of planetary science, also known as planetology. As has been noted, the opening paragraph of Putˊ na Amalˊteiu mimics the style of the entry on Venus: Amalthea, the fifth and innermost satellite of Jupiter, completes a full rotation about its axis over approximately, thirty-five hours. Besides this, over twelve  hours it completes a full revolution around Jupiter. Therefore Jupiter crawls out from beyond the close horizon even thirteen-and-a-half hours.7

Putˊ na Amalˊteiu, in fact, has more than a few sections devoted to the problem of Jupiter’s composition and structure. These moments are connected to the planetary scientists Iurkovskii and Dauge, characters already known to the reader from Strana bagrovykh tuch. As Jupiter pulls the Takhmasib bagrovykh tuch, rasskazy, stat′i, interv′iu: sobranie sochinenii, 2-i dopolnitel′nyi tom (Moscow: Tekst, 1993), 5. 6 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 44–45. 7 Ibid., 1: 549.

Minor Planets: The Strugatskiis’ Earlier Experiments in Cosmology

into its upper atmosphere, the two scientists take the opportunity to study the gas giant up close, using a “bomb-thrower” [bombosbrasyvatelˊ] that launches explosive probes, which work in concert with an “exospheric spectrograph.” The operation of this device recalls the process of loading and firing shells, well known to AN from his training as an artilleryman. In the context of the story, the image of “shelling Jupiter” also recalls the German bombardment of Leningrad and the “Road of Life” across Lake Ladoga. The planetologists’ arguments about the theories of Jupiter’s structure revolve around the writing of one Kangren, and they continue their observations even after the Takhmasib has been crippled and the conditions on the ship worsen. The refusal to abandon scientific work in the face of death is central to “Strashnaia bolˊshaia planeta” [The Terrible Big Planet], the draft version of Putˊ na Amalˊteiu mentioned in the introduction. In that story, the scientists have no hope of escaping Jupiter, but resolve to continue working just the same: the final line of dialogue of the story, spoken “decisively” by the planetologist Benˊkovskii, is “we must work” [Nado rabotatˊ].8 His colleagues respond by nodding seriously. Earlier in this story, the same Benˊkovskii gives a short speech on the problem of the formation of gas giants: But I love my field. It’s a science concerning hydrogen specters, planet giants, the most terrible and incomprehensible objects in the Solar System. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune… Monstrous masses of hydrogen and helium, lightly tinged with methane and ammonia. How are they constructed? Why do they rotate at such violent speeds? What energy feeds them, these notquite-stars [nedozvezdy], these degenerate planets?9

The Strugatskiis quickly outgrow this tendency to include scientific dissertations in their works, and deal a decisive blow to the notion of dying for science in their novel Stazhery [Apprentices, 1961]. In the final chapter, Iurkovskii and the navigator and pilot Krutikov are killed while exploring Saturn’s rings in an attempt to prove a theory the former has developed on their structure. Their deaths, unambiguously presented as senseless, mark both the end of the Strugatskiis’ early period and the beginning of the robust development of the themes that form the core of this study. Had the Strugatskiis continued to use their knowledge of astronomy only or mostly 8 Ibid., 11: 139. 9 Ibid., 11: 122–23.

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as a source of scientific data, then the role of the science in their works would not be worthy of a focused study, but would be rather the organizing principle of a catalog. By the early 1960s, the Strugatskiis begin to abandon the scientific trappings of this universe as they experiment in creating their own universes—transitioning from astronomy to cosmology. Yet Stazhery contains a chapter that embodies the earliest stages of this transition. This chapter, entitled simply “Mars. Astronomers,” is the Strugatskiis’ sole depiction of observational astronomers at work, and the utterly convincing depiction of the astronomers’ evening routine speaks to BN’s experiences in the profession. For instance, towards the end of the chapter, one of the astronomers gets caught up in a conversation and misses part of his observing program: Hearing the word “early,” Pen’kov gave a start and looked at the clock. “Oh, cripes,” he muttered, getting up from the table. “I’ve missed two stars sitting here with all you guys” [Ia uzhe dve zvezdy zdesˊ s vami prosidel].10

The chapter is dominated, however, not by the everyday operations of the observatory, but by the astronomers’ inability to work: in the evening over which the chapter takes place, observing is prevented by the increasingly frequent nighttime attacks by the local Martian wildlife, labeled letaiushchie piiavki [flying leeches] by the earth colonists. But a far more direct threat to their work is posed by the men tasked with eliminating the leeches: many of their stray bullets are damaging the astronomers’ equipment. Near the beginning of the chapter is a description of the ruined observing area: The wide-angle camera was overturned. The meteorological station was leaning to the side. The wall of the telescope enclosure was sprayed with some  sort of yellow filth. Above the door of the enclosure yawned a hole freshly made by an exploding bullet. The lamp above the entrance was smashed.11

There is at least a dim reflection of the destruction of Pulkovo in the bullet-ridden equipment of the Martian astronomers. This detail, then, links Stazhery to Putˊ na Amalˊteiu in its recapitulation of the traumas of the brothers’ youth. This chapter of Stazhery is most relevant to the present discussion in its reflection of the ways in which the Strugatskiis link their astronomers 10 Ibid., 2: 358. 11 Ibid., 2: 347.

Minor Planets: The Strugatskiis’ Earlier Experiments in Cosmology

to wider feelings of unease and uncertainty. Forced indoors, the conversation touches on the possible intelligence of the leeches (they carry away their wounded), this being only one way in which Mars continues to be a mystery. One astronomer in particular, Sergei, laments that a combination of the threat of the letaiushchie piiavki and bureaucratic intransigence prevents the colony from exploring the rest of the planet: […] we’re wandering up to our necks in depressingly trivial details… We delve into electronics, we break adders, we fix adders, we draft charts, we write little articles, little reports… It’s disgusting!” He grabbed at his cheeks and rubbed at his face intensely. “For thousands of kilometers, right on the other side of the fence, extends a completely unknown, alien world. And you just want to spit on everything and go where your eyes take you across the desert to find some real occupation… It’s shameful, guys. It’s hilarious and shameful to sit on Mars and to see nothing but the blink monitors12 and Pen′kov’s doleful face twenty-four hours a day…13

The astronomers are uncomfortable inhabiting a planet that is unknown to them and are bewildered by the uncertainty of their situation. These are some of the earliest—and therefore weakly formed—expressions of the cosmological disorientation that will become so central to later works. The impact of chapter four of Stazhery is muted; it is a minor episode and features none of the novel’s main protagonists. Its significance, however, must be measured against the works that will be considered in the coming pages, which will show that this chapter—in which is depicited the earliest “rough draft” of the bewildered astronomer-protagonist in the Strugatskiis’ works—must be considered a crucial “cosmological text” even if it is less crucial to the novel that contains it. Even before Stazhery, the Strugatskiis borrow the cosmology of another writer in order to convey a hint of the cosmological disorientation that they later will develop so fully. In Strana bagrovykh tuch, Dante is evoked during the exploration of the Venusian surface: “It was strange and somewhat eerie in that straight and narrow passageway, like a knife’s cut 12 A device imagined by the Strugatskiis similar to the now outdated blink comparator, which allowed an astronomer to rapidly toggle between two photographic plates in order to note minute changes. Such a device was famously used by Clyde Tombaugh in his discovery of Pluto in 1930. The Strugatskiis’ version is able to actively monitor the night sky for objects with variable brightness. Vladimir Borisov et al., Miry Bratˊev Strugatskikh: entsiklopediia (Moscow: AST, 1999), 1: 89. 13 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 2: 356–57.

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in the black basalt cliffs. It was probably along just such a path that Virgil had once led the author of The Divine Comedy into Hell.”14 This reference can be characterized as the tendency of an inexperienced author to rely too directly on references to his predecessors.15 However clumsy a means to underscoring Venus as Hell, the Strugatskiis choice to exoke Dante’s narrator and his guide prefigures what will later be their tendency to place protagonists at the gates of Hell so as to have the reader follow them in their descent. In this sense, many of the Strugatskiis cosmologies of Hell recapitulate this most famous such cosmology in world literature. While it can be said to introduce this particular problem in the Strugatskiis’ works, Strana bagrovykh tuch, in contrast to later works, does not feature cosmological themes in any cohesive fashion. Arguably the first of the Strugatskiis’ works to use problems related to astronomy as a minor thematic focus is their novel Trudno bytˊ bogom [Hard to Be a God, 1963], an account of Anton, an earthling who is living as an observer on an alien planet disguised as a member of the local nobility named Rumata Estorskii. That Anton/Rumata will struggle and ultimately fail to maintain a professional detachment from the society in which he is living is foreshadowed by a technique Howell calls plot prefiguration, one that will be discussed in much greater detail in chapter five: in the prologue, when Anton is an adolescent, he and two other children escalate a situation in which they almost play a game of “William Tell” with a real crossbow; as they work themselves towards this reckless outcome, they quote from the section of Pushkin’s 1830 Belkin tale “Vystrel” [The Shot] in which the narrator, the Count, and the Countess discuss the need to regularly practice shooting from pistols. Anton plays the part of Pushkin’s narrator, thus priming the attentive reader to expect an appearance of his narrative counterpart and one-time role model—the revenge-obsessed Silvio, a character who will be partially realized in Anton’s “Rumata” persona. This scene is an early example of the Strugatskiis’ textual engagement with Pushkin, a trend that becomes pronounced towards the middle and end of their career. Of concern to the “Anton” half of the protagonist is the fact that the city-state of Arkanar in which he is living is undergoing a purge of scholars, 14 Ibid., 1: 216. 15 The title of the chapter in question, “Krasnoe i chernoe” [The Red and the Black], is a direct reference to Stendhal that is made more explicit by character Spitsyn: he foreshadows his own death by following his comment on the red-and-black color scheme of the planet’s surface with a confession that he never cared for the French writer.

Minor Planets: The Strugatskiis’ Earlier Experiments in Cosmology

writers, and literate individuals in general, aspects of which closely parallel the Stalinist Purges of the 1930s. One of the victims of the purge—saved from almost certain death by Anton/Rumata—is the astronomer Bagir Kissenskii, the first to have confirmed the sphericity of the planet, making him a kind of alien Eratosthenes, the Greek scholar who first calculated the circumference of the Earth. Kissenskii is accused of “a madness verging on a crime against the state,” and his observatory is burned in an “accidental” fire; though he survives, he emerges from prison to find his life’s work destroyed: “his observatory had burned down, and those of his pupils who survived had scattered in all directions.”16 The burned observatory, once one of the most beautiful structures in the city, now sticks into the sky “like a black, rotten tooth” [chernym gnilym zubom].17 The fate of Kissenskii, his pupils, and the observatory, only one of many events that make up the Arkanarian purges, recalls the purge of Pulkovo, which resulted in the effective gutting of Soviet astronomy, after which the observatory was completely destroyed by German bombs. Thus there is a deeply personal element in the Strugatskiis’ depiction of Kissenskii, whose fate is an amalgam of those of the older astronomers whom BN knew from his days at Pulkovo. Like the astronomers in Stazhery, Kissenskii is a minor character with major significance: he is their first astronomer to be persecuted because of his profession, and in this he is linked to the astronomer Lowitz in Pushkin’s retelling of the Pugachev Rebellion (see this book’s epigraph). Though Kissenskii himself is not killed, there can be no doubt that certain individuals want to hang him “as close to the stars as possible” simply because of the learning that he represents. Reactions to Kissenskii’s description of the sphericity of the planet are incorporated into the narrative as a kind of shorthand for the anti-intellectual sentiments spreading throughout Arkanarian society. Early in the novel, Anton/Rumata recalls snatches of overheard conversations that exemplify this mindset. One such is: “[r]eally, the things they think up!… The world is round! I might say that it’s square, but don’t rile up everyone’s minds [umov ne muti]!…”18 Later, when the narrator is giving a brief history of the poets and scholars—one of whom had been Kissenskii—who were once associated with the Arkanarian Court before they began to be systematically jailed and executed, he allows that:

16 Ibid., 3: 336. 17 Ibid., 3: 302. 18 Ibid., 3: 266.

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[…] many did not notice any changes at all. In the concerts and poetic competitions of former times they valued the intermissions above all, during which the high-born dons discussed the virtues of pointers and told jokes. They were still capable of a not-too-drawn-out discussion of the properties of beings from the spirit world, but questions on the form of the planet or on the causes of epidemics they simply regarded as indecent. Among the officers of the Guards a certain despondency was brought about by the disappearance of artists, among whom there had been masters of depicting the nude form…19

Trudno bytˊ bogom, in its cosmological presentation of Arkanarian anti-intellectualism, prefigures Vtoroe nashestvie marsian, in which antiintellectualism—often directed at the astronomer-protagonist—is a central problem. Vtoroe nashestvie will be the first work considered in a separate chapter (Chapter Three), and the problems covered there will echo throughout all subsequent chapters. Thus the issues that begin to find expression in Trudno bytˊ bogom represent the very beginning of one of the most important trends in the Strugatskiis’ works. Among these earlier works, special consideration should be given to the Strugatskiis’ beloved 1964 comic novel Ponedelˊnik nachinaetsia v subbotu [Monday Begins on Saturday], which takes place in the research institute NIIChAVO, or the Scientific Research Institute of Magic and Wizardry [Nauchno-Issledovatelˊskii Institut Charodeistva i Volshebstva]; the Russian acronym immediately evokes the genitive pronoun nichego, or “nothing.” The protagonist of the novel is Aleksandr Privalov, a young computer programmer from Leningrad who is recruited to work at the Institute after giving a ride to two researchers who work there. It is widely assumed that the novel’s atmosphere of enthusiasm and joyful devotion to science is modeled in part on BN’s experiences of working at Pulkovo, and so Ponedelˊnik is of interest in the present context if only as a semi-autobiographical document. Indeed, there are hints that Privalov, the only protagonist of the Strugatskiis’ works to work on early computers as did BN, was at an institution like Pulkovo prior to his “transfer” to NIIChAVO: early in the novel, he twice makes reference to the problem of programming a system of two integral equations that is part of a model in stellar statistics.20

19 Ibid., 3: 337–38. 20 Ibid., 3: 439, 452.

Minor Planets: The Strugatskiis’ Earlier Experiments in Cosmology

There are moments of minor astronomical significance in the novel, one of the more entertaining being a reproach in the afterword—written by the “real” Privalov rather than the fictional protagonist Privalov— leveled at the authors for a mention of Saturn’s being in the constellation Libra at a time when this could not have been possible. He adds that, “[t]his final blunder [liapsus] is all the more unforgivable given that, if I understand correctly, one of the authors is a professional astronomer.”21 But, for the present purposes, Ponedelˊnik is far more revelant for its cosmological experimentation, which is first evident in the spatial properties of the building that houses the Institute. Privalov discusses this problem of space in one of the many asides in which he, as a recent hire, explains difficult-to-comprehend features of his workplace to the uninitiated reader: As is well known, from the outside the Institute appeared to be two stories high. In actuality it contained no fewer than twelve floors. I have never gone higher than the twelfth floor because the elevator is constantly under repair and I haven’t yet learned to fly. The façade with its ten windows, like the majority of façades, was an optical illusion. To the right and left of the vestibule the Institute stretched for at least a kilometer, but, just the same, all the windows looked out onto the same twisting street and onto the same warehouse. I found this unusually confounding. At first I insisted that OiraOira explain to me how this can be reconciled with classical or at least with relativistic conceptions of the properties of space. I did not understand a bit of his explanations, but gradually got used to it and stopped being surprised.22

There are other “inner infinities” in the Institute: the building draws its power from the turning of the so-called “Fortune’s Wheel” [Koleso Fortuny], the diameter of which can be measured (only approximately) in megaparsecs, and the stacks of the library extend further than anyone has even been. This contained universe of NIIChAVO represents a kind of “bottled cosmology” whereby one set of physical laws is a subset of another set, an idea that will be explored to a much greater extent in Chapter Seven, which will focus on the novel Grad obrechennyi [Doomed City]. In that work, as will be shown, the exotic cosmology is in part a physical manifestation of ideological emptiness. In Ponedelˊnik, the practically infinite dimensions of the Institute could be explained as the wish-fulfillment of the Soviet scientist imagining 21 Ibid., 3: 634. 22 Ibid., 3: 510.

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the perfect workplace with infinite space and limitless resources.23 At any rate, the spatial features of NIIChAVO must be regarded as the Strugatskiis’ first true cosmological experiment. Also in anticipation of later works, this novel represents an early foray into “Pushkinian cosmology,” as the work opens with a line from Kapitanskaia dochka [The Captain’s Daughter, 1836] that prefigures Privalov’s coming change in career, and the entire first section takes place in a world populated largely by elements repurposed from Ruslan i Liudmila [1820]. The crucial cosmological moment of Ponedelˊnik is found in a scene in which Privalov attends a presentation in the Department of Absolute Knowledge, entitled “The Realization of a Time Machine for Travel in Artificially Constructed Temporal Spaces.” The presenter gives a list of the spaces to which such a machine could go, among them “the world of human cosmological conceptions” [mir kosmologicheskikh predstavlenii chelovechestva]. There is a brief account of a journey that had been taken to this very space by one of scientists who laid the groundwork for the discoveries the speaker is presenting: It turns out that a few years ago this very scientist, the renowned one, assembled a machine on which he set off to travel into the world of human cosmological conceptions. For a certain period of time a one-way telepathic link with him was maintained, and he was able to transmit that he was located on the edge of the Flat Earth, was looking below at the twisting trunk of one of the three Atlas Elephants, and was planning to descend down to the Turtle.24 No more reports were received from him.25

It cannot be said that this throwaway paragraph about a voyage to a discarded cosmology is thematically significant to the novel in which it is found. However when considered within the long arc of cosmological experimentation that is so important for the Strugatskiis’ later works, this moment takes on a whole new meaning. All of the works that will be 23 A variation on the infinity of NIIChAVO can be found in Vladimir Savchenko’s novel 1993 novel Dolzhnostˊ vo Vselennoi [One’s Job in the Universe], in which a research Institute is built inside a sphere in which not only space, but also time is practically infinite: researchers can leave their homes in the morning and then return for lunch, having been at work for weeks or months. 24 A drawing depicting this ancient cosmology, usually associated with Hinduism, can be found in the popular science book by K. F. Ogorodnikov, BN’s dissertation advisor (Ogorodnikov, Na chem Zemlia derzhitsia, 7). 25 Ibid., 3: 573.

Minor Planets: The Strugatskiis’ Earlier Experiments in Cosmology

examined in the coming chapters feature some permutation of the essential elements of the account above: an individual thrust into a world in which the “usual” laws of nature do not apply becomes “lost” (either literally or metaphorically) as a result of the cosmological disorientation that comes from a lack of understanding of this world. All the works to be discussed feature exotic, alien, Hadean cosmologies of the Strugatskiis’ invention. Here, for this first journey, they use a cosmology not of their own creation; they do not do so again. The remainder of this study will be devoted to works in which cosmological experimentation is central.

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The Hell of the Ignorant: The Second Martian Invasion И что ж! всегда смешным останется смешное; Невежду пестует невежество слепое. Well, what can you do! what’s ridiculous will always be ridiculous; Blind ignorance fosters an ignoramus. Pushkin, “K Zhukovskomu” [To Zhukovskii, 1816]

The 1966 novel Vtoroe nashestvie marsian [The Second Martian Invasion]— set in a kind of nowhere-land village in which the inhabitants all have the names of Greek and Roman gods—is made up of just over two weeks of journal entries (1–15 June) written by a retired teacher of astronomy, veteran, stamp collector, and amateur meteorologist named Apollo.1 In the first entry, Apollo describes himself and his neighbors being awoken in the middle of the night by tremors and a strange light on the horizon. Explanations for the event are contradictory, ranging from training for a fireworks display, war games, and the explosion of an underground factory that produces either rocket fuel or marmalade—a pervasive lack of reliable information is a key feature of life in the unnamed village. A few days after the event, strange references to the folly of human agriculture, as well as mentions of stomach juices, begin to appear in the local paper. Later still, local farmers are compelled to plant blue “Martian” grain, and donor stations are set up in which citizens can exchange their “superfluous” stomach 1 According to BN, it was the humor inherent in giving the name of the god of the sun and of beauty to a provincial astronomy teacher that motivated the novel’s naming conventions (Strugatskii, Intervˊiu dlinoiu v gody, 195).

The Hell of the Ignorant: The Second Martian Invasion

juices for cash. By the end of the novel, these developments have completely transformed the local economy, mostly to the benefit of poor pensioners like Apollo. Apollo’s attitude towards the events surrounding the invasion is decidedly ambiguous. While he feels a certain responsibility as a local intellectual—a station he occupies at least by comparison with his ignorant fellow citizens—to approach the strange events with a measure of detached skepticism, he is repeatedly drawn in by ridiculous rumors, and is thrilled at the possibility that the new Martian government will issue new stamps. His constant worries about his pension are laid aside when he learns that his chronic digestive ailments make his stomach juice of the finest quality, affording him a higher rate of pay. At the end of the novel, he looks with admiration at the Martian ships floating above the town, confident that a time of peace and prosperity has arrived. Opposition to the Martian invasion is represented by Apollo’s son-inlaw Charon, the editor of the local paper. He appears in the middle of the night in Apollo’s kitchen a few days after the initial unrest, dirty, armed with a rifle, apparently involved in the anti-Martian resistance. Once the Martian victory is complete, Charon asserts that humans have become cattle and that human history has ceased. Apollo—recalling Dostoevskii’s Grand Inquisitor—counters with the argument that the Martians have brought stability that earthly powers could never guarantee, and that such stability is really the only thing that humans require. Later, with a view towards publishing it in Charon’s paper, Apollo names his speech “Peace and Confidence” [Pokoi i uverennostˊ]. In his commentary to the “Stalker” collected works, as well as at various points in his “Offline” interview, BN has stated that he and his brother could never decide whose argument— Charon’s or Apollo’s—they found the more convincing.2 Apollo is the first true astronomer-protagonist in the Strugatskiis’ works, and, while his status as an astronomer can hardly be called his defining trait, some essential elements of the novel would collapse were Apollo a pensioner with no named (former) profession. The first such element is the novel’s treatment of the science fiction trope of the expert (usually scientist) protagonist who is in the best position to understand fantastic events as they unfold. A famous example of such a protagonist is the unnamed narrator of Wells’s The War of the Worlds [1898], a philosopher (who would now be called a futurologist) who is far more capable of understanding the implications of the Martian invasion than the villagers, townspeople, and 2 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 619.

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soldiers who flee before the alien walking-machines. A more obscure example would be the meteorologist Viktor Klimenko, the narrator of Beliaev’s 1929 Prodavets vozdukha [The Air Seller], a novel about the thwarting of a villainous plot to steal the Earth’s atmosphere for resale. Somewhat like Wells’s and Beliaev’s narrators, Apollo is the closest equivalent in his village to a scientific authority, but the Strugatskiis twist this narrator-type by repeatedly emphasizing that the retired astronomer’s friends and neighbors respect neither him nor the scientific edifice that he distantly represents. The problem of dethroned scientific authority runs throughout the work, beginning on the first pages, which can be read as a parody of an astronomical observing session, with Apollo’s notes scattered among the details of his account of the chaos on the first night of the Martian invasion. For instance: “The sky to the north was in flame: it seemed that there, beyond the far horizon, the earth had split open and was throwing to the very stars fountains of multi-colored light.”3 Apollo is not the only witness to this event, as all of his neighbors are awake and running around in a panic: […] from the fire it was light as day beyond the horizon, but the light was not white, but reddish-orange, with clouds of smoke, brown with a hint of watered-down coffee, crawling along it. The neighbors ran up and down the street in whatever they had been wearing to bed, Miss Eurydice grabbed at everyone by their pajamas and demanded that they save her, and only Myrtilus expertly rolled his truck out of the garage and began, with his wife and sons, to carry all their possessions out of the house. It was a real panic, like in the good old days; I hadn’t seen one like it for a long time.4

The sight of Apollo’s neighbors running around in confusion is essentially similar to mass behavior during anomalous celestial events, such as the 1910 apparition of Halley’s comet. Then the public was frightened by, among other things, the French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s claim that poison gases in the comet’s tail might “impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet.”5 That year there was much panicked buying not only of gas masks, but also “anti-comet pills” and “anti-comet

3 Ibid., 4: 497. 4 Ibid., 4: 498. 5 Richard Flaste et al., The New York Times Guide to the Return of Halley’s Comet (New York: Times Books, 1985), 67.

The Hell of the Ignorant: The Second Martian Invasion

umbrellas.”6 Among the numerous stories of such behavior from 1910 is the following: Nerves were taut in New York as well. Two nights before, the passengers in a streetcar traveling north of Eighth Avenue leaped into the street for safety because they thought Halley’s Comet had hit the roof. “It’s the comet!” one passenger screamed, and no one paused to disagree. But their fears of imminent death were at least premature. Though it was still too soon to know whether they would survive the cyanogen gas attack, their belief that they had been struck by the comet itself proved false. It turned out that the employees of a nearby fifth-floor motor company were testing a new cooling fan for automobiles when one of the blades of the fan let loose.7

On a more personal level, the scene outside Apollo’s window also evokes any of a number of events surrounding the War, with the general feeling of terror informed by the Strugatskiis’ memories of the Blockade, the German bombardment of Leningrad, and the chaos of evacuation. There is also a gloss of English villagers fleeing from the Martian war machines in The War of the Worlds, a work that, as will be discussed later in this chapter, is intimately connected both with BN’s experience of the War and the core themes of Vtoroe nashestvie marsian. In a reflection of the journal entry that AN made under the cloud of the Blockade (quoted in Chapter One), Apollo, despite his own personal anxiety and hurried packing of his stamp collection, charts the progress of the “celestial event.” Later, when he looks again, “[…] it turned out that the northern horizon had already again sunk into silence and darkness, but there one could still see the cloud of smoke that had completely covered the stars.”8 The astronomer’s consistent referencing of the stars becomes humorous when his ever-vigilant neighbor Myrtilus is seen mostly undressed, set among them like a caricature of a heavenly body: Looking through the window, I saw that the street had cleared, and only in some scattered houses could light still be seen, along with Myrtilus on his roof, shining in his underpants among the stars.9 6 Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Guide to Halley’s Comet (New York: Walker and Company, 1985), 63. 7 Flaste, The New York Times Guide, 63–64. 8 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 499. 9 Ibid., 4: 500.

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This opening scene sets the tone for the novel in depicting Apollo as an individual for whom scientific accuracy is important, though not central. His occasional use of scientific terminology sets him apart from his abysmally ignorant neighbors. For instance, when he first notes the “burning” northern horizon, he calls the police and speaks to officer Pandereus, who does not understand Apollo’s question about “the phenomenon that can be observed beyond the horizon” because he does not know the word “phenomenon.” Pandereus acts with no deference to the retired astronomer, but instead regards the call as an annoyance that is tying up the telephone line. There is another moment of tension that highlights Apollo’s educated status relative to that of the other townspeople. In his June 4 entry, on the third day after the “explosion” and the glowing sky, Apollo relates an encounter with Myrtilus in which the Martians are mentioned explicitly for the first time, albeit the term used to describe them is incorrect: “Lord!” I shouted in desperation, now completely weak. “But who is it that’s invaded?” “The Martianses, the Martianses!” he said, once again whispering. “From up there!” he raised a finger to the sky. “They steamed in off a comet.” “Maybe you mean Martians?” I asked hopefully. “Fine, fine,” he said, getting into the cab of his truck. “You’re the teacher, you know best. But I don’t really care who it is that cuts my guts out…” “Lord, Myrtilus,” I said, finally understanding that the whole thing was nonsense. “You can’t talk that way. You’re an old man, you have grandchildren. How can there be Martians, if Mars is a lifeless planet? There’s no life there, it’s a scientific fact.” “Fine, fine,” muttered Myrtilus, though it was clear that he had started to doubt what he had said. “Maybe it’s not a fact.”10

Myrtilus’s grammatical error is difficult to translate: the Russian marsianin belongs to the class of “nouns of origin”11 that feature the suffix -anin/-ianin in the singular: the nominative plural is the seemingly truncated marsiane. These plurals are difficult not only for foreign learners of Russian, but also sometimes for native speakers, particularly, as is the case here, when the word in question may not be commonly used. More crucial to the present discussion is Myrtilus’s obvious scientific illiteracy, as his doubt in Apollo’s assertion of the absence of life on Mars is probably less significant than his idea that alien invaders could hitch a ride on a comet and float down off 10 Ibid., 4: 513. 11 This term is from Boris Unbegaun’s Russian Grammar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 74–75.

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it as it passes by Earth.12 His confusion is consistent with a general lack of knowledge in the village of the distinguishing features of heavenly bodies: later in the novel, during an argument with another veteran, the one-legged patriot Polyphemus, Apollo points out that his friend is confusing comets with planets, a correction that gives rise only to further conflict. Apollo’s relationship with Polyphemus is one of the richest in the novel in terms of tension brought out by disparate levels of scientific literacy. Polyphemus blames Apollo for having inspired his son Polycarp to leave the village to become a cabin boy, his specific complaint being directed at the widened horizons that the study of astronomy make possible. Apollo writes: When [his son] bolted out of town, Polyphemus nearly took me to court: the teacher, he says, brought the boy to waywardness with his lectures on the plurality of worlds. Polyphemus himself is to this day convinced that the sky is rigid and that satellites run across it like motorcycle drivers in the circus. My arguments for the use of astronomy are inaccessible to him; they were inaccessible then, and now they are still inaccessible now.13

Polyphemus’s cosmology is essentially medieval, albeit with the modern addition of the “globe of death” circus motorcycle stunt. This image stands in for the ancient notion of the celestial sphere, the solid surface in which the lights of the stars and planets are supposedly embedded. This concept is famously illustrated by the Flammarion engraving, which first appeared in that astronomer’s 1888 L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire [The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology]. The engraving depicts a man crouching on a flat Earth sticking his head through a breach in the starry celestial sphere, beyond which can be seen mysterious heavenly wheels and what may be additional concentric spheres.14 12 The verb he uses to describe their descent, podvalit′, can refer to a ship docking. 13 Ibid., 4: 503. 14 The notion of the celestial sphere has been retained in spherical (or positional) astronomy as a useful mathematical abstraction. Instead of positing a solid sphere, one imagines the stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies on the inner surface of a sphere of infinite radius, with the observer’s eye at the center of the sphere. Though this visualization of celestial mechanics is a holdover from a false cosmology, it is extremely effective in that it allows strong mathematic tools (mostly spherical trigonometry) to be brought to bear on predicting the positions of the stars and planets. Spherical astronomy was one of AN’s youthful interests: he makes reference to this topic as one covered in I. F. Polak’s Kurs obshchei astronomii [A Course in General Astronomy] in his Christmas journal entry of 1941. Furthermore, as was mentioned in Chapter One,

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The topic of the lectures that supposedly led Polycarp to his youthful rebellion—the so-called “plurality of worlds” or cosmic pluralism—is one with a long history of provoking controversy. This concept posits that the Earth is not the sole inhabited planet in the Universe, and that each star is a sun with at least the potential for fostering life among its own swarm of worlds. That such ideas were threatening to Christian cosmologies, at least, is demonstrated by the fate of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), the Italian friar who was burned at the stake for holding that the Sun and the planets are not unique, but are merely an average example of the widespread arrangement of stars and planets in the Universe. It was the French scientist and writer Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle who coined the term “plurality of worlds” in his 1686 Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes [Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds], the work that introduced these notions to a popular audience only eighty-six years after the burning of Bruno. In her introduction to a 1990 translation of Entretiens, Nina Rattner Gelbart makes the case that Fontenelle’s was the first book of popular astronomy: [W]hile much of Fontenelle sounds matter-of-fact to us—his talk of a boundless universe, his speculations on intelligent extraterrestrial and extragalactic life, his discussion of space travel—we have to remember that publishing his book three centuries ago was a very risky business. The ideas he was bandying about were bold, controversial, even forbidden. As they had been scarcely known to the average reader before he explained and disseminated them, these astonishing ideas suddenly became the rage. Since its first appearance in French, there have been approximately one hundred editions of the Entretiens. It has been translated into English, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Thus there is a very real sense in which Fontenelle’s work spread the word, encouraged the curiosity, and created the international audience that his subject still enjoys today.15

The book takes the form of five evening conversations between a “philosopher” who stands in for the author and a titled lady who stands in for the reader. The philosopher repeatedly makes the claim that the Sun is only one of many stars with planets in orbit: “So all the suns are daytime suns for all positional astronomy was considered one of the strongest areas of study at Pulkovo before the Purges. 15 Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans. H. A. Hargreaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), vii–viii.

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the other vortices. In their own systems they’re unique, one of a kind, but elsewhere they only add to the multitude.”16 Within the context of Vtoroe nashestvie marsian, Apollo and Polycarp are diminished versions of the philosopher and the lady, while Polyphemus falls outside the bounds of the conversation. He is impervious to advances in science, the type who would never read Fontenelle and would never attempt to understand the distinction, for example, between Copernicus and Ptolemy. There is another reference to the history of astronomy and cosmology later in the novel, when Apollo is complaining about Polyphemus’s fact-free argumentative method: He never argues on topic. The truth doesn’t interest him, for him only one thing matters: scoring points off his opponent. Let’s say that the quarrel is about the shape of our planet. With perfectly accurate arguments that are known to every educated person I prove to him that the Earth is, roughly speaking, a sphere. He bitterly and without success attacks every argument in turn, but when we get to the form of the Earth’s shadow during lunar eclipses, he suddenly asserts something like: “A shadow, a shadow … You’re trying to cast a shadow onto a clear day. First get rid of that wart under your nose and grow some hair on your bald spot, then you can argue.”17

Apollo’s complaint shows his scientific literacy in at least two ways, the first being his qualification—“roughly speaking” [grubo govoria]—on the spherical form of the Earth. For most of the post-classical era, it was assumed that the Earth, like all the planets, was a mathematically perfect sphere. Newton, in his Principia (Book 3, Proposition 19), was the first to posit that, due to the centrifugal force associated with its rotation, the Earth must be slightly flattened at the poles.18 Thus the Earth is often thought of as an oblate spheroid or ellipsoid, though even these visualizations are approximate. Apollo’s qualification, then, shows a high degree of scientific literacy. The argument that the approximate sphericity of the Earth is proven by the circular shadow it casts during lunar eclipses is an ancient one, at least as old as Aristotle’s De Caelo [On the Heavens]: Further support also derives from perceptual evidence, since lunar eclipses would have such demarcating lines; for, as it is, in its monthly configurations 16 Fontenelle, Conversations, 65. 17 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 509. 18 Isaac Newton, The Principia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 821–26.

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the moon takes on all manner of distinguishing line (indeed, it becomes straight and gibbous and crescent), but during eclipses it always has a convex dividing line, and so, it is eclipsed because of the interposition of the earth, the circumference of the earth, being spherical, will be responsible for the shape.19

While many, if not most, of Aristotle’s scientific assertions have been undone by modern science, the elegance of this particular argument can hardly be improved. That Polyphemus refuses to consider even this proof of the sphericity of the Earth shows him to be profoundly narrow-minded.20 All this scientific background serves to remind the reader that, by the time the Strugatskiis were writing Vtoroe nashestvie marsian in the mid1960s, the concept of cosmic plurality had long ago become a reasonable scientific hypothesis awaiting proof rather than a fundamental threat to religious and social order. The (semi-)sphericity of the Earth had been settled long before this. Thus the Strugatskiis’ use of these specific markers in the history of scientific thought—markers of which Polyphemus is wholly unaware—pins his “cosmological positions” as echoing the views of conservative religious and scientific authorities in the ages long before heliocentricism became widely accepted, when it was “obvious” that the Earth is flat. In this respect, Polyphemus is typical of the other inhabitants of the village, none of whom shows even the slightest interest in the science of astronomy as “men from the stars” invade their home. The only exception to this universal disinterest is a handful of moments in which one or another of Apollo’s friends attempts to win an argument by misusing some scientific fact. For example, when “the guys” are puzzling over some mysterious circular tracks in the dust in front of town hall, the retired lawyer Silenus reasons that they have been left by a Martian: “Here on Earth the gravity is stronger—Apollo will support me on this—so they can’t just walk around on their legs. For that they have special spring-mounted stilts, and they’re what leave these little holes in the dust.”21 Occam’s razor, however, guts Silenus’s theory when Polyphemus emerges from city hall, having made the circular tracks with his crutch on 19 Aristotle, On the Heavens I and II (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1995), 167. 20 In his baiting of Apollo on this particular topic, Polyphemus recalls Shukhov, the protagonist of Solzhenitsyn’s Odin den′ Ivana Denisovicha [One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich], published in 1962, four years before the Strugatskiis’ novel. In one scene, Shukhov baffles and annoys his fellow zek, the Soviet naval captain Buinovskii, insisting that God crumbles the old Moon to make stars. 21 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 514.

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the way in. Later in the novel, Apollo is surprised and displeased when Myrtilus assures him that life on Mars is impossible, particularly since Apollo himself had earlier told Myrtilus that Mars is a “dead planet” and that the absence of life there is a “scientific fact.” The context of the passage that follows, though, shows that the teacher of astronomer is far from a dispassionate scientist. Having gotten himself worked up over the possibility of new Martian-issued stamps and finding that they are not yet available, Apollo eases his disappointment by reminding himself that there can be no Martians to issue such stamps: When will we finally learn not to believe rumors? It’s well known, after all, that Mars has a highly rarified atmosphere, its climate is excessively harsh and almost totally lacking in water, the basis of all life. The myths about the canals were long ago and conclusively debunked, for the canals turned out to be nothing more than an optical illusion.22

The Martian Canals are a famous example of collective self-delusion in science. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, observing Mars during the 1877 opposition, recorded having seen what appeared to be curvilinear streaks on the surface of the planet, which he called in Italian canali. Other astronomers, most notably the American Percival Lowell, elaborated on Schiaparelli’s work, speculating about an ancient, dying Martian civilization that was building canals to transport water long distances across the surface of the drying planet. The Martian canals are a central feature of the “Barsoom” (Mars) novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, a childhood favorite of the Strugatskiis. With the development of more powerful telescopes after the War, it became clear that there were no canals; the 1964 Mars Mariner 4 spacecraft (the first successful flyby of another planet, completed two years before the novel was written) debunked the canals once and for all, showing the surface of the planet to be dry and pockmarked with craters. Thus Apollo’s ghostly Martian stamps are an elegant echo of the phenomenon of the Martian canals on a much smaller scale—a greatly wished-for thing that does not exist. While the general impression of Apollo is more that of a highly suggestible old man than of a dispassionate scientist, there is additional evidence of his knowledge and experience in astronomy. The best example of his scientific abilities is found early in the novel, when the old men of the town are arguing about the conflicting explanations for the lights in the sky 22 Ibid., 4: 518.

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that had accompanied what turns out to have been the Martian invasion. Among the explanations given, one should be examined more closely. The town newspaper with the oddly astronomical-sounding title Our Observer [Nash nabliudatel′] states that, in preparation for the one-hundred-andfifty-third anniversary of its founding, the neighboring town of Marafiny had been conducting a “training” firework display that could be seen for a radius of two hundred miles. Apollo comments: “The minute Charon goes on a business trip, our paper becomes catastrophically stupid. They could have at least tried to estimate what a fireworks display should look like from a distance of two hundred kilometers.”23 It appears that Apollo is making a quick mathematical verification of the Observer’s assertion, and finding it faulty, as fireworks would have to reach astonishing heights in order to be visible from so far away. Calculating the distance of the visible horizon from a given point above the Earth is an elementary problem in astronomy, one presented, for instance in P. F. Burns’s 1942 First Steps in Astronomy without a Telescope.24 The geometry of the question of how high an object must be above the surface of a planet so as to be visible to an observer standing within an area (really a spherical cap) of a given radius is related to this problem. So Apollo is repeating in his head a version of the kind of problem that he must have posed to countless students over the course of his career as a teacher, thus showing a facility with quantitative reasoning that somewhat counters the dominant impression he gives of a confused pensioner. It is crucial, though, that Apollo’s quantitative skills do not consistently translate into anything resembling analytical incisiveness—as was discussed above, his scientifically sound stance on the lack of life on Mars is forgotten the minute he hears of the possible issue of new Martian stamps. Apollo’s use of scientific research seems, in fact, more targeted to winning arguments with his friends than to maintaining a logically consistent set of conclusions. This is evident in a short speech to Morpheus in which Apollo attempts to explain that some tattooed, unsavory looking men who are manning the local stomach-juice donation center could in fact be Martians: “Our data about Mars are so scant,” I say calmly, “that the proposition that Martians might resemble guys from a bar on the edge of town does not, in any case, contradict any scientific truth.”25 23 Ibid., 4: 505. 24 F. P. Burns, First Steps in Astronomy without a Telescope (London: Ginn and Company Ltd., 1942), 27. 25 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 529.

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He then cites the work of some professor Zefir to support the idea that Martians could have tattoos: “Professor Zefir,” I say, looking him right in the eye, “the head astronomer of the Marafiny Observatory, does not in a single one of his many articles challenge such a practice among the Martians.”26

Apollo is—either deliberately or naively—using a type of informal fallacy called the “argument from silence” [argumentum e silentio] whereby a conclusion is based not on evidence, but on an absence of evidence. His naïve use of this argumentative technique would be further evidence of his lack of intelligence, whereas his use of it as a deliberate ploy would not speak highly of his scholarly ethics. In either case, considering the aggregate of instances presented thus far, Apollo is hardly deserving of the subtitle of the novel: “The Notes of a Sober-Minded Man” [zapiski zdravomysliashchego]. The similarity of this subtitle to the title of Gogol’s 1834 “Notes of a Madman” [Zapiski sumasshedshego] is certainly deliberate, the connection suggesting not that Apollo is mentally ill, but that he is more or less as unreliable as any of Gogol’s narrators. His lack of reliability comes not from madness, but from provincial-mindedness and a remarkably short mental horizon for an astronomer. Another illustration of Apollo’s “short horizon”—in a field closely related to astronomy, no less—can be found in one of his many digressions on his pension. One of his points links his former profession with the “trendy” topic of space exploration: “In the fifth place is my area of expertise. Now everyone has gone nuts about this space thing, so astronomy is a topical subject.”27 The phrase “about this space thing” [na etom kosmose] suggests both a general lack of knowledge about space exploration and a dismissive attitude towards this endeavor. While astronomy and space exploration are intimately linked, the old astronomer’s understanding of this link is anything but “topical.” So while Apollo knows his own subject, he is ignorant of related fields and has not tried to understand astronomy in an “interdisciplinary” sense. It is possible that Apollo’s short horizon was inspired in some small way by the older, scientifically conservative astronomers that BN knew during his time at Pulkovo, particularly those, like Kozyrev, who, as was discussed in Chapter One, refused to accept some of the more basic conclusions of astrophysics after having been isolated from 26 Ibid., 4: 529–30. 27 Ibid., 4: 511.

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science during his decade in the camps. This similarity is strengthened by the fact that Apollo himself spent three years as a POW during an unnamed war that, for the Soviet reader at least, is likely to recall WWII, but could also encompass the “war” of the Purges. This would make Apollo roughly the same age (for a contemporary reader) as a member of the generation of astronomers who preceded those of BN’s cohort. Apollo’s linking of astronomy and space exploration with the Martians in a “current events” sense is reflected by Paralus’s comment a few pages later that the invaders are simply another of the town Treasurer’s repeated attempts to get himself out of trouble: Our treasurer has weaseled out of it again. […] Last time it was an unusually strong hailstorm, the time before that locusts showed up, and now he has arranged Martians, on the level of our epoch, in connection with the exploration of space.28

Paralus’s comment is more ridiculous and uninformed than Apollo’s, but the two are part of the same continuum, in which ignorance and a lack of perspective combine to render current events almost opaque. Apollo’s daily monitoring of his weather station and assiduous recording of meteorological conditions—these begin many of his journal entries—reflect this general problem of a lack of scope: he keeps track of certain data, but fails to draw larger conclusions from the information he has collected. In other words, he notes daily fluctuations in the weather, but fails to comprehend how the climate is changing. The Strugatskiis’ depiction of ignorant individuals overwhelmed by forces beyond their comprehension recalls one of the fundamental elements of the major inspiration for Vtoroe nashestvie marsian: Wells’s The War of the Worlds, a key early book for both brothers. The Strugatskiis’ depth of appreciation for Wells is difficult to overstate: BN has written that their first novel, Strana bagrovykh tuch [The Land of Crimson Clouds, 1957], was written out of a desire to create something worthy of the pen of Wells.29 The War of the Worlds, of all Wells’s thinking, is the one most often referenced in the Strugatskiis’ works, and the one closest to their hearts. This is evidenced by a 2009 letter from BN to Genadii Prashkevich: I remember, in the most terrible days of the Blockade, in January of 1942, pressed up against the draining light and the cold window, I read The War 28 Ibid., 4: 514. 29 Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 5.

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of the Worlds, and—I swear!—somehow managed to forget in those minutes the hopeless hopelessness that surrounded me.30

Volodikhin and Prashkevich also note that, when BN returned with his mother to Leningrad in May of 1944, the ruined city made him think of London under the Martians.31 Also worth mentioning is a moment from the 1974 novel Grad Obrechennyi [The Doomed City], to which Chapter Seven of this study is devoted. In this excerpt, the astronomer Andrei Voronin is reminded of his personal history with Wells’s novel: Remember how your father forced you to read The War of the Worlds, how you didn’t want to, how you were angry, how you jammed the damned book under the couch in order to get back to your illustrated Baron Munchausen… Wells bored you, he made you sick, you didn’t know why on earth you had to deal with him, you wanted to be rid of him… And then you read the book through twelve times, memorized it, made illustrations for it, and even tried to write a sequel…32

As will be discussed, Grad obrechennyi is a deeply personal and autobiographical work for the brothers. Thus Andrei’s memory, while not necessarily a recollection of the childhood of either brother, is certainly emotionally true if not biographically so. Vtoroe nashestvie marsian in fact is a sequel to The War of the Worlds: the title of the novel makes it clear that “first” Martian invasion was Wells’s, and many details of the Strugatskiis’ work echo those that define its ancestor. The Martian collection of human stomach juices, for example, recalls the “vampiric” Wellsian Martians draining the blood from humans, and the blue Martian grain that the Strugatskiis’ Martians distribute to human farmers for compulsory cultivation brings to mind the red weed that Wells’s Martians unwittingly bring to Earth. These alien plants are similar even in their riotous growth: the red weed smothers all native plant life and clogs rivers and streams before blighting and dying off completely; Apollo notices fields of blue from his attic meteorological observing station only three days after bags of seed first appear in the mayor’s office. That the second invasion involves almost no military force reflects the Martians’ hardearned wisdom that humans are better bought than conquered. BN makes an unambiguous statement to his effect in his comments to the novel: “one 30 Volodikhin and Prashkevich, Brat′ia Strugatskie, 175. 31 Ibid., 14. 32 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 495.

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need not conquer humankind: without much effort one can simply buy it.”33 This idea is woven into their novel Khishchnye veshchi veka [The Predatory Things of Our Age],34 written two years before Vtoroe nashestvie marsian, in 1964. There the engineer Ivan Zhilin (mentioned in the discussion of Put′ na Amal′teiu), a former mezhplanetnik now working for the UN, is dismayed to find people in an unnamed “Western” resort city—where world Communism has yet to take hold—addicted to a drug called sleg that provides access to a hyper-real secondary reality. He imagines Wells’s Martians conquering Earth by such a means: “Yes, if I were commanding Wells’s Martians, I would not bother with war tripods, the heat ray and other nonsense… An illusory reality…”35 Khishchnye veshchi veka is, in fact, thematically twinned with Vtoroe nashestvie marsian in its exploration of the compromises that humans make in exchange for comfort, compromises that are fundamental to War of the Worlds. Towards the end of Wells’s novel, the unnamed narrator encounters, on Putney Hill outside London, an artilleryman whom he had met by chance early in the invasion. The ideas of “The Man on Putney Hill” for whom the chapter is named prefigure much of what the Strugatskiis explore in their novel. For instance, the artilleryman asserts that there are many humans who would prefer the comfort of captivity to the terror of freedom: Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them.36

The Strugatskiis’ novel can be read as an extended elaboration of the ideas of the Man on Putney Hill, but, given the depth of their engagement with Wells, it would be superficial to conclude that the only connection of the second work to the first is as an expansion of the artilleryman’s speeches. In the first place, the “hell of the ignorant” that defines the “cosmology” of Vtoroe nashestvie marsian has a very robust predecessor in The War of the Worlds. Many of the Martians’ early military successes are dependent on the 33 Ibid., 4: 619. 34 This novel was published in English as The Final Circle of Paradise (New York: DAW, 1967). 35 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 151. 36 H. G. Wells, The Works of H. G. Wells: Atlantic Edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1924–28), 3: 418–19.

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complacency and stubbornness of the English public, both rural and urban. The first Martian “cylinder” that falls in the Sand Pits near Woking inspires a kind of mindless gathering of the locals around the cooling metal object. Here Wells provides a small observation of the human instinct towards profit: “[a]n enterprising sweet-stuff dealer in the Chobham Road had sent up his son with a barrow-load of green apples and ginger beer.”37 These items are later seen abandoned as people flee from the Martian Heat-Ray. Once the intentions of the Martians have become more apparent and the military is making attempts to evacuate the populace ahead of the enemy’s advance, the narrator witnesses a telling exchange between a corporal and an old man: There were scores of people, most of them sufficiently sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes. The soldiers were having the greatest difficultly in making them realise the gravity of their position. We saw one shrivelled old fellow with a huge box and a score or more of flower-pots containing orchids, angrily expostulating with the corporal who would leave them behind. I stopped and gripped his arm. “Do you know what’s over there?” I said, pointing at the pine-tops that hid the Martians. “Eh?” said he, turning. “I was explainin’ these is vallyble.” “Death!” I shouted. “Death is coming! Death!” and leaving him to digest that if he could, I hurried on after the artilleryman. At the corner I looked back. The soldier had left him, and he was still standing by his box, with the pots of orchids on the lid of it, and staring vaguely over the trees.38

Given Wells’s well-known contempt for the uneducated masses,39 it should come as no surprise that such illustrations of ignorance in his works are not confined to The War of the Worlds. The Strugatskiis’ depiction of Apollo and his fellow villagers both reflects these elements of Wells’s novel and places Vtoroe nashestvie marsian in a Russian tradition that stretches (at least) from Fonvizin to Zoshchenko and Voinovich. More to the point, however, 37 Ibid., 3: 230. 38 Ibid., 3: 287. 39 On the suffering of the Russian people as resulting from the Revolution, Wells commented: “The dull pertinacity of France is driving vast multitudes of German people into the same realization at which the Russians arrived in 1917, that for them our present system of social and economic organization has nothing to offer but evil, and that they may as well perish experimentally as perish without effort” H. G. Wells, A Forecast of the World’s Affairs (New York: The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1925), 48.

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the Strugatskiis also echo Wells in their use of the figure of the astronomer as one who serves a function vaguely antithetical to that of the “mass.” Wells’s own astronomer Ogilvy has the distinction of being both the first named character in The War of the Worlds and among the first group of humans to be swept out of existence by the Martian Heat-Ray. In the chapters leading up to his death, Ogilvy plays a key role as the voice of science in the narrative; had the novel been written according to the tropes that science fiction would develop in the interwar period, Ogilvy might have been the central protagonist. A rough parallelism can be observed between Wells’s and the Strugatskiis’ narratives in that Ogilvy the astronomer is tossed aside once he is no longer necessary to the narrative, whereas Apollo’s role as an astronomer is made manifestly subordinate to his function as a mildly foolish old man observing events he barely understands. Ogilvy is introduced in the first chapter of Wells’s novel: the narrator runs into him during a period in which astronomers are observing unexplained masses of incandescent gas emanating from Mars, later revealed to be the explosions accompanying the launches of the invading cylinders towards Earth. The narrator comments, “I might not have heard of the eruption at all had I not met Ogilvy, the well-known astronomer, at Ottershaw. He was immensely excited at the news, and in the excess of his feelings invited me up to take a turn with him that night in a scrutiny of the red planet.”40 Wells’s descriptions of this observing session contain passages that present an ideal image of the quiet, contemplative astronomer in the darkened observatory, passages that certainly would have been inspiring to the brothers in their youth as they dreamed of one day sitting at the eyepiece of a similar telescope: In spite of all that has happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery warm—a pin’s-head of

40 Wells, The Works, 3: 217.

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light! It was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view.41

More relevant to the present discussion, however, are Ogilvy’s opinions about life on Mars, which prefigure Apollo’s own (inconsistent) assertions: He was full of speculation that night about the condition of Mars, and scoffed at the vulgar idea of its having inhabitants who were signalling us. His idea was that meteorites might be falling in a heavy shower upon the planet, or that a huge volcanic eruption was in progress. He pointed out to me how unlikely it was that organic evolution had taken the same direction in the two adjacent planets. “The chances against anything man-like on Mars are a million to one,” he said.42

Some nights later, the first of the Martian cylinders falls on Earth, showing itself as a greenish “falling-star” before crashing in the Woking sand pits. Ogilvy, hoping to find what he thinks will be a meteorite, is the first human to see the cylinder. He understands, after watching the ash-covered exposed end of the cylinder rotate as it unscrews, that some being is inside attempting to get out. Ultimately, then, the astronomer who had been skeptical about life on Mars is the same one whose telegram rouses “every observatory in the three kingdoms.”43 Thus Apollo’s path from incredulity at the possibility of a Martian invasion to acceptance of the new masters of humanity follows Ogilvy’s, at least up to a point: Wells’s astronomer’s assertion that evolution could not have taken the same path on Earth and Mars and his dismissal of there being “anything man-like on Mars” are not exactly overturned by the fact of the Martians, who are not at all “man-like.” The narrator describes the first Martian to emerge from the cylinder: I think every one expected to see a man emerge—possibly something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know I did. […] Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedge-like lower lip, the incessant quivering of the mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange 41 Ibid., 3: 217–18. 42 Ibid., 3: 219. 43 Ibid., 3: 230.

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atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.44

If we accept the assumption that the Martians in the Strugatskiis’ novel are the same as those in Wells’s, then it stands to reason that their first invasion taught them also not to allow humans to see their bodies, thus robbing them of the chance of being repulsed. There is a hint of alien physiology in a scene in which Apollo and his friend and rival philatelist—the pharmacist Achilles—argue over the attributes of a Martian who may or may not have come into the pharmacy (Apollo recalls a blue hand without fingernails, and Achilles remembers a tentacle), but their account of this putative encounter cannot be trusted, as there may have been an outside force inhibiting their perceptions. Apollo writes, “Then I recalled an annoying sensation of interference—the whole time something foreign was intrusively stepping into my consciousness, preventing me from thinking coherently and logically.”45 Apollo’s acceptance that Martians have arrived on Earth is more or less established even before this unexplained incident that may depict the actions of a Martian invader. Yet the novel features not a single unequivocal appearance of an actual Martian. Even the huge flying ships that hover in the air above the town at the end of the novel, which Apollo describes as “shining with a magical light”46 are at best secondary evidence of the arrival of aliens, and Apollo had become convinced of the Martians’ reality well prior to this spectacle. Ogilvy, on the other hand, can hardly disbelieve the evidence of his eyes as the first Martian emerges from the cooling cylinder. The reality of the Martians’ existence spurs Ogilvy to action: under the assumption that intelligent beings would not travel to Earth with malign intent, he, the journalist Henderson, and the “the Astronomer Royal” Stent form the only named members of the “Deputation” that approaches the pit with the cylinder, waving a white flag in a gesture of friendship. As was

44 Ibid., 3: 233, 234–35. 45 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 557. 46 Ibid., 4: 576.

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stated above, the members of this Deputation are the first to be slaughtered by the Martian Heat-Ray: Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it. Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire. Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.47

Up to the moment when he is killed, the narrative seems to be developing Ogilvy into at least a secondary central character, only to have the Martians’ “invisible, inevitable sword of heat” sweep him out of existence just as the book is getting started. He is mentioned only twice after his death, first when the narrator thinks of “poor Ogilvy” lying dead near the Martian pit, second when, to comfort both his wife and himself, he uses the slain astronomer’s argument that the aliens could not possibly establish themselves on Earth. Reading The War of the Worlds in the context of the problem of astronomical knowledge both in Vtoroe nashestvie marsian and the works that will be discussed in later chapters, Ogilvy stands out as a precursor of the Strugatskiis’ astronomer-protagonist, one whose scientific knowledge draws him unwittingly into danger and cosmological disorientation. His scientific reasoning, spoken by him directly and repeated by the narrator, is as useless as Apollo’s. In fact, it is precisely due to his profession that he is among the first to die. His doomed approach to the Martian pit as a member of the Deputation prefigures the final scene of Piknik na obochine (to be discussed in Chapter Five), in which Arthur Burbridge trustingly advances towards the Golden Sphere, only to be twisted to death by the “meat-grinder.” The Strugatskiis’ astronomer is not, in contrast to Wells’s narrator, placed so as to experience the Martian invasion from a helpful vantage point. His view of the events of the novel are not much better than that, one might imagine, of the old man who does not wish to abandon his orchids. In some ways, Apollo’s presentation of events is as uninformed as would be The War of the Worlds were it narrated from Ogilvy’s point of view. Such a novel would consist of the astronomer’s observing log of August 13, 47 Wells, The Works, 3: 240.

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possibly with a note indicating his intention to inspect the fallen meteorite; his telegrams might serve as addenda. Though Apollo “lives through” the second Martian invasion, the actual information that he conveys to the reader is profoundly sparse. This is partially achieved due to the fact that Apollo’s daily journal is used as the storytelling vehicle, ensuring that the reader will share Apollo’s low, limited vantage point. Wells’s narrator, on the other hand, writes about his experiences in retrospect, after the war is over, with the additional benefit of knowledge gained from the inspection of abandoned Martian technological artifacts. There are even a few places in the narrative where he explicitly references a post-war recovery that serves both to contrast the terrors being described and to reassure the reader that the Martian invasion will eventually fail. For example, while he is watching the Martians from the ruined house in which he is trapped for about two weeks, the narrator compares his eyewitness observations to illustrations found in “one of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war.” Before this, he describes a Martian “handling-machine,” “the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention.”48 These, together with the chapters concerning the experiences of the narrator’s brother during the invasion, give the reader a sense of full coverage of the war with the Martians. Apollo’s account, on the other hand, conveys the constant, tantalizing impression that many interesting and significant events are taking place “off camera” while the author collects weather data, obsesses over his pension, and organizes his stamp collection. In fact, Apollo’s fixation on his pension leads to his encountering an event of actual significance. While driving to the nearby town of Marafiny to see a former student who is now a general with great influence in matters of bureaucracy, Apollo witnesses a guerrilla attack on a Martian car and the slaughter of those inside. The victims, enveloped in flames as they stagger out, cannot be identified as Martian or human. After this, he sees a skirmish between anti-Martian fighters and pro-Martian farmers. But even here he fails to understand what, exactly, is going on: when the fighters are rounded up without a shot being fired, he assumes that they have run out of ammunition instead of inferring that they have refused to shoot at fellow humans. Apollo’s referring to the anti-Martians fighters as partizany [partisans] has a specific emotional resonance for the Russian reader: the term is applied within a Russian historical context to the irregular fighters who harassed both Napoleon’s and Hitler’s troops; these individuals are still regarded with a special reverence today. Apollo’s use of this term might be regarded as 48 Ibid., 3: 375.

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the Strugatskiis showing at least a slight preference for Charon’s argument. Apollo, as might be expected, does not have the perspective to be able to “compliment” the anti-Martian fighters, but he understands enough to be disconcerted when one of the captured fighters looks pointedly at him: And here they led the prisoner past me, and he stopped for a moment and looked at me right in the face with his nearsighted eyes. Maybe it only seemed this way to me. Now I hope that it seemed that way to me. But there was something in his eyes that made my heart drop. Oh, this dull world! No, I do not absolve this man. He is an extremist, he is a partisan, he killed, and should be punished, but I’m not blind. I saw quite clearly that he was a noble man. Not a blackshirt, not a lout, but a man with convictions. Now, nevertheless, I hope that I was wrong. All my life I have suffered from thinking well of people.49

This is a moment in which Apollo’s inability to understand seems too deliberate. The scene that places the firmest emphasis on the limited perspective of Apollo and the other members of the community can be found in his June 11 entry. As the old men are standing in the street, a Martian “car” (black, with no apparent doors, windows, or wheels) passes by, inspiring a conversation about the putatively alien vehicle’s probable bulletproof qualities: Then a Martian car crossed the square, and one-legged Polyphemus said thoughtfully: “So what do you think, old fellows, if one were to take a smash at it right now from a shotgun, would it punch through or not?” “If it were, say, a bullet, then it would probably punch through,” said Silenus. “It depends on where you hit it,” objected Myrtilus. “If it went in the front or in the back then there’s no way it would punch through.” “What about in the side?” asked Polyphemus. “If it went in the side, then it would probably punch through,” answered Myrtilus. I wanted to say that even a grenade would not punch through, but Pandareus beat me to it, saying sagaciously: “No, old fellows, there’s no point in you arguing. They’re impenetrable.”50

This conversation is explicitly modeled on the exchange of the two old men who assess the sturdiness of the wheels of Chichikov’s carriage as he arrives in the town of NN on the first page of Gogol’s Mertvye dushi [Dead Souls, 1841]: 49 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 551. 50 Ibid., 4: 555.

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[Chichikov’s] arrival gave rise to no noise at all in the town and was not accompanied by anything special; only two Russian peasants, standing in the door of the tavern across from the hotel made a certain few comments directed, it should be said, more at the carriage than at the one sitting in it. “Look,” said one to the other, “at that wheel over there! What do you think, would the wheel make it, if it happened, to Moscow or not?” “It would make it,” answered the other. “But I’m thinking it wouldn’t make it to Kazan?” “To Kazan it wouldn’t make it,” answered the other. With this the conversation ended.51

Gogol’s Russian peasants disappear from the narrative the moment their conversation ends. Such mayfly-characters are so common in Gogol’s works that Vladimir Nabokov, in his 1944 book Nikolai Gogol, assigns them a special term—“homunculi.”52 Gogol’s homunculi do not participate in the plot of the work in which they feature; rather, they wander into the narrator’s attention for a few moments and then vanish forever. Yet they are essential: writing about Revizor [The Inspector General, 1836], Nabokov asserts that “[t]his secondary world, bursting as it were through the background of the play, is Gogol’s true kingdom.”53 By putting a Gogolian homunculus-conversation into the mouths of Apollo and his friends, the Strugatskiis are pointedly reminding the reader that they are peripheral to the wider narrative of the Martian invasion: all the characters in the Strugatskiis’ novel, including their astronomer-narrator, are akin to Gogol’s homunculi. Apollo’s education and knowledge of astronomy do not distinguish him from the herd as much as his limited outlook and naivety link him to it. So the Strugatskiis’ first major astronomer-protagonist is by no means an intellectual struggling to break free from his provincial surroundings: he is quite comfortable in the hell he inhabits. There is an analogy attributed to English mathematician Henry Forder that states: “He who despises Euclidean Geometry is like a man who, returning from foreign parts, disparages his home.”54 Forder’s comment is based on the view that has developed in the roughly two centuries since the first non-Euclidean geometries were described by Lobachevskii, Gauss, and Bolyai that the geometry of Euclid 51 N. V. Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 5: 7. 52 Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961), 45. 53 Ibid., 52. 54 H. S. M. Coxeter and S. L. Greitzer, Geometry Revisited (Washington, D. C.: The Mathematical Association of America, 1967), ix.

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is somehow childish. His analogy is apt because Euclidean geometry is the “homeland” of all the geometries that exist; no others would exist without it. Apollo suffers from the prejudice opposite that of Forder’s straw man: he has never ventured out of his native “geometry” of school-curriculum astronomy, and has not allowed the troubling questions of astronomy and cosmology—those that both killed Bruno and sent Polyphemus’s son Polycarp to leave the village in search of adventure—to influence the architecture of his mind. Apollo’s desire for social and economic order is stronger by far than his admiration for the order of the Universe. The problem of societal stability is a key element in the closing pages of both the Strugatskiis’ and Wells’s respective works. Both novels conclude with an impression of order restored, but Wells’s order is English, human, while the Strugatskiis’ is Martian, alien. The bacterial plague that wipes out the Martians represents a kind of triumph of dispassionate Darwinian evolution and gives a sense that the human place in the hierarchy of nature is, if not God-given, then at least well-earned and stable: For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.55

The Strugatskiis, on the other hand, depict a world in which the status of humans as the crown of creation is simply a self-deception, one in which the knowledge and experience of a human astronomer is of negligible importance compared to the quality of his stomach juice (possibly part of the Martians’ strategy against bacteria). Apollo’s ability to lecture on the plurality of worlds is no more useful than—to borrow a metaphor from the 55 Wells, The Works, 3: 436.

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Strugatskiis’ 1984 Volny gasiat veter [The Waves Still the Wind] that will be discussed in detail in Chapter Eight—the ability of a bear to ride a bicycle. Here is some mild situational irony—invaders “from the stars” render knowledge of the stars superfluous. But the elements of the hell constructed in this work are both terrestrial and celestial, with explicit characters representing both. In subsequent works, the actors are much more difficult to identify. Of the works by the Strugatskiis featuring an astronomer-protagonist, this is the first and only one to take place in a familiar, “homey” cosmological context. Subsequent works feature elements of hell woven into the fabric of nature itself, as purely astronomical problems are distorted and made incomprehensible by altered, alien cosmologies.

Poincaré’s Starless Hell: The Inhabited Island Слуга покорный! я едва-едва Не умер там со скуки. Что за люди, Что за земля! А небо?.. точный дым […] My faithful servant! I very nearly Died there from boredom. What a people, What a land! And the sky?… Just like smoke […] Don Guan, from Pushkin’s Kamennyi gost′ [The Stone Guest, 1830]

At one point in his 1905 La valeur de la science [The Value of Science], the French polymath Henri Poincaré speculates on the intellectual stimulation that humanity has gained from being able to view the starry sky. He asserts that “[t]he stars send us not only that visible and gross light which strikes our bodily eyes, but from them also comes to us a light far more subtle, which illuminates our minds.”1 He goes on to imagine the consequences for science and society of living on a planet surrounded by clouds that permanently veil the sky: Think how diminished humanity would be if, under heavens constantly overclouded, as Jupiter’s must be, it had forever remained ignorant of the stars. Do you think that in such a world we should be what we are? I know well that under this somber vault we should have been deprived of the light of the sun, necessary to organisms like those which inhabit the earth. But if you please, we shall assume that those clouds are phosphorescent and emit 1 Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 283.

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a soft and constant light. Since we are making hypotheses, another will cost no more. Well! I repeat my question: Do you think that in such a world we should be what we are?2

He ultimately concludes that “under heavens always overcast and starless, the earth itself would have been for us eternally unintelligible.”3 The Strugatskiis’ 1967 novel Obitaemyi ostrov [The Inhabited Island] is set on just just a cloud-shrouded world (called Saraksh), a circumstance that gives rise to scientific and social consequences similar to those that Poincaré imagines. And while it would be difficult to prove that the Strugatskiis had read Poincaré’s book, it can be shown directly that AN was exposed to this same idea by a different astronomer. In his 1978 essay “My Jules Verne” [Moi Zhiul′ Vern], AN mentions having been inspired by the problem of planetary bodies to read what he refers to as “the charming, though now forgotten, popular-science book The Movement of the Worlds, by Jeans.”4 The book in question is James H. Jeans’s The Stars in their Courses (1931), translated into Russian in 1933 as Dvizhenie mirov [The Movement of the Worlds]. Jeans (1877–1946) was an English physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who is known both for his contributions to astrophysics—the Jeans length and the Rayleigh-Jeans law, for example, bear his name5—and as the author of numerous popular science books published from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. Jeans begins The Stars in their Courses with the same thought experiment that drives both Poincaré’s essay and the Strugatskiis’ world-building of Saraksh: We inhabitants of the earth enjoy a piece of good fortune to which we give very little thought, which, indeed, we take almost as much for granted as the air we breathe—I mean the fact that we have a transparent atmosphere. Some of the other planets, for instance Venus and Jupiter, have atmospheres which are so thick with clouds as to be totally opaque. If we had been born on Venus and Jupiter, we should have lived our lives without ever seeing through the clouds, and so should have known nothing of the beauty and 2 3 4 5

Ibid., 283. Ibid., 287. Strugatskii, 11: 349. The Jeans length is related to the problem of density pertubations in clouds of interstellar gas (Malcolm S. Longair, Galaxy Formation [Berlin: Springer, 1998], 12). The RayleighJeans law is an attempt to reconcile blackbody (an idealized physical body that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation) spectra with experimental results (Marc L. Kutner, Astronomy: A Physical Perspective [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 15).

Poincaré’s Starless Hell: The Inhabited Island

poetry of the night sky, and nothing of the intellectual excitement and joy of trying to decipher the meaning of the vast panorama of lights which are scattered round us in all directions in space. It will not form a bad approach to our subject, if we imagine that until to-night our earth had also been covered in by an opaque blanket of clouds. Suddenly this is rolled back, and we see the glory, and the tantalising puzzle, of the night-sky for the first time.6

While Strugatskiis’ lifelong, deep connection with astronomy makes it not unlikely that they might independently conduct a thought experiment similar to Poincaré’s, this passage from Jeans is compelling evidence that the seeds of the opaque Sarakshian firmament were planted years before they ever began writing. This chapter will examine how Saraksh—a world cut off from the stars, without access to the night sky as a laboratory of ideas, whose inhabitants have developed an unusual cosmology—is an essential stepping stone in the development of some of the Strugatskiis’ core cosmological preoccupations. Obitaemyi ostrov is the first novel of what is informally known as the Kammerer trilogy, a sequence of three novels featuring Maksim Kammerer as their protagonist.7 At the beginning of Obitaemyi ostrov, Maksim, working as an explorer for the so-called GSP [Gruppa svobodnogo poiska, The Free Search Group] (a loosely organized endeavor for exploring uncharted regions of space generally regarded as a career waystation for directionless young people), crashes his spaceship on an unknown planet. He quickly finds evidence of industrial pollution that attests to intelligent life, and is subsequently taken prisoner by a group of soldiers. Over the course of the novel, Maksim’s role in the society in which he has found himself changes, each section of the narrative being titled according to his current occupation: Robinson, Guardsman, Terrorist, Convict, Earthling. Maksim’s progress from an innocent, good-natured, and somewhat immature young man to a revolutionary leader is modeled on the heroes of Socialist Realism and could be fruitfully examined through the lens of Clark’s Spontaneity-to-Consciousness Dialectic. The Strugatskiis, in fact, imagined Maksim—originally Rostislavskii—as a

6 James H. Jeans, The Stars in their Courses (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 1. 7 The other two novels in the trilogy are Zhuk v muraveinike [Beetle in the Anthill, 1979] and Volny gasiat veter [The Waves Still the Wind, 1984].

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kind of Pavel Korchagin8 of the Future.9 The focus here, however, will be not on Maksim, but on the planet Saraksh and its odd physical attributes, which have led its inhabitants to construct a very striking cosmology. One such attribute—Poincaré’s permanent cloud cover—is presented in the very first paragraph of the novel: The sky here was low and somehow solid, without any of that frivolous transparency that hints at the bottomlessness of the cosmos and the plurality of inhabited worlds: a real biblical firmament, smooth and impenetrable. This firmament doubtlessly rested on the local Atlas’s powerful shoulders and phosphoresced regularly.10

Through these references to a “real biblical firmament”—evoking, for instance, the Flammarion engraving discussed in the previous chapter— and the “local” Atlas on whose shoulders the planet rests, the Strugatskiis elegantly include two discarded cosmologies in one sentence, finding room even for the concept of a “plurality of worlds” that flatly contradicts them. Their choice to open Obitaemyi ostrov with this short sequence of dethroned cosmologies seems to indicate that cosmological problems will be central to the novel, and no mere alien verisimilitude. The alienness of the Sarakshian night is tempered by a more detailed description of the phosphorescence of the atmosphere, one that both makes the planet tantalizingly similar to Poincaré’s hypothetical world and evokes the famous white nights of Leningrad and other Russian cities of the far north: “It was almost light, like on a bright, moonlit night on Earth, but there were no moonlight shadows and there was not that hazy blueness of moonlight.”11 This “second daytime” not only emphasizes the stark impossibility of seeing the starry sky from the surface of Saraksh by introducing a kind of permanent light pollution, but also hints at the implicit connections between Soviet reality and the supposed alien society that Maksim will come to know. The novel’s grey, dreary cityscapes and resigned, grounddown citizenry are as close as the Strugatskiis come in their earlier works to simply describing the Soviet Union as it was. While the degree to which Obitaemyi ostrov represents a developmental rung of the Strugatskiis’ The protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovskii’s Kak zakalialas′ stal′ [How the Steel was Tempered, 1934]. 9 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 669; 11: 337. 10 Ibid., 5: 317. 11 Ibid., 5: 317. 8

Poincaré’s Starless Hell: The Inhabited Island

Aesopian discourse lies outside the bounds of the current discussion, it is worth mentioning that Saraksh’s cosmological isolation reflects, among other things, the insular nature of Soviet life. But it is of far greater significance that Saraksh’s cloud-cover and nighttime phosphorescence represent an isolation that no Soviet citizen could imagine, as the stars at night cannot be taken away by any earthly power. The favorite activity of Viktor Denisov—the aspiring specialist in space medicine and protagonist of Aksenov’s 1961 Zvezdnyi bilet [The Starry Ticket]—is to lean backwards out of his window to gaze at the well of stars framed by the courtyard walls of his Soviet apartment building. Viktor likens this image, for which the novel is named, to a train ticket “that has been punched by a starry ticket-punch” [probityi zvezdnym komposterom].12 Thus the Strugatskiis’ meteorological denial of this ticket to the inhabitants of Saraksh is the first indication that this particular cosmology of hell is intimately connected to the Soviet experience. Finally, the Strugatskiis, having grown up in Leningrad as amateur astronomers, likely perceived the white nights as a period of exile from astronomical observations; these nights of permanent twilight could then be an earlier, deep-seated inspiration for Sarakshian cosmology. Other aspects of the Sarakshian environment are more explicitly alien. For instance, Maksim quickly notes that the planet’s atmospheric refraction makes the horizon appear to curve upwards:13 12 Vasilii Aksenov. Apel′siny iz Marokko (Moscow: EKSMO, 2006), 214. 13 See Vladimir Borisov et al., Miry Bratˊev Strugatskikh, 1: 458. It is also tempting to connect this detail of the Strugatskiis’ world-building to the structure of the high-gravity planet Mesklin, on which is set the American science fiction writer Hal Clement’s 1953 novel Mission of Gravity. See Hal Clement, The Essential Hal Clement (Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2000), 3: 24. In the first chaper of Mission, Barlennan, a member of the approximately arthropodic Mesklinites who are the sentient species of their planet, explains their cosmology to the Earthling Charles Lackland:





I was taught in school that Mesklin is a big, hollow bowl. The part where most people live is near the bottom, where there is decent weight. The philosophers have an idea that weight is caused by the pull of a big, flat plate that Mesklin is sitting on; the farther out we go toward the Rim, the less we weigh, since we’re further from the plate. What the plate is sitting on no one knows; you hear a lot of queer beliefs on that subject from some of the less civilized races.

The Strugatskiis are connected to this work: they translated it (as Ekspeditsiia “Tiagotenie”) for a volume of Clement’s works published in 1972 for the “Zarubezhnaia fantastika” [Science Fiction from Abroad] series put out by the Mir publishing house, and it would seem likely that AN had likely read it when it was first published in English. Skalandis mentions that, in the late 1950s, AN was “bingeing” [zapoem chitaet] on English-language science fiction, and that, starting in March of 1958, he

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The river really was large and slow, and one could clearly see that it flowed down from the east and flowed up to the west. (The refraction here is monstrous, to be sure…)14

The combination of Saraksh’s permanent cloud cover and “concave” atmospheric refraction has led, logically if not inevitably, to the formation of a deeply flawed cosmology: Sarakshians believe themselves to inhabit the interior surface of a sphere, with the so-called Mirovoi Svet [World Light] at its center. Under their feet is an infinite, solid “firmament” [tverd′]. This cosmology is described implicitly at several points early in the narrative which will be addressed below, but, in a rare departure from their otkaz (see the introduction), the Strugatskiis give a full description of the world as the Sarakshians perceive it when Maksim receives an explanation from Gai, an elite soldier who serves as a kind of younger brother to the protagonist. This section is prefaced by Maksim’s confusion at seeing a popular television program called “A Magical Journey” [Volshebnoe puteshestvie] that seems to consist solely of images and memories taken from his brain when he was first on Saraksh. At that time he was being held in semi-captivity in a facility that he had assumed to be staffed by specialists in first contact, headed by a man he thought of as the “Hippo” [Begemot]. Seeing the uses to which the contents of his mind have been put makes Maksim doubt that he had ever been making “contact” during his confinement. The degree to which the contents of Maksim’s brain are alien to the Hippo’s experience is illustrated by what is to many readers a very ordinary astronomical image: “the spectacle of a chromospheric prominence summoned such delight in the professor that it seemed as though he had never in his life seen anything like it.”15 There is no “as though” about it: no one on Saraksh has ever seen their local star, let alone has succeeded in observing its structure and associated dynamic phenomena. An inhabitant of Saraksh would have no context in which to place these images, and thus could assign them only to the realm of the fantastic. The professor’s reaction, initially unexplained, kept a careful journal of these readings (Skalandis, Brat′ia Strugatskie, 192). However, a perusal of AN’s notes and letters shows that, while he had read other works by Clement in the 1950s and 60s—among them the 1946 story “Cold Front” and the 1957 novel Cycle of Fire (which ABS translated in 1969)—he first encountered Mission only in 1970, when Evgenii Devis—the Mir editor who founded the “Zarubezhnaia fantastika” series—asked him to read it with an eye towards translation. Svetlana Bondarenko, “Re: dnevnik ANS,” (Letter to K. Reese, February 21, 2017). 14 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 319. 15 Ibid., 5: 346.

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becomes comprehensible later in the narrative, when Maksim, learning physics from Gai after his linguistic skills have improved, comes to realize fully the effects of Sarakshian cosmology on his efforts to make contact: This intuitive conclusion [Maksim’s suspicions about his time in the care of “Hippo”] gained some tangential support ten days later, when Gai was selected for the candidates’ correspondence course for the lowest officer’s rank and began cramming in mathematics and mechanics. The diagrams and formulas for the elementary course in ballistics bewildered Maksim. He accosted Gai about it; Gai did not understand at first, but then, smiling indulgently, explained to him the cosmography of his world. And then it became apparent that the inhabited island was not a sphere, was not a geoid, and was essentially not even a planet. The inhabited island was The World, the only world in the Universe. Under the natives’ feet stood the firm surface of the Sphere of the World. Above the natives’ heads was a gigantic—but finite—gaseous sphere with an as-yet-unknown make-up, having physical properties that were not completely understood. There existed a theory that the density of the gas increased as one approached the center of the gaseous bubble, and that some sorts of mysterious processes were at work there that caused the regular changes in brightness of the so-called World Light and gave rise to the succession of day and night. Besides the short-period, daily changes in the condition of the World Light, there existed long-period changes that generated seasonal temperature fluctuations and the succession of the times of the year. The force of gravity was directed from the center of the World Light perpendicular to its surface. The long and short of it was that the inhabited island existed on the inner surface of an enormous hollow in the infinite firmament that filled the rest of the Universe.16

Given the wider intellectual context of Sarakshian cosmology for the earthly reader (recall Poincaré and Jeans above), it makes sense that the Strugatskiis would frame Maksim as Copernicus on a planet of Ptolemys: Maksim, completely dumbfounded by the unexpectedness of these conclusions, started to argue, but it quickly became apparent that he and Gai were speaking different languages, and that it was far more difficult for them to understand one another than it would be for a diehard Copernican to understand a diehard disciple of Ptolemy. The crux of the matter was 16 Ibid., 5: 382–83.

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the surprising properties of the planet’s atmosphere. In the first place, the unusually strong refraction immeasurably stretched the horizon and from time immemorial had instilled in the natives’ minds that their earth is not flat and certainly not concave, but convex. “Stand on the seashore,” recommended school textbooks, “and follow the movement of a ship leaving dock. At first it will move seemingly along a flat surface, but the further away it goes, the higher it will rise until it becomes hidden by the atmospheric haze that occults the rest of the World.” In the second place, said atmosphere was highly dense and phosphoresced day and night, so that no one here had ever seen the starry sky, and instances in which the Sun had been observed were recorded in the chronicles, serving as a basis for innumerable attempts to formulate a theory of the World Light. Maksim understood that he was in a giant trap, that contact would become possible only once he would be able, in actual fact, to turn inside out the natural conceptualizations that had come together in the course of millennia. Apparently, this had already been attempted here, if one were to judge by the widespread curse massaraksh, which literally meant the world inside-out. Moreover, Gai had told him about a purely abstract mathematical theory that considered the World in a different way. This theory had emerged in ancient times, and had at one time been persecuted by the official religion, had had its own martyrs, had gained its mathematical orderliness through the efforts of genius mathematicians of the previous age, but still had remained purely abstract, although, as is the case with the majority of abstract theories, had finally found itself a practical application quite recently, with the invention of very long-range ballistic missiles. Having thought through and collated all that he knew, Maksim understood, in the first place, that this whole time he had looked like a madman and that it was with good reason that his mentagrams had been featured on that schizoid “A Magical Journey.” In the second place, he understood that, until the time was right, he would need to keep silent about his otherworldly origins if he did not want to return to the Hippo. This meant that the inhabited island would not come to his aid, that he could depend only on himself, that the building of a null-transmitter17 would have

17 A device that can send and receive messages in real time over vast distances, which, in effect, travel faster than light; it is essentially the Strugatskiis’ equivalent of Ursula Le Guin’s famous ansible.

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to be delayed until some indefinite time, and that he himself was stuck here, apparently, for a long time, and maybe, massaraksh, forever.18

Before this explanation is presented, Maksim and Gai experience several instances of mutual frustration as they seek the mutual goal of clarifying the former’s place of origin: He was still plodding through spelling-books when Gai accosted him with the question of where he, Maksim, had come from. Drawings did not help. Gai received them with a strange kind of smile and continued to repeat the same question over and over: “Where are you from?” Then Maksim, annoyed, jabbed his finger at the ceiling and said: “From the sky.” To his surprise, Gai found this to be perfectly natural and began, with interrogatory tone, to pour forth various words that Maksim initially took to be the names of planets in the local system. But Gai spread out a Mercator projection map of the world, and it then became apparent that they were not names of planets at all, but were names of antipodal countries. Maksim shrugged his shoulders, pronounced all the expressions of negation that were known to him and began to study the map, so that the conversation stopped there for the time being.19

Again, disparate cosmological perspectives prevent communication: Gai is not surprised by Maksim’s assertion that he has come from the sky, because Sarakshian cosmology states that, if one is to travel on a path perpendicular to the surface of the ground, one will move along a diameter of their Sphere of the World, through the World Light at the center, eventually arriving at an antipodal point. The names of these antipodal countries Maksim takes for planets within the local system because it does not occur to him that his “from the sky” explanation could lead a Sarakshian to name points on the planet’s surface. This perfect mutual incomprehension is best illustrated by Maksim’s first encounter with Sarakshians, in which he attempts to explain himself by drawing on the back of a blank form. This scene is conveyed from the perspective of Gai, who is seeing Maksim for the first time: The drawing that he saw struck him as funny. It was how little first-grade children portray the World: in the middle a little circle signifying the World Light, around it a large circle denoting the Sphere of the World, and on the circle a fat dot to which one need only add little arms and legs to get this is

18 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii., 5: 383–84. 19 Ibid., 5: 381.

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the World, and this is me. The poor nutcase had not even managed to portray the Sphere of the World as a regular circle: he ended up with some sort of oval. Well it’s clear that he’s not normal… And he also drew a dotted line leading from under the Earth to the dot: this is how I got here.20

This passage represents the Strugatskiis’ most elegant early example of the cosmological disorientation that results when one tries to force an invalid cosmology onto a valid one. Here they have created a false cosmology whose

visual representation is roughly equivalent to the standard depiction of planetary orbits from a point looking down onto the plane of the ecliptic. Maksim draws the planet Saraksh [α], which Gai understands to be the World Light. Around the planet he sketches an elliptical orbit, which Gai interprets as the inner surface of the world. That this inner surface is elliptical, not spherical, Gai attributes to Maksim’s supposed mental deficiencies or poor drawing abilities. The point [β] that Maksim indicates on the orbit represents the position of his ship; Gai sees the body of a person standing on the surface of the planet. The line Maksim uses to indicate how he came into orbit around the 20 Ibid., 5: 335.

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planet is understood by Gai to represent a path from under the earth. One could also interpret α as the World Light and β as Saraksh in orbit around it, with the dotted line representing Maksim’s path of entry into the local system. In either case, Gai’s interpretation of the drawing is hopelessly wrong, but still consistent with the cosmology that he has been taught. Finally, Maksim sketches a second planetary system (the Solar System), depicting his journey from Earth to Saraksh: “Meanwhile the detainee took a second form and quickly sketched two small Spheres of the World in opposite corners, connected them with a dotted line and also added some kinds of doodles.”21 This second drawing has no meaning under Sarakshian cosmology, and none of those present make any attempt to make sense of it. Zef, a prisoner who is serving out his sentence in the army (and later becomes one of the main characters), merely gives “a hopeless whistle” [beznadezhno prisvistnul] and turns away from Maksim’s sketch.22 Maksim’s gradual understanding of Sarakshian cosmology forces him to abandon his attempts to enter into first contact: if the local cosmology does not even admit for the possibility of a “plurality of worlds,” then there is no conceptual common ground on which an alien can introduce himself as originating from some distant part of this plurality. De Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, introduced in the previous chapter, both lends support to Poincaré’s thesis and illustrates the profoundness of Maksim’s isolation. Many of the philosopher’s arguments—that all stars are like our Sun, for instance—are based on the common human experience of seeing stars in the night sky, and he constantly draws the attention of the learned lady who stands in for the reader to this ever-present (weather- and time-permitting) visual aid. The philosopher’s argument would be utterly incomprehensible to an inhabitant of Saraksh. As is the case with Maksim and Gai, the philosopher’s upward-pointing finger would merely indicate another part of the known world, another place on “earth.” Poincaré states that a society cut off from the stars would be inhibited from progressing in science, a problem that is explicitly observed on Saraksh. In the long quoted passage that chronicles Maksim’s gradual comprehension of Sarakshian cosmology, it emerges that one ancient native cosmology imagines Saraksh as a spheroid. Though abstract and “incorrect,” these ancient models are used, according to Gai, in long-range ballistics. It is as if the Copernican, heliocentric structure of the Solar System had been admitted as a mathematically useful abstraction that serves to 21 Ibid., 5: 335–36. 22 Ibid., 5: 336.

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predict planetary motion more accurately, with geocentrism and epicycles23 maintained as physical truth. The tension between these conflicting models is preserved in the literal meaning, given in the same passage, of the ubiquitous Sarakshian curse massaraksh: “the world inside-out.” Sarakshian cosmology may also be a comment on the insularity of Soviet science: recall the discussion in Chapter One of how the international connections of Soviet astronomers made them ideologically suspect. The brothers certainly would have known about this problem through their contacts in scientific circles; they also would have been exposed to it as amateur astronomers. For instance, the Russian translation of Jeans’s aforementioned The Stars in the Courses features a publisher’s foreword that warns the reader against certain features of the work, drawing particular attention to the fact that “the author of this book is among those bourgeois scientists whose worldview is suffused by sharply stated idealistic paradigms.”24 Then follows the reassurance: “But in The Movement of the Worlds, these paradigms, though present in a number of places, are nevertheless muted in the general design of the book.”25 The publisher spends the rest of the foreword explaining how Capitalism has apparently influenced Jeans’s conclusions: The epoch of stagnation of Capitalism puts a stamp of gloomy pessimism on the worldview of a great number of bourgeois scientists (Jeans among them). In all places where science has not yet been able on the basis of strictly verified factual material to solve the problems that excite it, they are inclined to build gloomy hypothetical scenes. These motives are dictated not as much by still scanty factual scientific data as by the scientists’ class status and consciousness.26

This foreword itself represents a kind of clash of ideological cosmologies. It is highly doubtful that Jeans, while writing his book, thought that any part of his argument would prove ideologically dangerous—science aims to be true universally, not locally. It is tempting to read the foreword—or at least the motivation behind it—as a distant inspiration for those “false” Sarakshian cosmologies that better describe the world than the “true” cosmology. 23 There is a detailed discussion of epicycles, a long-discredited concept of orbital mechanics, in Chapter Six. 24 James H. Jeans, Dvizhenie mirov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe tekhniko-teoreticheskoe izdatel′stvo, 1933), 8. 25 Ibid., 8. 26 Ibid.

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Maksim glimpses other cosmologies on Saraksh, some more valid than others. During his time in the revolutionary underground, he meets a certain Zelenyi [Green], who does not believe that Maksim, whose physical size and superhuman abilities set him apart from the Sarakshians, can be “from the mountains” as many others suppose: [Zelenyi] was a clever guy, a dreamer, he regarded the earth as flat and the sky as solid, and, by particular virtue of his ignorance, invigorated by wild fantasy, was the sole person on the inhabited island who, it seems, suspected in Maksim not some sort of mountain man (“I’ve seen these mountain men, seen them in all their forms”), and not a strange play of nature (“From nature we’re all the same, in prison or free”), but nothing less than a visitor from impossible places, say, from beyond the heavenly firmament. He never spoke about this to Maksim openly, but hinted at it, and treated him with a respect that bordered on brown-nosing.27

Zelenyi’s cosmology is essentially similar to some of the more primitive models of the Universe from human history. On an earthly setting, such a cosmology is “obvious,” the most intellectually lazy supposition, given the apparent local non-sphericity of any given point on the planet’s surface. But, for an inhabitant of Saraksh, living on an apparently concave surface, permanently deprived of from Poincaré’s “illuminating” starlight, such a model represents a bold imaginative leap. But while his assumption of a “heavenly” firmament marks Zelenyi as uneducated in the accepted cosmology his world, it may serve as an indication of cosmological assumptions “among the people” and thus might be taken as an indication of the degree to which the dominant Sarakshian cosmology is non-intuitive. More significant, and more difficult to account for, are the ideas of the mutant seer Koldun—a common word for a sorcerer or wizard in the Russian folk tradition—whom Maksim meets in the desert after his escape from a prison camp. The seer’s vision of the universe is presented from the point of view of Gai, who possesses no means of understanding this “inside-out” perspective: They said further that he knows the unforeknowable. Understanding this unforeknowable was impossible. In Gai’s opinion, this was just a collection of words: the black, empty world before the beginning of the World Light; the dead, icy world after the extinguishing of the World Light; the infinite 27 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 453.

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wastelands with many world lights… No one could explain what it meant, but Mak just nodded his head and muttered admiringly: “Now that’s intelligence!”28

The Strugatskiis, keeping true to their otkaz, do not clarify how Koldun has been able to intuit that there are stars beyond Saraksh’s World Light (the “plurality of worlds” again), let alone the concept of stellar evolution. In fact, the scope of Koldun’s insight seems to describe in loose terms both the Big Bang and the Heat Death of the Universe. Moreover, the vision of stars going out may be what the publisher of the Russian translation of Jeans’s The Stars in Their Courses has in mind when he complains about the astronomer’s “gloomy hypothetical scenes,” as the book ends with a depiction of the Universe expanding and dying, the stars winking out one by one: We have seen how the stars are continually melting away into radiation, as surely and continuously as an iceberg melts in a warm sea. We are still in doubt as to the extent of this transformation, but there is practically no room for doubt that the sun weighs many millions of tons less than it did a month ago. As the other stars are melting away in the same manner, the universe as a whole is less substantial than it was last month. […] [A]ll the stars of the Galactic System, right out to the Milky Way, are held together in one another’s gravitational forces. As the stars turn their weight into radiation, these forces for ever [sic] weaken, with the result that the system for ever expands. Our own star-city gets ever bigger and bigger, while its individual lights get ever feebler and feebler. The same is of course true of all the other star-cities in space. Then, beyond all, we have the general expansion of the universe—the blowing-out of the soap bubble—so that the great star-cities themselves move ever further and further away from one another. In some way the material universe appears to be passing away like a tale that is told, dissolving into nothingness like a vision.29

The portrait that Jeans paints is intimately connected to the theory of the expanding universe, which, as was mentioned in Chapter One, was dismissed as the “idealist”—the adjective hurled at Jeans by his Soviet publisher—theory of the Belgian astronomer-priest Georges Lemaître. The Heat Death of the Universe is of particular interest for the Strugatskiis, and will be dealt with in Chapter Six, on the 1974 Za milliard let do kontsa sveta 28 Ibid., 5: 532. 29 Jeans, The Stars in their Courses, 139.

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[A Billion Years until the End of the World]. For the present, it should be stated that this seer acts as a preview of the brothers’ interest in the overlap between science, religion, and mysticism that is explored deeply in their final novel, the 1988 Otiagoshchennye zlom [Those Burdened by Evil], discussed in Chapter Eight. The problem of Koldun’s knowledge is compelling, and it is left to the reader to notice that the seer is the most scientifically informed Sarakshian of those whom Maksim encounters. The deep knowledge of this very minor character and the obscure means by which he has acquired it not only look forward to two of the Strugatskiis’ key later works, but also markedly raise Koldun’s importance within their canon: like the astronomers of Stazhery, his significance on this wider scale is greater than it is within the work in which he appears. Lacking Koldun’s abilities to “see” through the clouds, the mostly unflappable Maksim is gradually unbalanced by Saraksh’s meteorological peculiarities. There is a moment in the novel that strongly suggests that Saraksh’s permanent cloud cover is psychologically damaging to the earthling, that his astronomical isolation is giving rise to cosmological disorientation. On the night before a battle in which he, a prisoner, is forced to fight, Maksim has a dream: “In his dream he saw the Sun, the Moon, the stars. All of them at once, that was how strange the dream was.”30 Maksim experiences this dream towards the end of the novel, having spent approximately six months under the opaque Sarakshian firmament. This vision suggests a gradual eroding of Maksim’s own cosmological foundation: he has been too long cut off from Poincaré’s “illuminating” starlight. It could also be a variation on Joseph’s dream in Genesis 37:9, in which the same celestial bodies are seen in the same order: Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.”

This is the dream that leads Joseph’s brothers, convinced that he means to rule over them, to sell him into slavery and to dip his colored robe in goat’s blood into order to convince their father than he has been killed by a wild beast. In Joseph’s dream, the unexpected, dreamlike element is the “behavior” of the celestial bodies: they bow to him. The verse does not draw attention to the impossibility of such a “conjunction.” In Maksim’s dream, 30 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 574.

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this impossibility is the point. While the Moon and the Sun are often in the sky at the same time, the stars cannot appear (with the exception of supernovae) until the Sun is below the horizon. The astronomically impossible scenario in Maksim’s dream presents a picture of the most prominent “earthly” heavenly bodies crowding into his mind, forcing their way out of his subconscious to present themselves as a group. The second sentence, by overtly characterizing the dream as “strange,” draws attention to the physical implausibility of such an event. Though it might not be very productive to explore additional parallels between Maksim and Joseph, both dreams prefigure terrible events, which at least mildly suggests Joseph’s dream as a model for Maksim’s. The cosmological implications of Maksim’s dream are realized in the detonation of a nuclear bomb that creates a yawning hole in the planet’s permanent cloud cover: thousands of tons of hot dust are described ascending “to the heavenly firmament that had been split by a blow.”31 The breaking of the Sarakshian firmament is significant because Maksim associates it with his initial “imprisonment” on the planet. When he is first forced to land, he looks into the clouds for the hole that his ship must have pierced during his descent, only to find the hole already almost fully erased: “there were only two32 large black smudges fading away, like drops of drafting ink in water.”33 Not long after this, when soldiers destroy his spacecraft, he sees “where his ship had just stood a billowing column of white-hot smoke, departing like a giant corkscrew into the phosphorescing heavenly firmament.”34 Much later in the novel, when he recalls an incident in which he is shot and left for dead, the central visual image of the scene is the “dead phosphorescing sky” [mertvoe fosforetsiruiushchee nebo].35 So the breaking of the firmament is both apocalyptic and suggestive of the possibility that Saraksh’s cosmological isolation can be brought to an end. This could be the “biblical” prophecy of Maksim’s dream. Maksim himself makes a kind of cosmological prophecy to his fellow revolutionary Vepr′ [Wild Boar] before a likely suicide mission to destroy a network of mind-controlling towers. His final statement is a rejection of the cosmology of Saraksh: 31 Ibid., 5: 587. 32 It emerges later that Maksim’s ship had been brought down by automated artillery left over from previous wars. This shell had made the second hole in the clouds. 33 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 317. 34 Ibid., 5: 320. 35 Ibid., 5: 443.

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By the way, Boar, keep this in mind and tell it to your friends. You live not on the inner surface of a sphere. You live on the outer surface of a sphere. There are many such spheres in the world, and on some of them people live much better than you, and on some of them—worse than you. But nowhere do they live more stupidly… You don’t believe me? Well then go to Hell. I’m off.36

The final truth that Maksim wishes to convey is cosmological truth; he regards this as the information that he must impart before going to die. The notion that, as he gives his speech to Boar, Maksim believes that he might truly die is not actually convincing: despite the numerous dangerous situations in which he finds himself, Maksim (and the reader along with him) seems quite confident that he will survive: at the end of part one, he survives even a point-blank gunshot wound to the head. This confidence allows Maksim to treat the inhabitants of his Island as something like experimental subjects in a laboratory of historical and social development, a feature of the novel that anticipates its role among the Strugatskiis’ works as a laboratory for creating various hells. For instance, in the chapters concerning Maksim’s time in the camps, the surrounding woods are filled with abandoned, autonomous, and still deadly machines of war that continue to operate as though the war had not ended. This scenario can be read as a “rough draft” of the Zone in Piknik na obochine, in which near-magical alien technology serves mainly as a source of random death and mutilation; this work will be the focus of the next chapter. Also, the gloomy political structure of Saraksh, in which the various countries are ruled by grasping fools who maintain a state of permanent war, can be seen as a “rough draft” of the world depicted in the 1967 samizdat novella Gadkie lebedi [The Ugly Swans], a work that takes place in a town plagued by constant rainfall, a variation of Saraksh’s permanent cloud-cover. Most importantly, though, the false cosmology of Saraksh can be seen as a “proof of concept” of the cosmology of the City in Grad obrechennyi, which will be the focus of Chapter Seven. The City is lit by an immobile artificial sun that turns on and off like a light bulb; the night sky is black, with no moon and no stars. So the idea of being trapped in an isolated world with a blank, alien sky—so integral to this later novel—already exists in Obitaemyi ostrov. This idea is less developed in the older work because both Maksim and the reader know that the larger universe is present—just hidden by a curtain of clouds—and that some sort of educational and scientific effort could be brought to bear 36 Ibid., 5: 619.

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in order to consign Sarakshian cosmology to the heap of discarded cosmologies that looms over the opening sentences of the novel. The inhabitants of Saraksh are trapped in ignorance, while Maksim is not, nor is he doomed to spend the rest of his life under the Sarakshian clouds: the two subsequent works of the Kammerer cycle, mentioned above, are both set back on Earth, featuring him as the protagonist. In Grad obrechennyi, however, the continued presence of the familiar universe is not at all certain: the reader is stuck in the City, in the endless circles of Hell. For this reason, the cosmology of Saraksh is merely interesting and strange, while that of the City is truly terrifying, particularly to a pair of brothers who spent much of their young lives looking up at the stars. Poincaré concludes his argument by writing: “Was I wrong in saying that it is astronomy which has made us a soul capable of comprehending nature; that under heavens always overcast and starless, the earth itself would have been for us eternally unintelligible?”37 In Obitaemyi ostrov, the Strugatskiis have certainly demonstrated that the local “Earth” of Saraksh is unintelligible to its inhabitants, and that, living “under heavens always overcast and starless,” Sarakshians have been kept in in a state of “unearthly” ignorance. Yet their novel is not in essence a cosmological thought experiment, particularly since the average reader is unlikely to regard Sarakshian cosmology as anything more than an addition to the “alien” atmosphere of the alien planet. This cosmology is properly highlighted only when Obitaemyi ostrov is considered within the wider context of later works in which cosmological experimentation is more fundamental.

37 Poincaré, The Value of Science, 287.

Exceptions to the Laws of Thermodynamics: Roadside Picnic […] иль вся наша И жизнь ничто, как сон пустой, Насмешка неба над землей? […] or is our whole Life nothing, like an empty dream, Heaven’s mockery of the Earth? Pushkin, Mednyi vsadnik [The Bronze Horseman, 1833]

Of all the Strugatskiis’ works, their 1971 novel Piknik na obochine [Roadside Picnic] may be the only one that is not wholly unfamiliar to many Englishlanguage readers. This is due less to the novel’s worldwide popularity and more to the fame brought by association with Tarkovskii’s celebrated 1979 film Stalker, for which the Strugatskiis wrote the initial screenplay. More recent attention has been brought to the book by the video game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, loosely based on elements from both the book and the film, as well as a recent retranslation of the book by Olena Bormashenko, published by Chicago Review Press in 2012. In the world of Piknik, following a night referred to as “the Visitation” [Poseshchenie], so-called “Zones” scattered across the Earth’s surface have been strewn with what are apparently alien artifacts. The Zones and the objects in them present deviations from physical law as understood by (earthly) science, representing new frontiers not only for science, but also

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for the black market. Scientists are both mystified and enchanted by the violations of physics apparently manifested by the Zone, and the criminal underworld is happy to supply an endless stream of alien items to anyone willing to pay. Those who go illegally into the Zone to supply the black-market demand are called “stalkers,” a term complicated for English-language readers by associations with sexual crime. This problem did not exist in Russian when the Strugatskiis derived the term from Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 novel Stalky & Co., in which “stalky” is a byword for clever resourcefulness with a gloss of strategic cruelty.1 The novel is centered around the stalker Redrick “Red” Schuhardt, with each of the four chapters depicting a day in his life between ages twenty-three and thirty-one. Red’s life under the influence of the Zone gets manifestly worse over the period depicted: the first chapter shows him as a lab assistant at the Institute dedicated to the study of the Zone in the fictional Canadian town of Harmont; the last chapter depicts his final journey to the Zone, an ex-con desperate both for his mutant daughter’s salvation and for revenge on the world. Relevant to the present discussion, however, is not Red’s struggle, but the cosmological setting of the novel and the specific mechanics of the Visitation. In a radio interview with the physicist Valentin Pil′man that serves as a prologue to the novel, the reader learns that the only point of origin that can be discerned for the items left behind by the Visitation (the novel contains not the slightest hint of the actual being(s) responsible for the event) rests on a concept in observational astronomy. Though Pil′man claims that he is not the actual discoverer of this so-called “Pil′man Radiant,” he is kind enough to explain the hypothesis to the interviewer: Imagine that you have spun a large globe and that you begin to shoot at it with a revolver. The holes on the globe will lie along a certain smooth curve. The entire essence of what you call my first serious discovery is contained in this simple fact: all six Visitation Zones are arranged on the surface our planet as if someone took six shots at Earth from a pistol situated somewhere on the line between Earth and Deneb. Deneb is the alpha star of the constellation Cygnus, and the point on the heavenly firmament from which they, so to speak, were shooting is called the Pil′man Radiant.2

The term “radiant” has a very specific meaning in astronomy: it refers to the point on the celestial sphere from which a meteor shower appears to originate. Meteor showers are the result of the Earth passing through a “meteor 1 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 6: 643. 2 Ibid., 6: 345–46.

Exceptions to the Laws of Thermodynamics: Roadside Picnic

stream,” usually debris from a comet; the particles of this stream burn away in the upper atmosphere as streaks of light. Most meteor showers are regular and predictable, always radiating from same point in the sky, the prominent ones named after the constellation in which their radiant lies. So the Lyrids, for instance, appear to radiate from the constellation Lyra towards the end of every April. Thus the terminology used to describe the probable point of origin of the Visitation is connected to a natural, cyclical astronomical phenomenon. Besides mildly implying that the event itself may repeat at some point in the future, the connection of the Visitation to an astronomical spectacle of great beauty prefigures the problem of the Zone as a mockery of physical reality. While some of the dangers of the Zone can be conceptualized as galactic phenomena scaled down to Earth-size (for example, the komarinaia plesh′ [mosquito’s bald spot], a small region of elevated gravity, suggests a miniature black hole), a better explanation is that they are a kind of mockery of scientific order, violating basic physical principles. For instance, when Red has led Kirill and Tender—other workers at the Institute—to the garage in which can be found a full pustyshka [empty] (two metal discs held by an unknown force at a fixed distance from one another, suggesting a jar made of nothing), he notices the shadow of a tire pointing in the wrong direction: “I don’t like that tire. Its shadow is somehow not normal. The Sun is at our back, and the shadow has stretched towards us.”3 The “backwards” shadow is the first visual evidence that the Zone is not subject to the laws of physics, at least as humans understand them. Late in the novel, Red sees the Zone’s green sunrise: “In the east the mountains seemed black, but above them flared and overflowed a familiar emerald glow: the green dawn of the Zone.”4 These details might be dismissed as science fiction window-dressing, a charge that could be more easily leveled at the Strugatskiis’ early story “Zabytyi eksperiment” [The Forgotten Experiment, 1959], in which an explosion at a laboratory devoted to the study of mesons creates a vast uninhabitable zone in which animals display bizarre mutations and in which a strange “blue fog” [goluboi tuman] can arise without warning. The story follows a group of scientists as they journey into this restricted area to check on the titular experiment—a “time engine” [dvigatel′ vremeni] that has been running unchecked for forty-eight years.5 “Zabytyi eksperiment” is a kind of trial run of Piknik, albeit with none of the cosmological 3 Ibid., 6: 367. 4 Ibid., 6: 484. 5 This “engine” is based on the causal mechanics developed by Nikolai Kozyrev, discussed in Chapter One.

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implications: the story ends rather tidily, with the “time engine” presented as a great achievement for humanity’s energy needs. In a manifestation of a trope typical of 1950s science fiction, all the (pseudo-)scientific underpinnings of the story are explicitly explained. The “blue fog,” for instance, is apparently a result of the interaction of “nonquantized protomaterial” [nekvantovannaia protomateriia] with water vapor.6 BN in his commentary to the story dismisses this explanatory section, saying that it hangs over the story “like the rotting corpse of an albatross” [gniiushchim trupom al′batrosa].7 It was such early literary semi-failures that led the Strugatskiis to develop their otkaz (see the introduction), which is realized to a great degree in Piknik. There, the “green dawn” is mentioned without further clarification. While the green dawn of the Zone might be explained as analogous to aurorae, certain phenomena of the Zone that have implications for thermodynamics are not so easily categorized. One of the topics of a conversation Pil′man has in the third chapter with Richard Noonan—a midlevel functionary in the Harmont branch of the International Institute of Otherearthly Cultures and a black-market profiteer in items stolen from the Zone—is the so-called pokoiniki [dead people]. The pokoiniki are the reanimated remains of individuals who died before the Visitation; most have crawled out of the ground to return to their families. They resemble the modern horror-movie zombie only superficially, as they present no apparent danger to living humans. When Noonan confesses to finding these one of the most upsetting phenomena associated with the Zone, Pil’man answers: Oh, these dead people of yours … […] Listen, Richard, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You’re an educated man, after all… Don’t you understand that, from the point of view of fundamental principles, your dead people are not in the least degree any more or less an amazing thing than the eternal batteries? It’s just that the “so-and-sos” violate the first law of thermodynamics, and the dead people the second—that’s the only difference. In a sense, we’re all cave men: we can’t imagine anything more terrifying than a phantom or a vampire. But in the meantime a violation of the principle of causality is a far more terrifying thing than a whole flock of ghosts… More so that any of these Rubenshtein’s monsters … or Vallenshtein’s?8

6 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 504. 7 Ibid., 1: 659. 8 Ibid., 6: 463.

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Causality in physics is a simple and basic principle stating that a cause must always precede its effect. An intuitive illustration of this concept is given by Zeh in his 2001 The Physical Basis of The Direction of Time: After a stone has been dropped into a pool, one observes concentrically diverging (‘defocusing’) waves. Similarly, after an electric current has been switched on, one finds a retarded electromagnetic field that is moving away from its source. Since the fundamental laws of nature, which describe these phenomena, are invariant under time-reversal, they are equally compatible with the reverse phenomena, in which concentrically focussing waves (and whatever was caused by the stone—such as heat) would ‘conspire’ in order to eject the stone out of the water. Deviations from the time reversal symmetry of the laws would modify this argument only in detail, as one merely had to alter the reverse phenomena correspondingly.9

Causality is intimately connected to the concept of the “time’s arrow” a visualization suggested by the English astronomer Arthur Eddington to explain the so-called “asymmetry of time”—that it flows in one direction only. Eddington uses the phrase “time’s arrow” to describe, as he puts it, “this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.”10 Pil′man is referring to causality not in Eddington’s more general sense, but as it relates specifically to thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics is closely related to the law of conservation of energy, which states that the total energy of a closed system is constant, and that energy, while it can exist in one or another form, can be neither created nor destroyed. The eternal batteries violate this law in that they seem to create limitless energy. The second law of thermodynamics has to do with a statistical increase in entropy over time in a given system. The pokoiniki violate this law by returning from a state of decay to one at least resembling life, the extreme degree of this “life” exhibited by the ability of their severed body parts to continue to “live.” Here the effect (decay) has been reversed, while the cause (death), apparently remains in effect, hence the violation of causality. Entropy as a concept is closely connected to the thermodynamical arrow of time, which Zeh characterizes by “the increase of entropy according to the Second Law.” He goes on to say: 9 H. D. Zeh, The Physical Basis of The Direction of Time (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2001), 15. 10 A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 69.

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Since the whole universe is defined as an absolutely closed system (even if infinite), its total entropy, or the mean entropy of co-expanding volume elements, should according to this law evolve towards its maximum—the so-called Wärmetod (heat death).11

The Strugatskiis’ fascination with the philosophical implications of the laws of thermodynamics, particularly the second, finds much fuller expression in their novel Za milliard let do kontsa sveta [A Billion Years until the End of the World, 1974], which will be considered at length in Chapter Seven. A 2001 question addressed to BN on the frequent occurrence of the concept of nondecreasing entropy in their works is grouped in Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody under Za milliard let, but really applies to several works, including Piknik. BN answers: It is probably because at one time Clausius’s hypothesis concerning “the heat death of the Universe” made an indelible impression on me. Now all of these “eschatological” ideas have been reexamined (in favor of greater optimism), and the idea of entropy is being reexamined, but, nonetheless, no one has repealed the second law of thermodynamics. It’s a powerful law, you have to agree. It makes an impression [Vpechatliaet].12

BN’s admiration for the second law lends additional impact to the overturning of this law that the pokoiniki represent. As in later works, the Strugatskiis construct hells by destroying or undermining concepts in astronomy and physics—fields that are particularly meaningful to them. In Piknik this destruction—amounting to nothing less than an overturning of some of the founding principles of modern physics—is mentioned in passing and might easily be overlooked. Later works show a gradual trend towards making this construction-of-hell-by-destruction more central to the work in question. For the present, it is sufficient simply to note a mid-career instance of this trend. The “meteor shower” origin of the Visitation marks this work as the Strugatskiis’ first in which the Universe itself is presented as monumentally indifferent to humanity, if not actively wishing humans harm. This indifference is contained in the title of the novel itself, which may suggest pleasant associations for the uninformed reader. Instead, the metaphorical “picnickers” are not humans, but some race of hypothetical superbeings 11 Zeh, The Physical Basis, 37. 12 Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 230.

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who have abandoned their “trash” without a second thought. Pil′man acts as the Strugatskiis’ mouthpiece when he presents this metaphor to Noonan during their conversation: A picnic. Picture it: a forest, a village, a meadow. A car drives from the village to the meadow, and out of the car disembark young people, bottles, baskets with provisions, girls, transistor radios, video cameras… A fire is lit, tents are erected, music is turned on. And then they leave. The beasts, birds, and insects who all night had looked on in horror at what was transpiring crawl out of their hiding places. And what do they see? Some engine oil has leaked onto the grass, gasoline has been poured out, dead spark plugs and oil filters are scattered here and there. There are rags and burned-out light bulbs lying around, and someone has dropped a crescent wrench. Mud that was picked up from some unknown swamp has been left by tire treads… well you know what I mean, the remains of the fire, the apple cores, candy wrappers, food cans, empty bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ripped-up newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from other meadows…13

Whatever the origin of objects in the Zone, there is a strong implication that their creators did not notice humanity, just as hikers do not notice the insects that they trample as they set up camp. The real human suffering caused by the Visitation, taken together with the cosmically local, insular nature of this suffering puts humanity in the position of the beetle described by Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure [III: I, 78–80]: And the poor beetle that we tread upon In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies.

The interaction of the indifferent Universe with an injured, insignificant humanity is made more pointed by the novel’s deep intertextual relationship with Pushkin’s 1833 poem Mednyi vsadnik [The Bronze Horseman]. The first explicit suggestion of this relationship can be found in Pil′man’s presentation to Noonan of the ways in which humanity has proven worthy of admiration: You ask me: what makes man great? […] That he has created a second nature? That he has set in motion almost cosmic forces? That in a tiny space of time he has taken possession of the planet and hacked through a window 13 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 6: 455.

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into the Universe? No! What makes him great is that he, in spite of all this, has remained whole and intends to continue doing so.14

The phrase “hacked through a window into the Universe” [prorubil okno vo Vselennuiu] is an explicit reference to the following lines (12–20) from the prologue of Pushkin’s poem: And he thought: From here we will threaten the Swede. Here a city will be founded To spite our lordly neighbor. By nature here we are bound To hack through a window into Europe, To stand on firm leg by the sea. Here along waves new to them All flags will come to us as guests And we will begin to feast in the vastness.15

Pil′man’s paraphrasing of Pushkin sets up an implicit comparison between the goals of humanity for contact, space exploration, etc., with those of Peter the Great in his building of St. Petersburg. While this comparison is problematic (it is the Universe that has “hacked through a window” into humanity, not the reverse), it motivates an examination of the parallels between the two works, parallels that turn out to be not at all trivial.16 Such an examination is closely connected to what Howell characterizes as plot prefiguration. She writes: If the author uses a well-known motif to pattern and anticipate the modern plot, then any deviations, changes, or additions to the underlying pattern are inherenly meaningful. Moreover, once the reader has discerned the beginnings of a recognizable pattern of allusions, a set of expectations is activated about what can possibly happen as the plot develops further and the prefigurative motif is adhered to. In this regard, the location and context

14 Ibid., 6: 455–56. 15 A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1948), 5: 135. 16 I must acknowledge my former student Joseph Gates, who for my class on Soviet science fiction in the spring of 2012 wrote a short essay entitled “An Exploration of the Petersburg Myth in The Bronze Horseman and Roadside Picnic,” in which he presented preliminary versions of some of the conclusions that are made in this chapter.

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in which bits of the prefigurative motif occur is more important than the frequency of their occurrence.17

Thus, the reader who recognizes Pil′man’s quotation can not only expect Piknik to feature elements of Pushkin’s poem, but also look back over the pages leading up to this moment in chapter three with the expectation of finding connections there, as well. Since Mednyi vsadnik was first published in 1834 (viciously abridged by Nicholas I), critics have sought to understand the sympathies of Pushkin’s narrator, and, by extension, of Pushkin himself. A tonal and thematic contradiction between the prologue and the body of the poem was noted early on: in the former the narrator praises Peter and his namesake city, while in the latter he relates how the low-ranking clerk Evgenii suffers the loss of his fiancée Parasha, and later his mind and his life—all as the result of one of the frequent floods that plague a city that should not have been built on a river delta. Two critical schools of the poem—“State” and “Humanitarian”—argue, respectively, that Pushkin meant the suffering of Evgenii to be an acceptable loss for the greater good or that Evgenii’s madness and death are meant to convey a message of social censure. Still others argue, among them Andrew Kahn in his 1998 study of the poem, that “the power of the poem lies precisely in its unwillingness to resolve a tragic conflict.”18 In other words, they assert that Pushkin’s poem expresses both admiration for Peter’s achievement and horror at its results. Additionally, Mednyi vsadnik is considered a founding text both of the Petersburg Myth—the idea that the circumstances of the city’s construction and its geographical location make it somehow otherworldly and sinister—and for the literary figure of the malen′kii chelovek, the “little man” who is ground to a pulp under the wheel of the state. A strikingly similar dynamic can be observed in Piknik, in which the benefits to humanity (in medicine, energy, etc.) that have been brought by the Visitation parallel Pushkin’s prologue and the lofty goals of Peter, while the destroyed lives of the stalkers and those living near the Zones recall Evgenii’s madness and unmourned death. There is a moment in the novel that captures this contradiction perfectly. In chapter two, Red has boarded an elevator in the hotel where he is to meet with some black-marketers to fence the items he has just brought back from the Zone. A woman in the elevator is wearing a necklace made out of the so-called chernye bryzgi [black sprays] set in silver. At that moment, Red has in his briefcase, among other items, sixteen such “sprays” in a plastic bag. His partner on this particular 17 Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 21. 18 Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (London: Bristol Classics Press, 1998), 13.

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expedition had been Burbridge, whose stalker handle—“The Vulture” [Sterviatnik]—came about because those who accompanied him into the Zone tended not to return. On this occasion, however, Burbridge has fallen into a substance nicknamed the ved′min studen′ [witch’s aspic], one of the most dangerous items in the Zone, leaving his legs forever “de-boned.” At the end of the chapter, Red is arrested, leaving his wife and daughter to fend for themselves for several years. Finally, the sample of the ved′min studen′ that the two stalkers had procured at great personal expense later ends up in a private laboratory, where an attempt to study the substance with waldoes19 in a containment chamber leads to the death of thirty-five people and the injury of at least a hundred others. Thus there is an implicit contrast—and reproach—in the physical proximity of Red to the woman in the “black spray” necklace: lives are destroyed to produce trivial adornments. There is a similar dynamic at work in the prologue to Mednyi vsadnik, in which Pushkin’s narrator lists the beautiful features of Peter’s city—elegant palaces and towers, etc.—whose appeal will fade as the reader is exposed to the destruction of the flood and Evgenii’s personal tragedy. The black sprays may be one of the more scientifically profound objects found in the Zone. As Pil′man explains to Noonan: Well, you know about the properties of [the black sprays]. If you send a beam of light into one of those spherules, then the light comes out of it with a delay, except that the delay depends on the weight of the spherule, on its size, and on certain other parameters, and the frequency of the light coming out is always lower than that of the light going in… What is this? Why? There’s a crazy idea that these “black sprays” of yours are gigantic regions of a space that possesses properties different from those of our own and which takes on this involute form under the influence of our space… […] In short, objects like this are completely useless for the real-life issues of present-day humanity, though from a purely scientific point of view they have fundamental significance. These are answers to questions that we aren’t yet capable of asking, answers that have fallen from the sky.20

This information makes the uses that have been found for the black sprays still more ridiculous, particularly since people die to bring such items out of the Zone. Pushkin sets up a similar implicit comparison in his prologue, in 19 A term commonly used to refer to remote manipulators, after the title character of Robert Heinlein’s 1942 story about a disabled man who lives in a space station, using strength-multiplying devices to augment his weak body. 20 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 6: 460.

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which the speaker concentrates his praise on what could be called the more trivial, decorative aspects of Petersburg, such as the balls and feasts that are the setting for a hundred odd scenes of aristocratic life in the Russian literature of the nineteenth century. Even the city’s harsh climate is used in service of making the cheeks of pretty girls more red (59–66): I love your cruel winter’s Still air and frost, The running of sleds along the wide Neva, Girls’ faces redder than roses, And the gleam and noise and murmur of balls, [And also], in the hour of a bachelor feast The fizzing of foamy glasses And the punch’s blue flame.21

Before this passage, he even celebrates the astronomical phenomenon of the near-constant sunlight in the early summer months—the White Nights— not as an example of nature’s beauty, but as one that allows him to save money on lighting costs (48–58): [I love] your pensive nights’ Transparent twilight, their moonless gleam, When in my room I write, I read without a lamp, And the sleeping giants Of the deserted streets are clear, and The Admiralty spire is bright, And, not letting nighttime darkness Onto the golden heavens, One dawn hurries to relieve another, Having given night a half hour.22

These passages, read in the context of the whole of the poem, seem almost callously cheerful: can the deaths of Evgenii and Parasha be worth the existence of a city in which bachelors can drink punch topped with blue flame? Given the stark contrast between the narrator’s world and Evgenii’s, it seems clear that Pushkin compels the reader to consider this very question. 21 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 136–37. 22 Ibid., 5: 136.

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A variant of this contrast is presented earlier still in the prologue (lines 25–32), when the narrator describes how the Finnish fisherman—“nature’s sad stepson” (pechal′nyi pasynok prirody)—who formerly could be seen throwing his “decrepit seine” into the Neva has been replaced by the palaces and towers of Peter’s city. The fate of this fisherman is not considered for a moment, nor is the loss of his home and means of supporting himself. He is mirrored at the end of the poem (465–67) by the generic fisherman who sometimes moors his boat on the unnamed island where Parasha’s ruined house has washed up, the house in front of which Evgenii’s corpse is found and quickly buried in the final lines. Present in this scene as well is the element of leisure that had been introduced in the prologue: Evgenii’s island is also the destination of a generic clerk tooling around in a boat on a Sunday (469–71). A clerk, however, is not privy to the balls and parties described by the narrator in the introduction—he is an image of the Evgenii who has not been driven to madness and death, and his leisure activity is essentially similar to the work of the fisherman. Finally, the anonymous crew of the barge that removes Parasha’s house are present on the island only in the third person plural verbs svezli, nashli, pokhoronili [they hauled away, they found, they buried]. Thus the end of Mednyi vsadnik feature three nameless types associated with the Civic reading of the poem, ghostly little men clustered around the central Little Man of Evgenii. Their dominance of the final lines—particularly given the boatman-clerk’s pitiful reflection of the kinds of activities exemplified by the prologue’s punch topped with blue flame— suggest an inherent sympathy on Pushkin’s part for the lives ruined and upturned by the building of Petersburg and by its continued existence. The influence of the city is felt even on a bare island in the Neva that remains in its natural state, unburdened by stone and mortar. In fact, the temporary placement of Parasha’s ruined house on this island suggests another rebuke directed at Peter and his city. On line 471, the island itself is described as “deserted” [pustynnyi], a fact that is further emphasized by the lines that follow: “There grew/ Not a single blade of grass” [Ne vzroslo/ Tam ni bylinki] [471–72]. After the flood casts it aside, Parasha’s house remains high above the water: “Above the water/ It remained like a black bush” [Nad vodoiu/ Ostalsia on, kak chernyi kust] (474–75). Thus the wreck of the house on the island is, in essense, a man-made object perched on a local elevation, and the house and island together suggest a twisted reflection of the monument to Peter erected on the Thunder-stone. Recall, too, that the Bronze Horseman was itself “on an island” when the

Exceptions to the Laws of Thermodynamics: Roadside Picnic

city was flooded: at the end of part one of the poem, the statue stands “at an unwavering height, above the troubled Neva” [V nekolebimoi vyshine/ Nad vozmushchennoiu Nevoiu] (256–57) as the whole of Senate Square is under water. Adding to this visual overlap is Evgenii’s burial in the sand of this island, where Parasha and her mother found their metaphorical grave. Thus this double of the Bronze Horseman is also a barrow for the only named victims of the flood, and, by extension, a monument to those killed by the city just as the statue is a monument to its founder. Pushkin’s island-barrow is reflected in Piknik by the numerous stalkers who lie where they died throughout the Zone. Also, the key thematic parallel in the novel to Pushkin’s prologue and its depiction of trivial leisure enjoyed on the backs of the less fortunate is the apparent benefits to humanity that the Visitation has brought. In addition to the dubious benefit of the black sprays being used as jewelry, there is also the very real benefit of the eternal batteries, which in chapter three are shown as being the sole power source for cars. Clean, unlimited energy is certainly a positive development, and there is a general assumption, mouthed by several characters over the course of the novel, that the derelict alien technology of the Zones will one day bring still greater benefits to humanity. Both the radio interviewer in the prologue and Noonan (in chapter three) pose questions to Pil′man that express such a hope. Other comments imply, however, that the supposed benefits of the Zones will eventually prove detriments. The strongest such assertion is spoken by Red to a man who is trying to convince him to leave Harmont, calling the town a “hole” [dyra]: It’s all true. Our little jerkwater is a hole. It was always a hole and it’s still a hole. But now […] it’s a hole into the future. And through that hole we’ll pump something into your mangy world that’ll change everything. Life will be different, correct, and everyone will have what they need. There’s a hole for you. There’s knowledge coming out of this hole. And when we have this knowledge, we’ll make everyone rich, and we’ll fly to the stars, and we’ll find our way to anywhere we like. That’s the kind of hole we have here…23

The repetitions of the word “hole” [dyra]—eight in the passage—suggest Harmont as a twisted variation of Petersburg as the “Window to Europe,” with the hole/window substitution leaving little doubt as to what kinds of benefits will come pouring through this aperture. These words are not entirely Red’s, but are mixed with statements made by his friend Kirill 23 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 6: 379.

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Panov, an idealistic Russian scientist working at the Institute. Earlier in the chapter, they had gone into the Zone, where the Russian had accidently touched a silvery “spider web” that was located near the pustyshka that they had gone to retrieve. Kirill dies in the shower of a ruptured heart not long after their return, a fact that Red has not yet learned when he gives this speech. The death of the idealistic Kirill for the nebulous greater goal of the better world that will be made by the knowledge that is coming out of the “hole” of Harmont is presented in the novel as a starkly uneven trade. The Russian scientist leaves behind his suitcase (in which Red carries items from the Zone to be fenced in chapter two) and a pile of research results that are published as posthumous articles. More importantly, he leaves behind a legacy of kindness that follows Red into the final chapter, as the stalker reflects repeatedly on his inability to follow Kirill’s example while holding onto his memories of his friend, the only person unsullied by the filth of the Zone. Red at one point recalls Kirill as “holy” [sviatoi], an epithet that draws attention to the famous, “first” Kirill. St. Cyril (827–869), the Orthodox Christian missionary from present-day Macedonia, who, together with his brother Methodius invented the Glagolitic alphabet for the illiterate Slavs, a descendant of which—Cyrillic—now bears his name. Kirill’s presence as a foreigner educating the locals about the Zone parallels St. Cyril’s mission among the Slavs, and his “voice from beyond the grave” in posthumous articles is a weakened version of the posthumous miracles that are obligatory in any hagiography. Just before they go into the Zone, in fact, it seems to Red that Kirill is silently praying behind the transparent mask of his protective suit; Red reassures his friend that stalkers get into heaven at the head of the line [Stalkerov v rai bez ocheredi propuskaiut!], a “saintly” benefit for decidedly non-saintly people.24 But if Kirill is a “saint,” then for what holy cause has he died? No matter what the benefits of the Zone to humanity as a whole, there can be no question that the lives of those who make these benefits accessible are ruined. The mental and moral exhaustion of Red is the central example of this destruction, but there are peripheral figures whose ruin is more grotesque. One of these is Dickson, whose stalker handle is Suslik [Ground Squirrel], the only person to have survived an encounter with the so-called miasorubka [the meat grinder], an invisible force that twists to

24 Ibid., 6: 359.

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death those it seizes. Dickson first appears in the novel when Red arrives at Burbridge’s house after their aforementioned foray into the Zone: Redrick rang the bell several times, the gate opened with a gentle creak, and Redrick, taking his time, went along the sandy path with rose bushes planted alongside; Ground Squirrel was already standing on the porch, crooked, dark-crimson, avidly shaking all over with a desire to serve. He impatiently turned to the side, lowered one spastically groping foot from the step, got his footing, began to stretch his other foot to the lower step, all the while jerking, jerking his good arm in Red’s direction, as if to say, “Just a minute, just a minute …”25

The background behind Dickson’s disfigurement is given only in the final chapter, near the end of the novel, but his ruined life is never the focus of Red’s attention. A ruined life more essential to the novel is that of Red’s daughter Maria, or Martyshka [Monkey]26 a creature covered in fur who has lost the ability—or the desire—to speak as she has gotten older, and who, according to doctors, is no longer truly human. Martyshka’s muteness and lack of responsiveness to the world around are presented as far more terrifying than her strange fur. In chapter two of the novel, she behaves like a normal little girl, and even her fur is meant to be understood not as a terrible mutation, but as a lovely feature that makes her unique. In the scene in which Martyshka is first depicted, Red goes in her room as she is sleeping. The scenario is typical of a young child in bed—her blanket has been flung to the floor and her shirt has slipped up her back, exposing her fur: “Redrick could not help himself, and stroked her back, covered in warm, golden fur, and for the thousandth time he was amazed at how silky and long her fur was.”27 A few pages later, Martyshka is awake, and behaving like an average child, climbing all over her father and inundating him with news. The scene is perfectly ordinary save for the detail of the girl’s dark eyes with no whites 25 Ibid., 6: 421. 26 Martyshka technically refers to Old World monkeys (the superfamily Cercopithecoidea), but the word is common in Russian when the monkey in question is regarded with some degree of affection. For instance, the “Monkey” character in Soviet cartoons always bears this name. See the series 38 popugaev [38 Parrots] or Tigrenok i ego druz′ia [Tiger Cub and his Friends], the latter of which includes the extremely popular “Po doroge s oblakami” [A Stroll with Clouds, 1984]. These cartoons came out well after the Strugatskiis had written Piknik, and serve here only to illustrate the semantic context of the word in Russian. 27 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 6: 405.

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and the golden fur on her cheeks. It is only when, in chapter three, she has begun apparently to devolve mentally that Martyshka’s animal-like appearance becomes jarring, not because she is violent or monstrous, but because she seems emptied, distant, and indifferent. In this chapter, set a year or two after the second, when Noonan visits the Shuhardts’ apartment, Martyshka answers the door, but seems not to recognize the familiar visitor and does not react to him in any way. When Guta, Red’s wife, comments that Noonan needs to get married, he starts to trot out an old response—that he is waiting for Martyshka to grow up, but the sentence dies in his mouth. At the end of the chapter, Martyshka displays affection towards her grandfather, who died years before the Visitation but has returned to his son’s household and sits now in the apartment, his blue-tinted hand looking like a chicken’s claw. Noonan looks at the pair as “two monstrous spawn of the Zone” [dva chudovishchnykh porozhdeniia Zony].28 By the fourth chapter, Red’s mental image of Martyshka focuses on her gloomy mordochka [little animal face] grown over with coarse, brown fur, a contrast to the earlier depiction of her smooth, silky fur. Even the word describing the fur itself has changed: the diminutive, affectionate sherstka has given way to the unmarked sherst′, the coat of an animal. Martyshka is a literary descendant of the little girl in Dostoevskii’s Brat′ia Karamazovy [The Brothers Karamazov, 1880] whose tears and prayers are worth more than “the entire world of knowledge,” but her lineage goes back even further, at least to Pushkin’s Evgenii. The Strugatskiis’ engagement with Mednyi vsadnik is deepest in the fourth and final chapter of Piknik, which should be read as an expansion and reworking of Evgenii’s confrontation of the Bronze Horseman. In this chapter, Red, accompanied by Burbridge’s son Arthur, has returned to the Zone to seek the so-called “Golden Sphere” [Zolotoi shar], a unique item that, according to stalker folklore, grants wishes. After enduring terrors of the Zone that might be likened to Evgenii’s night spent on the marble lion29 28 Ibid., 6: 475. 29 The lion sculptures Pushkin describes were made by Paolo Triscorni; they stand before the Lobanov-Rostovskii Palace, built in 1817–1819. At present, the lions are across Aleksandrovskii Garden from Senate Square, next to St. Isaac’s Cathedral. In his notes to the poem, Izmailov writes that the trees that presently conceal the Bronze Horseman from the view of one standing by the marble lions were planted at the end of the nineteenth century. In Pushkin’s day, Evgenii’s view would have been unobscured. He also writes that the poet adopts a local legend, which emerged from the November 7, 1824 flood, of a man named Iakovlev who rode out the flood atop one of the lions (A. S. Pushkin, Mednyi vsadnik, ed. N. V. Izmailov [Moscow: Nauka, 1978], 267).

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during the flood, the two approach the abandoned quarry where the Sphere sits, partially buried under crumbled stone: It was not golden, it was more like copper, reddish, completely smooth, and  it  shone dully in the Sun. It lay under the far wall of the pit, having snugly installed itself among the piles of slumped rocks, and even from there it was apparent how massive it was and how heavily it had crushed down its bed.30

Crucially, the word used to describe the Sphere’s color is mednyi [copper], the same adjective famously applied to Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. The piles of stones around the Sphere recall the famous Thunder-stone on which Falconet’s monument stands, the largest stone ever moved by human hands. Furthermore, both the Sphere’s uniqueness and its purported attributes make it the closest the Zone has to a creator: the threat and promise embodied in the object reflect those of the wider Zone. Thus, when Arthur, and then Red, approach the Sphere with a mixture of defiance and hope, their actions recall Evgenii’s confrontation (432–447): He stood gloomy Before the proud idol And, clenching his teeth, clasping his fingers, As if possessed by a black might, “[Hey], you wonder-working builder!” He whispered, shuddering viciously, “Just you wait!” And suddenly headlong He set off running. It seemed To him, that the threatening tsar’s face, In an instant flaming into fury, Quietly turned … And he across the empty square Runs and hears behind him— Like the rumbling of thunder— A heavy-ringing galloping Along the dazed sidewalk.31

30 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 6: 501. 31 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 148.

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There is a moment much earlier in the novel that prefigures the confrontational meeting of Red and the Sphere. Red is looking with Kirill at an Institute-produced photographic map of the Zone, speculating on how a stalker might find it useful. He concludes that the map’s utility is diminished by the fact that stalkers go into the Zone only at night: “But then again, you wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it when you’re showing your ass to the stars and can’t see your hands in front of your face…”32 The main interest of this sentence is the phrase zadnitsu zvezdam pokazyvaesh′, which contains the elegantly rude suggestion of a stalker making an obscene gesture to the indifferent stars from which the Visitation originated. This reading suggests something of an echo of Evgenii’s uzho tebe! The interpretation of this phrase might be widened until it becomes a “middle finger” extended at the entire Universe, a gesture of defiance directed at the Strugatskiis’ first true cosmology of Hell. At the end of Pushkin’s poem, when Evgenii’s corpse is found on the nameless island in the Neva delta next to Parasha’s ruined house, the implication is that his death is a direct result of his confrontation of the statue of Peter and the “chase” that follows. (Pushkin does not permit the reader to conclude whether or not the Bronze Horseman actually pursues Evgenii.) In a metaphorical reflection of Evgenii being crushed by the wheel of the state, Arthur, as he runs towards the Sphere is literally ground up by one of the most terrifying phenomena of the Zone, the aforementioned miasorubka: And the boy was still going down, dancing, along the steep slope, striking out some inconceivable tap-dance, and white dust flew up into the air from under his heels, and he was shouting something at the top of his voice, very clearly, and very gleefully, and very triumphantly—it was like a song or an incantation, and Redrick thought that this was the first time over the whole existence of the mining pit that someone had gone down along that road in such a way—like he was going to a festival. And at first he didn’t listen to what that talking skeleton key was yelling over there, but then it was like something clicked on in him, and he heard: “Happiness for everyone!… For free!… As much happiness as you want!… Everyone get over here!… There’s enough for everyone!… No one will go away snubbed!… For free!… Happiness! For free!…” And then he suddenly fell silent, as if an enormous hand had violently forced a gag into his mouth. And Redrick saw the transparent emptiness 32 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 6: 358.

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that had been hiding in the shadow of the excavator’s bucket seize him, jerk him into the air and slowly twist him with effort, like a housewife twists the clothes she’s washing when she squeezes the water out. Redrick had time to notice one of his dusty shoes fly off of his jerking foot and fly up into the air high above the pit. Then he turned away and sat down.33

The assumption that the Sphere can grant all wishes—implicit, too, in Arthur’s request—reflects Evgenii’s epithet for Peter: chudotvornyi, miracle-working. As is the case in Pushkin’s Petersburg, the only miracles in the Zone are terrible ones, a fact stated by Pil′man when he gives Noonan another possible explanation for the Visitation: Or this. The Visitation did actually take place, but it’s not at all over. We’re actually currently in a state of contact, only we don’t suspect it. The aliens have nestled into the Zones and are meticulously studying us, while at the same time preparing us for the “cruel miracles of what’s to come” [k “zhestokim chudesam griadushchego”]34

Pil′man is paraphrasing the final words of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1960), probably the work of science fiction closest in philosophical outlook to Piknik: the entire novel takes place on a research station floating above the watery surface of the titular planet, which may itself be a sentient being and which may be attempting to enter into contact with the humans on the station. The precise phrase is: “the time of cruel miracles has not yet passed” [nie minął czas okrutnych cudów].35 In both works, this phrase conveys a kind of dread before the limitless power of an alien force whose very nature is beyond understanding, and it is clear that any miracles that may originate from it will not resemble the wishes submitted. Just as in Tarkovskii’s Stalker, the ability of the Zone to grant wishes is never explicitly displayed. The Strugatskiis’ novel ends with Red’s repetition of Arthur’s wish, the young man lying wrenched to death somewhere off to the side. Arthur’s violent death—together with the near-death of both Arthur and Red on the way to the quarry where the Sphere rests—is the only “miracle” shown in the chapter. Yet it is explicitly stated that hope for a miracle is the main motive compelling Red to come on this final excursion into the Zone, specifically, a miracle for his daughter. The twin “miracles” of Maria’s reverse evolution and Red’s father’s resurrection define his and his 33 Ibid., 6: 502. 34 Ibid., 6: 456. 35 Stanisław Lem, Dzieła (Warsaw: Biblioteka Gazety Wyborczej, 2008), 3: 210.

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wife’s life, as exemplified by an incident that he recalls during the journey to the Sphere after having heard a mournful creaking sound in the fog: Redrick stared straight ahead and saw nothing. He was remembering something. It was night. He had woken up because of the same kind of noise, mournful and drawn-out, striking him as if in a dream. But it wasn’t a dream. It was Monkey screaming, sitting on her bed by the window, and from the other end of the house dad responded in a similar way, just as drawn-out and screechingly, only with a kind of additional grunting. And in this way they called back and forth and back and forth in the darkness: for a century, for a hundred years and then another hundred years. Guta woke up as well and took Redrick by the hand—he felt her shoulder that had instantly become covered in perspiration, and in this way they lay those entire hundred years and another hundred years and listened, and when Monkey fell silent and lied down, he waited for a little while longer, then got up, went down to the kitchen and greedily drank half a bottle of cognac. That was the night he started bingeing.36

Red, like Evgenii, is fighting for someone who is already lost: Parasha is already drowned when Pushkin’s clerk confronts the Bronze Horseman, and Monkey has slipped out of the species into which she was born by the time her father confronts the Golden Sphere. In a larger sense, the “State” reading of Mednyi vsadnik and Peter’s combination of power and unpredictability align perfectly with the cosmic hierarchy of Piknik, in which the whole of humanity is a “little man,” recovering from a wanton, vicious “flood.” Thus the cosmology of the Strugatskiis’ novel represents a kind of Pushkinian St. Petersburg on a universal scale, with the alien authors of the Visitation standing in for Pushkin’s mute, indifferent idol, a “foreign” reformer with absolute power who changes the world against the will and without the input of those who inhabit it. In terms of the development of alien, infernal cosmologies in the Strugatskiis’ works, Piknik occupies an important rung between Obitaemyi ostrov and Grad obrechennyi. In Ostrov, an accident of nature leads to the development of a false cosmology. In Grad, as will be shown, a seemingly new universe with a distinct cosmology is created as a prison or hell. In Piknik, humans are subject to a kind of “cosmological inconsistency” in which technology created by beings whose abilities recall Clarke’s Third Law—“any sufficiently

36 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 6: 481.

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advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”37—gives rise to discrete pockets of alien cosmologies where, as Pil′man points out, the laws of thermodynamics do not apply. While these pockets of exceptions to physics are quite real, they can be avoided or willfully ignored: witness the woman in the elevator wearing “involute space” in the form of a necklace. It is only the stalkers or those living in the immediate vicinity of a Zone who inhabit the prison in which the rules are suspended. Yet all those who are prisoner to these regions of cosmological inconsistency are subject to a kind of “house arrest”: their unfreedom is mitigated by the presence of familiar things, loved ones, etc. While the conditions in which they live are made all the more horrible by contrast of the familiar to the alien, it is undeniable that Piknik takes place in this world, and that the cosmological inconsistencies introduced by the Visitation are somewhat contained. Yet their tangible reality marks Piknik as the Strugatskiis’ first work in which the basic structure of the Universe is distorted, in which a physically new cosmological paradigm is created. Subsequent works in which the Strugatskiis pursue this cosmological question are no longer concerned with depicting cosmologies of Hell contained within the “real” world, but are set entirely inside these new cosmologies. In fact, the imagined cosmologies become progressively more extensive in Strugatskiis’ later works, to be considered in the next three chapters: Za milliard let presents cosmological problems within an earthly context; Grad obrechennyi considers a contained universe in which a variant of Earth seems to be imprisoned; Otiagoshchennye zlom presents a distorted cosmology that contains the entire observable Universe.

37 Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 36.

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“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World Редеет облаков летучая гряда; Звезда печальная, вечерняя звезда, Твой луч осеребрил увядшие равнины, И дремлющий залив, и черных скал вершины; Люблю твой слабый свет в небесной вышине: Он думы разбудил, уснувшие во мне. The fleeting bank of clouds grows sparse; Oh, sad star, star of evening, Your ray of light has silvered the faded valleys, The slumbering bay, and the black cliffs’ peaks; I love your weak light in heaven’s heights: It has awoken thoughts in me that had been sleeping. Pushkin, 1820

On 22 April 1974, BN’s friend Mikhail Kheifets was arrested for having written and distributed an essay called “Iosif Brodskii i nashe pokolenie” [Josef Brodsky and Our Generation]. The essay was shared only with trusted friends, but one of these persons surrendered Kheifets’s work to the authorities. BN and his wife were among those summoned to the Bol′shoi dom [the Big House], the Leningrad KGB headquarters, for questioning, and were at least briefly under threat of arrest as accomplices.1 The Strugatskii 1 Skalandis, Brat′ia Strugatskie, 392–93.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

brothers, almost exactly a year before the delo Kheifetsa, had already begun work on a short novel with the preliminary titles Faust, XX vek [Faust, Twentieth Century] and Za milliard let do kontsa sveta (do Strashnogo Suda) [A Billion Years until the End of the World (until Judgement Day)] in which they planned to depict a collaboration between heaven and hell to limit the development of science. Early in the writing process, they were compelled to prioritize other projects, but BN writes in his commentary, “I am now certain that this delay of almost a year was to this novel’s benefit” [Ia uveren teper′, chto zaderzhka pochti na god poshla etoi povesti tol′ko v pol′zu] and that his encounter with the gears of the State shaped Za milliard let into one of their very best works.2 The power of said gears served as the inspiration for one of the Strugatskiis’ most compelling—and most cosmologically profound—ideas, that of the Gomeostaticheskoe Mirozdanie [The Homeostatic Cosmos].3 This idea is revelant not only as a milestone in the Strugatskiis’ creative progress developing cosmologies of hell, but also as a fundamental element of what will be termed the novel’s “literary cosmology.” The novel begins with Dmitrii Malianov, an astronomer specializing in stellar dynamics, working in his Leningrad apartment on a hot July morning. His wife and son are in Odessa with her mother. Malianov is on the verge of a breakthrough in his work on the behavior of stars as they pass through clouds of dust, but is constantly interrupted by seemingly random events. At first the interruptions are trivial: wrong numbers, the delivery of groceries that he never ordered, the arrival of his wife’s friend Lidka Ponomareva as a houseguest. The situation becomes more serious and strange when Malianov’s neighbor Snegovoi, a physicist who works in a top-secret institute, begins to ask odd questions about Malianov’s work, and the next morning is discovered dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. An investigator named Zykov, dressed incongruously in jeans, a black shirt, and sunglasses (like, as Malianov notes to himself, a Tonton Macoute4), arrives the next morning. 2 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 583 3 The translation of this term is problematic, as English does not have a word for the Universe that aligns with the archaic, poetic register of mirozdanie. A modern version of the Old English middangeard (the middle yard or enclosure, the middle habitation, “the region between heaven and hell, or the inhabited land surrounded by the sea” (R. D. Fulk, et al., eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008], 413) might be a good fit, but J. R. R. Tolkien’s use of this term has weighted it with connotations that are manifestly incompatible with the present context. 4 Tonton Macoute, or “Uncle Gunnysack,” was a member of a Haitian paramilitary force in the late 1950s, named after a local variant of the bogeyman who captures children in a sack to eat for breakfast.

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Recalling Dostoevskii’s Porfirii Petrovich (a reference BN acknowledges),5 Zykov accuses Malianov of having killed Snegovoi and threatens him with arrest and imprisonment before disappearing for the remainder of the narrative. The rest of the novel consists of Malianov’s attempts, either alone or with friends—scientists and researchers who have come under similar pressures—to make sense of the situation. The events in the novel become so fantastic—a telegram sent to Malianov’s wife by Snegovoi hours after he had killed himself, a tree that grows overnight in the courtyard of his building—that the most plausible explanation turns out to be the one put forth by Malianov’s friend and upstairs neighbor, the mathematician Vecherovskii. His theory of the “Homeostatic Cosmos” posits that the second law of thermodynamics itself is preventing intelligent beings from making too much order in the Universe: If there existed only the law of nondecreasing entropy, the structure of the cosmos would disappear, and chaos would reign. But, on the other hand, if there existed or even just prevailed only all-powerful intelligence, unceasingly perfecting itself, then there, too, the structure of the cosmos prescribed by homeostasis would be violated. This would not mean, of course, that the cosmos would become better or worse, it would just become different, contrary to the principle of homeostasis, for unceasingly developing intelligence can have only one goal: the altering of the nature of Nature. Therefore the very essence of the Homeostasis of the Cosmos consists in the maintenance of equilibrium between the growth of entropy and the development of intelligence.6

Thus the very structure of the Universe inhibits the growth of knowledge, and the novel makes the practice of doing science into a matter of life and death. The Strugatskiis underscore the far-reaching implications of Vecherovskii’s theory by suggesting that it represents a new cosmology. Just before he presents his idea to Malianov, he says: “But make an effort just the same to discard epicycles, try just the same to place not the earth in the center, but the Sun. You’ll sense right away just how much everything simplifies.7”8 5 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 584. 6 Ibid., 7: 96. 7 A mathematician talking to an astrophysicist, Vecherovskii uses the Russian verb uprostit′sia, usually used to refer to the simplification of the terms of an equation. 8 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 95.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

Epicycles, an essential component of the now-discarded cosmological model of geocentricism, were posited as an explanation of the so-called “retrograde motion” of planets like Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. As is now known, Earth’s closer proximity to the Sun makes the perimeter of its orbit much smaller than that of more distant planets. Therefore, as it orbits, Earth overtakes these planets, causing them to appear to travel backwards against the background of the stars. When geocentrism was still the accepted model, it was proposed that each planet exhibiting retrograde motion actually orbited a center of gravity that in turn moved along its larger orbit (a so-called deferent) about the Sun. By suggesting that Malianov is wedded to epicycles, Vecherovskii is placing his mind inside an outdated cosmological paradigm so as to prepare him to abandon his familiar, comfortable, incorrect universe. This use of a discarded cosmology provides an essential thematic link to Vtoroe nashestvie marsian in Chapter Three (Polyphemus’s rejection of the concept of plurality of worlds) and Obitaemyi ostrov in Chapter Four (the discarded cosmologies that crowd the opening sentences). In both of those works, however, the familiar “outer” cosmology remains consistent with scientific consensus. Here the new cosmology represents a paradigm shift both for the characters and the reader. The second law of thermodynamics as a disturbingly “sentient” antagonist is a compelling counterpoint to the exceptions to this law that were discussed in the previous chapter. The malleability of the second law is a central component of the cosmology of hell in Piknik na obochine, and the fact that the basic physical laws fixed by human science are merely “suggestions” undermines the entire scientific edifice. Here the second law brooks no exceptions (a fact perfectly consistent with modern science), but the vehemence with which it maintains the balance of order to disorder is terrifying. To an astronomer like Malianov (and, by extension, Malianov’s creators), the notion that the Universe observes the observer not just passively, but with malevolent potential is profoundly unnerving. Worse still is the long reach of the Homeostatic Cosmos: at the end of the Za milliard let, Vecherovskii is planning on taking all the abandoned research projects of the scientists under pressure, together with his own, to a weather station in the Pamir mountains, where he will attempt to avoid the Universe’s gaze. There are unambiguous suggestions that Vecherovskii will die a fool’s death, and BN has stated outright in the Interv′iu that the mathematician will meet a tragic end.9 In Piknik, by contrast, the cosmology of the Zones is discrete, contained within established 9 Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 228.

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borders, and the technological demons that inhabit them are released only by human intervention. Another thematic interaction between Piknik and Za milliard let regards the problem of the supercivilization, a hypothetical, technologically advanced civilization capable of creating, for instance, the objects that “people” the Zones in the former work. One of the initial theories that are developed to explain the inexplicable phenomena that have been preventing the scientists gathered in Malianov’s apartment from working posits that their activities have drawn the attention of a supercivilization whose leaders wish to curtail these activities. This is the explicit explanation given to Weingarten, a biologist and one of Malianov’s oldest friends: he is visited by a small, red-haired man who emerges from his children’s room and states that “a certain extraterrestrial civilization has for a long time been following his, V. A. Weingarten’s scientific activities.”10 This “supercivilization” explanation is initially comforting because it fits neatly within one of the more overused tropes of science fiction.11 Vecherovskii dismisses the theory as “too human,” rejecting it also because: […] it’s a novel. Better yet, it’s a whole literary genre in cheap, bright covers. This is all just an attempt to cram an octopus into a tuxedo [Eto vse popytki natianut′ frachnuiu paru na os′minoga]. And not even an octopus, but an octopus who doesn’t actually exist…12

Just above this elegant and strange metaphor, Vecherovskii comments that, “for some reason or another, the transformation of civilizations into a supercivilization does not take place” [prevrashchenie tsivilizatsii v sverkhtsivilizatsiiu pochemu-to ne proiskhodit].13 Thus, in world of Za milliard let, the putative supercivilization that created the Zones—whether accidentally or by design—could not exist. Despite the grim atmosphere and the relentless misery that characterize Piknik, the mere existence of the Zones represents a kind of implied optimistic view of development of intelligent life: if aliens can create such miraculous objects, then humans could, as well. That the study of these objects will give humans 10 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 59. 11 The Strugatskiis use the trope of the supercivilization in their Noon Universe: many of the works set in this world reference the Stranniki [the Wanderers, or the Pilgrims], unseen beings whose existence is suggested only by their artifacts and their putative interference in human development. The Stranniki will be discussed in Chapter Eight. 12 Ibid., 7: 93. 13 Ibid., 7: 93.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

a boost in their journey along this path is voiced by several characters, a fact discussed in the previous chapter. Za milliard let, however, presents the sweaty Leningrad of some summer in the mid-1970s as the pinnacle not of human potential, but of human attainment—the Homeostatic Cosmos will permit no further steps forward. This problem represents a despair that is very particular to the Soviet Union of Brezhnev’s Zastoi [Stagnation], when it seemed to the Strugatskiis and their contemporaries that their present would be their and their children’s future, as well as that of untold future generations. Still worse, scientific progress in this future will be flat, and science will be static. Those who attempt to move science forward will be punished by an enemy who does not exist, and the decisive dissolution of the possibility of a supercivilization represents a kind of negative progress in the Strugatskiis’ development of ever-more infernal cosmologies. The equating of scientific discoveries with a threat to one’s existence is particularly personal in this case, and here the degree to which Malianov is an autobiographical depiction of BN is crucial for understanding the novel. The autobiographical aspects of Andrei Voronin—the protagonist of Grad obrechennyi whose moral immaturity and blind devotion to Stalin are artifacts of BN’s youth—will be discussed in the next chapter. Malianov, on the other hand, aligns very neatly with the BN of the time when the novel was composed: married, with a son, living in Leningrad. BN has stated on numerous occasions that the apartment in which the novel takes place is his own, in the building at the corner of Varshavskaia and Pobedy Streets, near Moskovskii Prospect,14 and, as Howell notes, his phone number “is simply [BN’s] Leningrad phone number with one digit changed.”15 Furthermore, the mathematical innards of the work that Malianov is doing are adapted from one of BN’s unfinished projects in stellar dynamics.16 Thus Malianov’s life can be viewed as one of BN’s possible past, as the life that he might have lived had he not been compelled to abandon his dissertation, and his apparent decision to abandon his work represents a very personal defeat, not only for BN, but for both brothers. The passage in which Malianov considers how the roots of his discovery reach back into his childhood is more than a little reminiscent of the interviews with AN quoted in Chapter One:

14 Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 230. 15 Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 117. 16 Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 231.

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That’s to say, of course, that it’ll be possible to get used to this, it’s probably possible to get used to anything in the world. To any loss. But just the same, if you think about it, what a considerable loss this will be! After all, I’ve been moving towards this for ten years. Not even ten years, but my whole life. From childhood, from the school club, from homemade telescopes, from calculating Wolf numbers using someone else’s observations… My M-Cavities, I really don’t know a thing about them, after all: what I might end up coming up with, what others who would become interested in them after me might come up with, might continue, develop, add something of their own and pass it on further, into the next age… They could probably come up with something considerable, and I’m losing something considerable if it turns out to be the embryo of convulsions that the Universe itself will rise up against. A billion years is a long time. In a billion years, a civilization can grow up out of a little lump of slime…17

The details of Malianov’s childhood endeavors in astronomy could be taken directly from AN’s reminiscences of making telescopes, calculating Wolf numbers, and dreaming of discovering asteroids. His present-day life reflects BN’s, and is complete with workplace vignettes, such as his mentioning to Lidochka that his coworkers at the Observatory sunbathe on the Big Antenna. Malianov, then, is arguably the Strugatskiis’ most fully fleshed-out astronomer-protagonist; he is also their only such protagonist depicted in his working prime: Apollo (Vtoroe nashestvie marsian, Chapter Three), is retired, Andrei Voronin (Grad obrechennyi, Chapter Seven) has been isolated from the Universe, and Manokhin (Otiagoshchennye zlom, Chapter Eight) no longer contributes to the field. Malianov is also the only one of the Strugatskiis’ astronomers to be shown at work, seeking to understand the physical implications of the formulae on the page before him. These scenes, one early in the book and one near the end, show that the astronomer has a great passion for his field. Despite his less-than-pleasant surroundings (a hot, dirty apartment with an empty refrigerator), all physical unpleasantness falls away when Malianov reaches a crucial insight. This early scene is noteworthy also for being an accurate depiction of the creative process, in which epiphanies arrive when the mind is allowed to drift away from the problem. In Malianov’s case, he is talking with his cat Kaliam18 about the lack of food in the 17 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 105. 18 All of BN’s cats, regardless of gender, were named Kaliam, from kaliamchik, a slang word from his childhood meaning “a little piece,” “a little slice.” Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 56.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

apartment and the possibility of going grocery shopping when everyone is at lunch” with “during lunch hour, when, apropos of nothing, he thinks: “I mean, really, it’s turned out to be a lousy integral! Well, OK… Let it be a constant… It doesn’t depend on omega. It’s clear that it doesn’t. It follows from the most general reasoning that it shouldn’t.” Malianov pictured the sphere and the integration moving across its entire surface. The KuttaJoukowski Theorem suddenly surfaced out of somewhere. For no reason at all. Malianov chased it away, but it appeared again. “I should try a conformal mapping,” he thought.19

Malianov’s joy of discovery and his affection for the mathematical tools he employs are conveyed not only by his use of the diminutive integrashka to refer to the integral in question, but also by the exclamation Ai da Malianov! Ai da molodets! [Well played, Malianov! Well played, great job!], an instantly recognizable variant of Pushkin’s famous Ai da Pushkin! Ai da sukin syn! [Well played, Pushkin! Well played, you son of a bitch!]—uttered at his having completed the verse play Boris Godunov in the fall of 1825.20 Pushkin’s phrase can be found in Russian “winged word” dictionaries as shorthand for satisfaction at work completed successfully. It is also quite possible that the Strugatskiis have included here a meta-literary joke: the Kutta-Joukowski Theorem21 is Zhukovskii’s theorem in Russian, and thus there is a ghostly presence here of a poet who was one of Pushkin’s most prominent predecessors and his first posthumous editor. Malianov’s exclamation suggests a link between scientific and artistic creativity that will be explored more fully later in this chapter. For the present, it is sufficient to observe that the creative joy that results from scientific discovery makes acquiescing to the “demands” of the Homeostatic Cosmos a greater sacrifice than it may at first seem. The degree of this sacrifice is tied to the argument made for acquiescing by Valentin Glukhov, an Eastern Studies scholar and acquaintance of Zakhar Gubar′, an engineer and friend of Weingarten’s. Glukhov has already capitulated to the Homeostatic Cosmos and is seeking to alleviate his shame by convincing others to do the same: 19 Strugatski, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 8. 20 Ibid., 7: 9. 21 The Kutta-Joukowski theorem, or the Joukowski hypothesis, is a fundamental theorem in aerodynamics and fluid dynamics. G. K. Batchelor, An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 437.

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So you, Dmitrii Alekseevich, you’re doing something with stars, with interstellar gas… What business is it of yours, really? I mean, if you really think about it. I mean, it’s kind of like peeping. You got your hand slapped: don’t peep… Drink tea, watch television… After all, the sky isn’t there to be peeped at [podgliadyvat′]. The sky’s there, after all, to be admired [liubovat′sia]. […] Is it really not clear what you should choose? You need to choose life! What else is there? Not these telescopes of yours, not these test-tubes… So let them choke on your telescopes, let them choke on your diffuse gases!22

Here Glukhov—or the Homeostatic Cosmos through him—makes an aesthetic argument against quantitative astronomy, one that, for the reader who has been following Malianov’s progress (or who has personally experienced the joy of sudden quantitative insight), is less than persuasive. The notion that the stars can—and should—be admired aesthetically and not quantitatively is the essential thesis of Walt Whitman’s “When I heard the learn’d astronomer …,” from his 1892 “deathbed” edition of Leaves of Grass: When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.23

This mystical-aesthetic approach to “astronomy” (or simply star-gazing) is contrary to the Strugatskii brothers’ approach to the science. AN, for instance, sketches the conjunction of the Moon and Venus in a January 28, 1953 letter to BN and their mother, calling it “perhaps the most beautiful thing I have seen in my life” [samoe, pozhalui, krasivoe zrelishche v moei zhizni],24 but also dreamed of fixing the orbit of an asteroid through 22 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 78, 81. 23 Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 409–410. 24 Bondarenko, Neizvestnye Strugatskie: pisˊma, rabochie dnevniki: 1942–1962 gg., 172. A reproduction of AN’s sketch can be found on the cover of this book.

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three observations, a very complex mathematical problem. BN, for his part, maintained a love for the quantitative even after he ceased working as a programmer: Skalandis writes that once, in the late 1970s, the director Aleksei German (whose final film was the 2013 adaptation of Trudno byt′ bogom) was mystified to find the writer one morning at breakfast, lost in his pleasure at solving some complex mathematical problem.25 Recall BN’s answer to an Interv′iu question (quoted in Chapter One) from May 1999 in which he writes that the inevitable atrophying of his abilities in astronomy caused his interest in the subject to wane as he aged. It follows that his motivation behind abandoning astronomy had to do with his perceived inability to contribute to the field in a meaningful way. On the other hand, AN, who never received the education in astronomy of which he had dreamed, always made an effort to stay informed on developments in the field. Thus, for both brothers, the dividing line between Glukhov’s “peeping” and “admiring”—that is, observing as a scientist versus merely looking—is difficult to demarcate. BN comments on this in one of his interviews with Vishnevskii: Arkadii Natanovich knew a great deal and read a great deal, he had a wonderful collection of books in Japanese. He liked translating very much, in the opinion of many he was one of the best translators from the Japanese. But when they say that everything “Japanese” that is our works is from Arkadii Natanovich, and that everything “astronomical” is from me, well here everything is exactly the other way around! If you take the Japanese poetry that features fairly often in our work, then the specialist in this area, as it happens, so to speak, is me. Arkadii Natanovich was indifferent to poetry, but at some point someone gave my wife a little volume of Japanese poetry,26 and I would constantly be fishing out of it epigraphs and lines fitting for this or that instance. By the same token, Arkadii Natanovich had a surpassing understanding of astronomy and would read everything that came out in that area.27

Thus, in the brothers’ working relationship there was a comingling of the scientific and the aesthetic in terms of what each brought to the table. 25 Skalandis, Brat′ia Strugatskie, 508. 26 This volume, Iaponskaia poeziia: sbornik (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1956), edited by А. Е. Glushkina and V. N. Markova, will be discussed later in this chapter. 27 Vishnevskii, Brat’ia Strugatskie, 33.

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An analogous dynamic can be found in Za milliard let, in which, as will be shown, the fate of scientists is implicitly linked to that of poets. This link is crucial to understanding the literary cosmology that underpins the work. Near the end of the novel, once the Homeostatic Cosmos hypothesis has been more or less accepted and Malianov has brought his manuscript—“On the Problem of the Mutual Influence of Stars with Diffuse Material in the Galaxy” [K voprosu o vzaimodeistvii zvezd s diffuznoi materiei v Galaktike]—to surrender to Vecherovskii, the mathematician proposes that the pressure they are experiencing may not be a recent phenomenon at all: Although, maybe it was not by chance that Newton fell to interpreting the Apocalypse,28 and that Archimedes was cut down by a drunken soldier…29 But these, of course, are just conjectures… The trouble is that this law manifests in one way only: through unbearable pressure. Through pressure that’s deadly to the psyche and even to one’s very life. But here, unfortunately, there’s really nothing you can do. In the end, this isn’t so unique in the history of science.

28 After having made key contributions to mathematics and physics, foremost among them being his participation in the development of calculus and the writing of his Principia, Newton, stung by bitter personal disputes with both English and Continental scientists (the feud with Leibniz over primacy in developing calculus ended only with his rival’s death in 1716), ceased doing science and concentrated instead on his position at the Royal Mint and his mining of biblical passages for information about the exact date of the end of the world. As Jane Muir puts it, “[i]n the last third of his life, Newton continued to collect his pretty pebbles on the beach of truth. But these pebbles were now religious and historical ones instead of scientific” (Jane Muir, Of Men and Numbers: The Story of the Great Mathematicians [Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996], 134). Two of Newton’s prominent late works, both published posthumously, were The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733). For more on this, see Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 812–30. 29 Archimedes of Syracuse, a geometer considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity, is said to have been killed by a Roman soldier during the Siege of Syracuse (214–212 BC). Archimedes died despite specific orders by General Claudius Marcellus, who regarded the mathematician as an important scientific asset, to capture him alive. In the most famous account of Archimedes’s death, given by Plutarch, the geometer was bent over some sketches he had made in the sand and admonished the soldier who had come to take him to Marcellus, “do not disturb my circles;” the enraged soldier killed him. For various versions of this incident, see Mario Geymonat, The Great Archimedes, ed. and trans. R. Alden Smith (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 9–13.

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More or less the same thing happened with the study of radioactivity30 and of lightning discharges,31 with the theory32 of the plurality of worlds…33

Vecherovskii’s suggestion is far from unexpected: a force that persecutes scientists and scholars in the present would have sought the same victims in the past. It is compelling to imagine the Homeostatic Cosmos driving the arm of the Roman soldier who slew Archimedes, and the logic of 30 Pierre Curie and Marie Skłodowska Curie were not supported in their research by the respective institutions where they worked as instructors, relying instead on a combination of government grants and funds from metallurgical and mining companies. Their terrible working conditions are described by Denis Brian in his The Curies: A Biography of the Most Controversial Family in Science (New York: Wiley, 2005). As the Curies readied to conduct studies on several tons of waste pitchblende that had been dumped in forest, they struggled to set up a laboratory space (Brian, The Curies, 63):

The problem then was where to undertake the experiments. As their present lab was hopeless, they appealed to the bureaucrat in charge of the Sorbonne’s many buildings, who turned them down. The new director at the School of Physics and Chemistry, the uptight, officious Professor Gabriel, was hardly more helpful. […] [W]hen the Curies asked for a space to work on pitchblende, his reluctant offer was almost an insult. They were shown, across from the school’s courtyard, a dilapidated shed, once used as a morgue by the School of Medicine, where students dissected cadavers. Abandoned, it seemed not even fit for cadavers: the skylight’s broken windows let in the rain and the dirt floor was covered with a scattering of asphalt. It had a few battered kitchen tables, a blackboard, and a cast-iron stove with a rusty pipe. They would discover that the shed was an oven in summer and an icebox in winter. Despite the obvious drawbacks, they accepted it. German chemist Wilhelm Oswald, who saw the place after the Curies had moved in, called it “a cross between a stable and a potato-cellar, and if I had not seen the work-table with the chemical apparatus I would have thought it a practical joke.” 31 Vecherovskii may be referring to Benjamin Franklin’s initial lack of recognition for his groundbreaking experiments in electricity and lightning. While his results were valued by the botanist and member of the Royal Society in London Peter Collinson, the English scientific community was long in recognizing the their validity. According to Kozuskanich, Collinson had some of Franklin’s letters read at a 1747 meeting of the Royal Society, but “[n]o one else was impressed and the letters were refused into the minutes of the meeting.” Nathan R. Kozuskanich, Benjamin Franklin (New York: Routledge, 2015), 69. In 1753, by which time subsequent experiments—and the commercial success of his lightning rods—had vindicated Franklin, the Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal. 32 The concept of the “plurality of worlds” is discussed in Chapter Three, as well as the fate of the Italian friar Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who was burned to death for his refusal to renounce his assertion that the Sun is merely one star among many, and that each such sun might support planets. It seems likely that Vecherovskii has Bruno in mind as a victim of the Homeostatic Cosmos. 33 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 130.

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Vecherovskii’s extrapolation makes such speculation seem quite reasonable. More compelling and less obvious is a suggestion contained in what Vecherovskii says, or seems to say, in the final lines of the novel: And he said nothing more, but it seemed to me that he was talking. There’s no rush, he said. There are a billion years until the end of the world, he said. There’s time to do very, very much in a billion years, if one doesn’t give in and understands, if one understands and doesn’t give in. And it also seemed to me that he said, “He knew how to besmirch paper while the candle crackled! He had something to die for by the Chernaya River…” And his satisfied hooting, like the hooting of a Wellsian Martian, resounded in my brain. And I lowered my eyes. I sat bent over, pressing my white folder to my stomach with both hands and repeated to myself, for the tenth time, for the twentieth time repeated to myself: “…from that time dead-ended, crooked, circuitous paths stretch out ever before me…”34

The words that Malianov repeats to himself are the final lines of a short poem called either “Sea of Death” or “Cowardice,” by Akiko Yosano (1878–1942), one of the most famous female post-classical Japanese poets.35 It is quoted in full36 by Vecherovskii earlier in the novel, whose frequent declamations of poetry are almost always followed by his characteristic “Martian” hooting.37 Of greater interest here is what Malianov seems to hear Vecherovskii reciting—the final stanza of Bulat Okudzhava’s “Schastlivchik Pushkin” 34 Ibid., 7: 132. 35 This poem is popular among Russian readers due to its presence in Za milliard let—the connection between the two works is mentioned in the second paragraph of Yosano’s Russian Wikipedia entry. 36 Vecherovskii’s quotation of the poem is not completely accurate. Markova’s translation:

Сказали мне, что эта дорога Меня приведeт к океану смерти, И я с полпути повернула вспять. С тех пор все тянутся предо мною Кривые, глухие окольные тропы… They told me that this road Would lead me to the ocean of death, And, halfway there, I turned back. From that time dead-ended, crooked, circuitous paths Stretch out ever before me…

(Glushkina and Markova, Iaponskaia poeziia, 317.) 37 The invading Martians in Wells’s The War of the Worlds seem to communicate with one another from inside their war machines with loud hoots. They also, as the narrator

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[That Lucky Pushkin, 1967], a deeply ironic poem that presents some of Pushkin’s misfortunes in a cruelly positive light.38 For instance, the stanza just above that quoted by Vecherovskii reads: He loved beautiful women with an unceremonious love, and he was even killed by a beautiful man.39

The proximity of these lines quoted (or not) by Vecherovskii to his suppositions about Newton and Archimedes seems to suggest that Pushkin himself, as a poet ahead of his time, was a victim of the Homeostatic Cosmos. Such a suggestion intensifies the irony of Okudzhava’s lines. There is near-unanimous agreement that Pushkin’s death at the hands of George D’Anthès in a duel over his wife’s honor was a frivolous way to die and an incalculable loss for Russian culture: it is not the case that “he had something to die for/ by the Chernaya River.” However, if Pushkin is placed in the position of Malianov and the other scientists, then his duel with D’Anthès is simply the result of his having stood up to the Homeostatic Cosmos, continuing to write despite the pressure (various exiles, Nikolai I acting as his personal censor, Bulgarin informing on him, etc.). It follows from this assumption that Pushkin’s refusal to capitulate (to stop writing poetry) resulted in the fatal duel. Lermontov’s “Smert′ poeta” [The Poet’s Death, 1837] can be read as a kind of chronicle of the external forces that drove Pushkin down the path towards the duel, a catalog, in this context, of the actions of the Homeostatic Cosmos. In this new light, Okudzhava’s lines become a stripped-down biography of each individual who has drawn the attention of the Homeostatic Cosmos. His observation about Pushkin’s talent for besmirching paper parallels that which, in each case, draws the attention of the Homeostatic Cosmos. His assertion that Pushkin had a reason to die by the Chernaya River presents the choice of each such individual—defiance or capitulation. observes from the ruined house in book 2, chapter 2, hoot before drawing the blood from a captured human. 38 This poem is one of four recited by their authors in the 1976 film Kliuch bez prava peredachi [The Nontransferable Key], in a scene set by Pushkin’s apartment on the Moyka River in Leningrad on the one hundred and thirty-ninth anniversary of the poet’s death. The others reciting are Bella Akhmadulina, Mikhail Dudin, and David Samoilov. 39 B. Sh. Okudzhava, Stikhotvoreniia (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2001), 302.

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The final image of the novel—Malianov clinging to his manuscript— suggests that the astronomer has yet to definitely resolve to capitulate. It is still unclear whether or not he will die like Pushkin by the Chernaya River. This connection between the fates of poets and of scientists is strengthened by a scene towards the beginning of the novel in which Vecherovksii encourages Malianov to use his work as a bulwark against the inexplicable events that are beginning to pile up around him: When I feel poorly, I work. […] When there’s unpleasantness in my life, when I’m melancholy [kogda u menia khandra], when I’m tired of living, I sit down to work. There are probably other recipes for this, but I don’t know them. Or they don’t help me. You want my advice, here it is: sit down and work. Thank God that people like you and I need nothing for our work save paper and pencil…40

This speech is significant for several reasons, the first being that the tools of a mathematician—a writing instrument and paper—are identical to those of the poet.41 Furthermore, Vecherovskii’s use of the high-register term khandra [distemper, melancholy] is telling. While the noun is still in regular use, in modern Russian the verb khandrit′ [to be blue, to mope about] is more common. There is an association of khandra with nineteenth-century poetic usage, particularly in the context of a kind of Romantic moodiness. For instance, the noun appears three times in Evgenii Onegin,42 each time in reference to the titular hero’s fits of spleen. Crucially, Vecherovskii is the novel’s closest equivalent to the Romantic figure of the otstupnik sveta [а defector from society]: he is the only central character with no family, and is devoted wholly to the esoteric poetry of mathematics. At one point early in the novel, Malianov sees his friend covering a piece of paper with mathematical symbols that he, despite his own deep familiarity with mathematical physics, finds wholly unfamiliar: Vecherovskii sat, his gaze fixed on his solitary piece of paper, quietly tapping on it with his princely Parker pen. Half of the paper was densely covered with symbols that Malianov didn’t understand.43

40 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 49. 41 Compare Pushkin’s 1821 poem “K moei chernil′nitse” [To My Inkwell]. 42 See chapter 1, stanza 38, line 4 and stanza 54 line 12, as well as chapter 8, stanza 34, line 11. 43 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 50.

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This moment presents the mathematician as the embodiment of the Russian poet-prophet, as the possessor of arcane, divine learning. His otherness is emphasized variously and repeatedly (his clean, cool apartment, his impeccable clothes), but the key thing that sets Vecherovskii apart from the other scientists is his possession of special knowledge. He even demonstrates something of a of poet’s approach to science: at one point, when Malianov starts to grab a piece of paper to illustrate his discovery, Vecherovskii stops him, saying, “in words, in words” [slovami, slovami].44 Finally, as was mentioned above, Vecherovskii’s plan at the end of the novel is to journey to a distant land, like Onegin in the incomplete chapters of Pushkin’s novel in verse. The nineteenth century is present in the novel in more explicit ways: running through the final chapters is a thread in which the characters examine their behavior against the background of nineteenth-century morals, one that prepares the reader for the coming potent hint of Pushkin’s role in the history of the Homeostatic Cosmos. On his way up to Vecherovskii’s apartment with his research materials, Weingarten stops by Malianov’s apartment and gives a long, sweaty speech in justification of his choice to capitulate. He calls Vecherovskii not a human, but a nineteenth-century robot, and, when Malianov asks whether they have scared him, Weingarten makes a rude gesture at him, and says, recalling one of the central problems of Vtoroe nashestvie marsian: That’s for you—they scared me—[…]. It was in the nineteenth century that they scared people. In the twentieth century they purchase a fine product [khoroshii tovar pokupaiut].45

Later, having received a confusing telegram that implicitly threatens the life of his son, Malianov himself is ascending the stairs to Vecherovskii’s apartment, and runs into Glukhov, who is on his way down. During their conversation, Glukhov observes: Understand, […] it’s always unpleasant to capitulate. They say that, in the last century, people would even shoot themselves so as not to capitulate. Not because they were afraid of torture or labor camps, and not because they were afraid of blurting something out under torture, but simply because they were ashamed. […] In our century people shoot themselves because they’re ashamed before others: before society, before friends… But in the last century people shot themselves because they were ashamed before themselves. 44 Ibid., 7: 47. 45 Ibid., 7: 112.

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Understand, in our time for some reason it’s accepted that one will always reach an agreement with oneself. Probably that’s exactly how it is.46

In this context, Pushkin jumps out as an individual of the nineteenth century as the narrative defines it—one who chose death over capitulation. This interpretation is strengthened by an already-mentioned network of lexical references to Pushkin and his works. Among them is a suggestive noun which may be a reference to Boris Godunov. After Vecherovskii has presented his Homeostatic Cosmos hypothesis to Malianov, he takes great pains to impress upon his friend that there is no enemy to fight. Malianov resents that he will not be granted even the psychological relief of surrendering to a worthy opponent: But I really had had the feeling that I was the general of a broken army and that I was wandering under a hail of bullets in search of the victorious general so as to give him my sword. And, that being said, what oppresses me is not the defeat itself as much as the cursed development that I will in no way be able to find this foeman.47

Malianov may be using the archaic, high-style term “foeman” [supostat] because Vecherovskii had earlier used it to refer to the imaginary supercivilization when he puts forth a kind of “proof by contradiction” to show the other scientists that attempts to fight their oppressor through traditional channels of power would be futile. But its presence at this particular moment is telling because the Strugatskiis have Malianov use it in a sense that strikingly recalls what is probably the most famous passage in Pushkin’s play: But who is he, my grim foeman [No kto zhe on, moi groznyi supostat]? Who will attack me? An empty name, a shadow: Will a shadow really tear the purple mantle from me, Or will a sound deprive my children of their inheritance? I’m a madman! what was it I feared? Just breathe on this specter and it will disappear. So it’s decided: I’ll show no fear, But one cannot scorn every threat… Oh, you are heavy, Monomakh’s Cap!48

46 Ibid., 7: 123. 47 Ibid., 7: 94. 48 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7: 49.

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Malianov’s conception of himself as a conquered general searching for the one to whom he must relinquish his sword frames his struggle against the Homeostatic Cosmos in terms of political-military power, one of the core concerns of Pushkin’s play. But more compelling is Malianov and Godunov’s striving to clothe their metaphorical enemy in flesh, to focus the object of their fears into a single physical individual. In each case, they know that this individual does not exist, yet they seek him just the same; the foeman of the imagination is not the foeman of reality. Certainly, Malianov’s mental casting about for an enemy to whom he can surrender can be summarized by Godunov’s line: “But who is he, my grim foeman?” In a very real sense, each of the characters of Za milliard let wears his or her own “Monomakh’s Cap.” Like Godunov, each is utterly alone in facing their shadowy foeman.49 The Strugatskiis’ use of supostat in this suggestive manner, together with Malianov’s Ai da Malianov!, motivates an examination of how Godunov might function within the narrative in a wider sense. Indeed, the problem of indecisiveness in the face of great responsibility is fundamental both to the play and the novel, and the gradual realization on the part of Malianov and the other researchers that the reality to which they have become accustomed may be a great deal less “real” than they had thought is reflected in the function of Pushkin’s False Dmitrii. In fact, allowing for their differences in scale—the entire Universe versus the pre-Romanov Russian state—the two works present remarkably similar cosmologies: both the Strugatskiis’ researchers and Godunov find themselves beset on all sides by an enemy whom they never see, whom they never have the opportunity to confront, and who is fundamentally altering the world under their feet. But the central overlap is between chapter eight of Za milliard let—that which contains Vecherovskii’s presentation of “Homeostatic Cosmos” hypothesis and Malianov’s supostat “monologue”—and scene 1150 of Godunov, which ends with the “Monomakh’s Cap” monologue. 49 The framing of the weight of scientific knowledge in terms of Pushkin’s metaphor has a precedent in Soviet science fiction: in Vladimir Savchenko’s 1967 novel Otkrytie sebia [Discovering Oneself], the protagonist Krivoshein and the clones of himself that he creates use the term “Monomakh’s Cap” to refer to a helmet that they have made to interface directly with their biocomputer. 50 The scenes are numbered according to Pushkin’s original version of the play, entitled Komediia o tsare Borise i o Grishke Otrep′eve [The Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepiev], which Pushkin read aloud to friends in various intimate settings around Petersburg in 1826. Caryl Emerson and Chester S. L. Dunning, in their introduction to The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin’s Original Comedy, with

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This scene is one of only three to take place in the Tsar’s chambers, his most intimate and most vulnerable space. It is the most complete portrait of the Tsar’s family life: the scene opens with Godunov’s daughter Kseniia kissing the portrait of her dead fiancé, comforted by her nurse, while his son draws a map of Russia. A reader familiar with history knows that Kseniia will be forced to become the False Dmitrii’s consort and that Feodor, along with his mother, will be strangled by the Pretender’s agents (it will be claimed that they were poisoned) and placed on display in coffins before their funeral, the signs of violent death in evidence on their bodies.51 The scene ends with Godunov’s advisor Shuiskii explaining the threat of the Pretender, his presentation of this information necessitating the symbolic exits first of Kseniia and her nurse, then of Feodor. So the contrast between the domestic calm at the opening of the scene and the tension and foreboding of the end is marked. Chapter eight of Za milliard let is set in Malianov’s apartment, the place that, by his own words, he loves more than any other in the world, and one that, due to the threats posed by what turns out to be the Homeostatic Universe, he is beginning to fear. So both Godunov and Malianov learn of the existence of their supostat in their homes, which heightens the impact of the information: the foeman has penetrated into their innermost sanctums, where their spouses and children live. All of Godunov’s scenes, in fact, are set in Moscow, in secure places of power, and the entirety of Za milliard let takes place in two apartments in Malianov’s building. In both cases, the protagonist is essentially sheltered at home, awaiting the ruling of fate. These two scenes also converge through the function of Shuiskii and Vecherovskii: both are conduits of information, and both are calmer men who seem wiser and more commanding than Godunov and Malianov. They describe the threat, but do not behave as if they are under threat themselves. It is convenient to refer to Malianov’s inner dialogue as a “monologue” not only because it suggests a parallel with Godunov’s actual dramatic monologue. One striking structural feature of Za milliard let is its vacillating narrative voice: the novel begins from a third-person perspective, albeit one wedded to Malianov, but, starting in chapter five, begins to feature brief Annotated Text and Translation, ed. Chester S. L. Dunning (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), argue that this was Pushkin’s preferred version of the play, and should supersede the 1831 Boris Godunov, on which the vast majority of publications and critical studies have been based. 51 Daniel H. Shubin, Tsars and Imposters (New York: Algora Publishing, 2009), 111; Chester S. L. Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 197.

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inclusions of first-person narration that may strike the reader as unmotivated, or even as mistakes. It is about a page into chapter eight—the chapter in question—that the narrative ceases to vacillate and shifts firmly to the first person, where it remains for the rest of the novel. BN has written in the Interv′iu that this structure was adopted to frame the novel as a manuscript in the process of being edited and then partially destroyed, which explains the numerous narrative lacunae throughout.52 It could also be argued that the novel, with the Strugatskiis’ conception of Malianov as the “author,” was begun, like Dostoevskii’s Prestuplenie i nakazanie [Crime and Punishment, 1866], as a first-person narrative, with a later decision to change the narrative perspective necessitating a wholesale revision.53 It would follow that the latter portion of the novel is the least edited by Malianov, and therefore the most immediate. In any case, this is the point of the book at which Malianov is first able to stand metaphorically “on stage” and speak about himself, as Godunov does at the end of scene 11. Another possible parallel can be found in Shuiskii’s speech explaining why the childishness of the people will lead them follow the Pretender: But you yourself know: the mindless rabble [bessmyslennaia chern′] Are fickle, rebellious, superstitious, Easily given over to empty hope, Obedient to passing suggestion, Deaf and indifferent to Truth, And feed on fables [A basniami pitaetsia ona].54

The general dynamic between Vecherovskii and Malianov is that of a patient but exhausted teacher and a somewhat slow student: the latter brings the former, bit by bit, to the truth, but must lead him every step of the way. This relationship allies Malianov to a degree with Pushkin’s fickle, superstitious “rabble” [chern′] (here we might recall scene 8 of Godunov, in which the Tsar emerges from his regular consultation with wizards and sorcerers), but Vecherovskii’s main focus is on scientific missteps (the phlogiston,55 52 Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 228–29. 53 For more on the compositional history of Prestuplenie i nakazanie, see Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 80–95. 54 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7: 46. 55 A superseded theory that attempted to explain oxidation imagined phlogiston to be the fire element contained in all bodies, released during combustion. It was first formulated by the German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–1734) and is central to many of the works he produced in the early to mid-1700s. Stahl’s ideas were significantly influenced

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the aether,56 alien supercivilizations) that come not from reason, but “from unreason” [ot nerazumiia].57 Vecherovskii admits to having used the concept of a supercivilization as a kind of fable in order to bring Malianov to the truth in stages, and frames the concept of a supercivilization—this is, the “octopus in a tuxedo” passage quoted earlier—within cheap science fiction, as a fable for adults. Related also to the problem of fables is Malianov’s mental comparison of himself to the two most famous fairy-tale Ivans from the Russian folk tradition: he has to remind himself that he is the protagonist of this particular tale, not Ivan-Tsarevich or Ivan the Fool. Thus Malianov is “feeding on fables” in order to make sense of his situation, and this framing suggests no little amount of wishful thinking. In nearly all traditional depictions of these two Ivans end in triumph, often, as is the case with the “false hero” versions of the Ivan the Fool, despite overwhelming odds against them. It is Vecherovksii-as-Shuiskii’s task to bring Malianov into cold reality: if he continues to defy the Homeostatic Cosmos, he will not win, as one cannot triumph over natural law. Pushkin is also referenced through a box of “Pikovaia dama” [Queen of Spades] chocolates that Malianov produces as he and Vecherovskii are about to have tea, just before the mathematician presents his Homeostatic Cosmos hypothesis. These chocolates serve as an additional reminder of the omnipresence of the Homeostatic Cosmos, as the appearance of the box in Malianov’s apartment is itself an “act” of the supostat: one of the first interruptions that the astrophysicist endures at the beginning of the novel is the unexpected delivery of a box of food and alcohol, apparently ordered and paid for by his wife before her departure for Odessa. Like Semen Godunov’s arrival with news from the Tsar’s informers at the beginning of scene 10 of Pushkin’s play, the appearance of the deliveryman is the first physical manifestation of Malianov’s doom.

by those of his teacher, the chemist Johann Joachim Becher (1635–1682). See J. H. White, The History of the Phlogiston Theory (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1932), 47, 50–1. The phlogiston theory was overturned by the work of the French chemist (and “father of modern chemistry”) Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743–1794) in the late 1700s. 56 The (luminiferous) aether was proposed in the seventeenth century by Newton and others as a medium through which waves of light could propagate as waves through water. The 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment, intended to measure “aether flow,” ended up proving that the speed of light does not depend on the speed of motion of the light source and simultaneously disproved the existence of the aether. 57 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 90.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

That the chocolates are called “Pikovaia dama” reflects both actual and literary realities: there are numerous kinds of chocolates that are branded with Pushkin’s name and the names of his works, but this reference to Pushkin’s 1834 short story may signal the hopelessness of Malianov’s position. Like the Strugatskiis’ novel, Pushkin’s work can be interpreted in terms of the supernatural (defined loosely) or coincidence. In “Pikovaia dama,” the vanishingly small probability that the three hands of faro that Hermann plays with Chekalinskii turn out precisely as they do lends a great deal of support to the supernatural explanation.58 The appearance of the Queen of Spades in the final hand signals Hermann’s downfall. In the Strugatskiis’ novel, the chocolates are mentioned just before Vecherovskii names the Homeostatic Cosmos to Malianov. At this moment almost everything is decided, and it is clear that no one with be able to withstand the supostat. The box stands open on the kitchen table like the winking Queen of Spades turned up on Chekalinskii’s table on the third night of faro: it indicates that the game is up. In this sense, the chocolates function similarly to the echo of Godunov’s speech in Malianov’s thoughts, and the presence of both elements in chapter eight serves to underscore its significance in the work as a whole.

58 In Pushkin’s time, faro was played with two decks of cards, one for the dealer (the banker), one for the player placing the bet (the punter). The punter draws a card either at random or by deliberate choice, placing it face down or face up, and also places his bet on the table. The banker deals from another deck, placing the cards alternately in two stacks. When a card of equal rank falls to the banker’s right, the banker wins. When a card of equal rank falls to the banker’s left, the punter wins from the banker the amount of money equal to his initial bet. For more details, see Paul Debreczeny, The Other Pushkin: A Study of Aleksander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 196–98. On the first night, Hermann plays a three; Chekalinskii deals a nine, then a three. On the second night, Hermann plays a seven; Chekalinskii deals a jack, then a seven. On the third night, Hermann (mistakenly) plays a queen; Chekalinskii deals a queen, then an ace. It follows that the Countess has given Hermann the proper sequence (three, seven, ace): he pulls the wrong card on the third night. There are 4 cards of any given rank, and 52 cards in a deck. For Chekalinskii to deal a card that does not cause him to win, he must deal any of the 48 cards that do not match the winning rank, the chances of which are 48/52, or 12/13, or 92.31%. The chances of Hermann winning with the one card removed from the deck are 4/51, or 7.84%. Multiplying these two events together gives us the probability of the event on the first night: (12/13)*(4/51) = 7.24%, a somewhat unlikely outcome. Squaring this result gives the probability of this event occurring two nights in a row on the first two cards, giving 0.52%. Cubing the result gives the probability of the final outcome: 0.038%, a vanishingly small likelihood.

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In a wider sense, the roles of Godunov’s son Feodor and Malianov’s son Bobka are similar: as was mentioned above, scene 11 begins with Feodor sketching a map of Russia, prompting Godunov to imagine his son’s future: Study, my son: science is shortening The experiences of our fast-flowing life for us: One day, and maybe soon All the regions that you today Have depicted so cleverly on paper, All will come under your hand.59

Later, as Godunov is dying and passing the crown to his son, he foresees for him great difficulties: But you, a young, inexperienced ruler, How will you command in a storm, Extinguish rebellion and manacle betrayal?60

Just before this, he expresses great affection for Feodor, realizing that he may not have time both to speak to his son and to be blessed before dying: I now appear before you, and have no time To cleanse my soul through confession. But I feel it: my son, you are dearer to me Than spiritual salvation… so be it!61

Malianov’s final resistance to the Homeostatic Cosmos is broken by the aforementioned telegraph that implicitly threatens Bobka, but his protectiveness of his son, like Godunov’s, is intimately connected to the future he imagines: Of course, I’ll still have Irka, and Bobka will be healthy and happy, but he no longer will grow up to be the same kind of person that I would want to raise him to be. Because now I won’t have the right to want that. Because he’ll no longer be able to be proud of me. Because I’ll be that very papa who “also once was able to make a great discovery, but for your sake…” Damn that moment when those damn M-Cavities surfaced in my idiot head!62 59 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7: 43. 60 Ibid., 7: 89. 61 Ibid., 7: 89. 62 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 128.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

Though mentioned frequently, Bobka is never directly present in the narrative. The only child to be featured “on screen” is the son of Gubar′, one of the other researchers. The five-year old boy is one of those present at Malianov’s apartment for the “meeting of minds” that makes up the middle of the novel, frequently giving voice to uncomfortable truths in a manner inconsistent with his age.63 Thus Gubar′’s son serves as a kind of stand-in for Bobka, a reminder of the way in which one’s own children can be warped by the supostat: whereas Gubar′’s son talks out of turn and without warning, the threatening telegram reads in part, “BOBKA IS SILENT VIOLATES THE HOMEOPATHIC COSMOS” [BOBKA MOLCHIT NARUSHAET GOMEOPATICHESKOE MIROZDANIE].64 Gubar′’s son is to Malianov a reminder of Bobka’s possible fate in much the same way that the “ghost” of the slain Dmitrii implicitly haunts Godunov’s visions of Feodor’s future: while he envisions his son succeeding him, he is also tormented by thirteen years of nightly visions of the slain child. Furthermore, it is Shuiskii’s mention of Dmitrii’s name that prompts Godunov to send his son from the room—for him the two children cannot inhabit the same space. This fact parallels an “exchange” in the novel: Gubar′’s capitulation to the Homeostatic Cosmos causes the strange boy to go back to his mother, and the telegram to Malianov follows soon after. Like Godunov’s son, Bobka will suffer if Malianov remains “in power.” From the “perspective” of the Homeostatic Cosmos, Malianov and the other researchers are all “Godunovs”: they have climbed into an “unnatural” role insofar as their discoveries threaten the “natural” order. It follows that they must be dethroned. The most significant citation of Pushkin’s work in the novel comes when Malianov, seeing that his neighbor Snegovoi and his wife’s friend Lidka are sitting awkwardly and not talking, quotes the first line of the 1825 poem “Vakkhicheskaia pesnia” [The Bacchanalian Song]: “Why has merriment’s voice fallen silent? [Chto smolknul veseliia glas?].” This quotation does not at first seem to be relevant outside the “drinking song” context: the astronomer is attempting to force the cheer of the poem into his relatively cheerless gathering. The full text of the poem, however, reveals some compelling connections to the central problem of the novel: 63 Gubar′’s son is one of the Strugatskiis’ many precocious, strangely alien children, the most prominent examples being Irma Baneva and her friend Bol-Kunats in Gadkie lebedi [The Ugly Swans, 1967]. For more on this trend, see Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 138–142. 64 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 122.

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Что смолкнул веселия глас? Раздайтесь, вакхальны припевы! Да здравствуют нежные девы И юные жены, любившие нас! Полнее стакан наливайте! На звонкое дно В густое вино Заветные кольца бросайте! Подымем стаканы, содвинем их разом! Да здравствуют музы, да здравствует разум! Ты, солнце святое, гори! Как эта лампада бледнеет Пред ясным восходом зари, Так ложная мудрость мерцает и тлеет Пред солнцем бессмертным ума. Да здравствует солнце, да скроется тьма! Why has merriment’s voice fallen silent?/ Ring out, Bacchic refrains!/ Long live the tender maidens/ And the young wives who once loved us! Fill the glass fuller!/ Onto the resonant bottom/ Into the thick wine/ Cast the precious rings!/ We’ll raise glasses, we’ll bring them together!/ Long live Muses, long live reason! Burn, oh holy Sun!/ Like this lamp pales/ Before the clear dawn’s rise,/ So does false wisdom flicker and glimmer/ Before the immortal Sun of the mind,/ Long live the Sun, may darkness perish!65

This poem was written during Pushkin’s two-year, from June of 1824 to September of 1826, confinement to his mother’s estate at Mikhailovskoe for having written a letter expressing interest in atheist ideas. It comes roughly from the same period as his “19 oktiabria” [October 19], which focuses on the poet’s forced absence from his friends’ annual celebration of the founding day of the Lyceum at Tsarskoe Tselo. The forced cheer at the outset of the poem reflects an alternate approach to this same loneliness and isolation. Thus, the first line functions within the poem in largely the same way as it does in the novel. In fact, the first nine lines of the poem describe the coping mechanism—drinking—of the researchers assembled in Malianov’s apartment as they come to understand from each other’s 65 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2: 370.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

testimonies the extensive influence of the Homeostatic Cosmos. Even the romantic content of the poem is reflected in the novel: the pressure brought against the engineer and babnik [womanizer] Gubar′ takes the form of a procession through his apartment of every woman with whom he has ever been intimate, at one point as many as five at once. These women are literally “the tender maidens/ And the young wives who loved [him].” They all act strangely, as if not under their own control, and the last to arrive leaves with him his putative son. But Irka’s friend Lidka brings sex most prominently into the novel: she arrives at Malianov’s door in a sleeveless mini-dress, which she soon changes for a mini-skirt and a short blouse. Malianov thinks of her as “come-hither” [prizyvnaia] to the highest degree, thinks he can glimpse some sort of reflection in her tanned, mirror-smooth legs, and sees her neck as “made for kissing” [sozdana dlia potseluev].66 At one point, he recalls the hagiographic trope in which the monk thrusts his hand into fire in order to overcome sexual temptation. Later, after Lidka has disappeared and the researchers have begun to gather in the apartment, Malianov throws his own “ring” into the “wine” (this image in the poem is based on a tradition by which those assembled throw into their glasses rings given to them by women), saying that, though Lidka did not proposition him, it was clear that such an option was open. In line 10, the focus of the poem changes from drinking to the problem of reason, on which it remains until the end. Line 10, in fact, is itself an explicit linking of creative inspiration (the Muses) to reason (science), recalling the above discussion of Ai da Malianov! Reason, as Vecherovskii states in the formulation of his hypothesis, is the force that counters the Homeostatic Cosmos. In the poem, the power of reason is equated with that of the Sun, while unreason or false wisdom is likened to a lamp that the Sun outshines. The Sun itself is the first major image in the Strugatskiis’ novel, and performs the first action of the work, setting the stage in the apartment in which Malianov’s epiphany will occur: …the white July heat, a two-hundred-year record, had flooded the city. Mirages wandered over the white-hot roofs, all the windows in the city were open wide, and in the watery shade of the drooping trees old women sweated and floated on benches next to entryways. The Sun surmounted the meridian and sunk its teeth into the books’ long-suffering spines, struck the glass panes of the shelves and the polished doors of the bookcase, and hot, malevolent reflections began to tremble on 66 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 18.

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the wallpaper. The noonday torture was approaching: the time was nigh when the frenzied Sun, hanging fixed over the twelve-story high-rise across the way, would strafe the entire apartment through and through.67

The Strugatskiis may be inserting an astronomical joke in the detail of the sun crossing the meridian, a great circle that passes through the observer’s zenith, the nadir, and the north and south celestial poles. The most famous meridian is that which passes through Greenwich Royal Observatory in London: the Prime Meridian, at which longitude is defined to be 0°. In Russia before the twentieth century, as is mentioned in Chapter One, the prime meridian passed through the center of the main observatory building at Pulkovo.68 It is essentially coincident with Moskovskii Prospect / Pulkovskoe Highway in St. Petersburg, which, were it not for the necessity of circumventing the Pulkovo Heights, would run straight to the Observatory. Thus, when the sun at the beginning of the novel crosses the meridian, it crosses the meridian. The sun is at its highest point when it passes through the meridian, which marks local noon. This establishes its role as a time-keeper from the very beginning of the novel. In Strugatskiis’ text, the Sun serves in the as a kind of astronomical anchor, fixing the narrative in space and time. Interestingly, BN’s apartment building is oriented roughly northeast along its axis, and so the windows that open onto the street face southeast, ensuring full sunlight in the morning and afternoon. Thus, the fictional space of Malianov’s flat is perfectly consistent with the extra-textual reality, whatever the unreality that dominates the work. The Sun also plays a prominent role in determining the conditions inside Malianov’s apartment. In the first pages, he finds the “heavy, yellow” sunlight that fills the apartment oppressive, and later decides not to invite Zykov to sit in the kitchen because the sunlight there will be unbearable. Crucial, too, is the episode when the Sun, if only for a moment, shocks the inspector out of the control of the Homeostatic Cosmos:69 67 Ibid., 7: 7. 68 V. V. Sharonov, Solntse i ego nabliudenie (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo tekhniko-teoreticheskoi literatury, 1953), 166. 69 The strong suggestion that certain characters are under the control of the Homeostatic Cosmos could be another implicit link to Pikovaia dama: when the Countess appears to Hermann in a dream (either a true vision or a sign of his madness), she complains, “I have come to you against my will” [Ia prishla k tebe protiv svoei voli]. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochninenii, 8: 247. In the Strugatskiis’ novel, there are numerous indications that those who are not under the direct pressure of the Homeostatic Cosmos are being used as tools to distract and oppress Malianov and the others. These “puppets”

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

And here a light draft passed through the room, stirred the closed curtain, and the fierce midday Sun, bursting through the window, struck Igor Petrovich full on the face. He squinted, shielded his face with his outstretched hand, shifted a little in the chair, and hurriedly put his glass on the table. Something had happened to him. His eyes began to blink quickly, color rushed to his cheeks, his chin quivered. “Forgive me…” he whispered with a completely human intonation. “Forgive me, Dmitrii Alekseevich… Maybe, you… For some reason, here…”70

So prominent is the Sun that the novel can be said to be fairly bathed in its light and heat, in the stellar radiation of Earth’s local star. The Sun’s presence is an elegant and humorous reflection of Malianov’s topic of study: a star interferes with and/or facilitates his research in stars. Following Pushkin’s solar metaphor, the scientific and scholarly discoveries made by Malianov and the other characters can be grouped as products of “the immortal Sun of the mind,” whereas the arguments for capitulation made by Glukhov and Weingarten (as well as by those controlled by the Homeostatic Cosmos) can be described as motivated by “false wisdom.” The poem asserts that the immortal Sun of the mind is the stronger of the two, but the events of the novel, and Pushkin’s own fate as interpreted by the Strugatskiis, state otherwise. Thus the poem is a moving anthem, but is ultimately untrue: the false wisdom of capitulation is in the end stronger than the immortal Sun of the human mind, a particularly disspiriting outcome given that the novel is fairly broiling in sunlight. The novel also features artificial illumination in a way that strongly parallels the metaphor of the lamp in Pushkin’s poem. At the end of chapter two, hours before his suicide, Snegovoi invites Malianov into his apartment on the pretense of lending him a book. Upon entering, Malianov notices that every possible source of light in the apartment is switched on: experience occasional periods of disorientation, as if becoming aware for a moment that they are being controlled. In addition to Zykov’s moment of confusion, Malianov suddenly notices during a conversation with Lidka that she is staring at him with wide eyes and a “completely incongruous expression” [sovershenno neumestnoe vyrazhenie] on her face, indicating either confusion or fear. On the next page, she again becomes confused, staring at him with eyes wide from fear before slowly recovering her composure. Additionally, it was mentioned above that the women from Gubar’s past who amass in his apartment do not seem to understand why they have come, and the woman who leaves her child behaves “like a sleepwalker” [kak somnambula] and speaks in a way that cannot be understood. Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 18, 64. 70 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 39.

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It was neat and clean in the room into which Snegovoi led him; all the lamps burned: the three-in-one overhead light, the floor lamp in the corner above the couch, and even the little lamp on the desk.71

Snegovoi’s suicide is his variant of capitulation to the Homeostatic Universe, and his lighting of all the lamps in his apartment represents the bright burning of Pushkin’s lozhnaia mudrost′ in his mind. Strengthening the parallel is a “competition” of sorts between the Sun and the lamps that is strikingly similar to Pushkin’s: when Zykov tells Malianov how Snegovoi’s body was discovered, he mentions that the crucial detail—noted by the driver who had come to collect the physicist—that led to the summoning of the authorities was that the lights in his apartment were on in the daytime: Meanwhile the driver, having walked around the building, discovered that all three of Snegovoi’s windows were open wide and that in his apartment, despite the fact that the Sun was already high, electric light was burning. The driver immediately reported this fact. Competent persons were summoned, who, upon arriving, immediately broke the lock and inspected Snegovoi’s apartment. Upon inspection it was discovered that all the electric lamps in the apartment were turned on, that on the bed in the bedroom lay an open, but packed suitcase, and that Snegovoi himself was sitting in his office at the desk, holding in one hand the telephone receiver, and in the other a Makarov pistol.72, 73

Note that, despite the bright sunlight, the driver is still able to see the electric light in Snegovoi’s apartment: here lozhnaia mudrost′ is not flickering and glimmering before the Sun. It is crucial that the Strugatskiis repeat the detail of the full electric illumination of Snegovoi’s apartment once the authorities have broken down the door, thus strengthening the implied power of the false wisdom that killed the physicist: his corpse is bathed in artificial light. This suicide has another literary subtext: during his visit in Malianov’s apartment, Snegovoi relates a story from his time in the army in which another soldier, wishing to verify his comrade’s firm belief in a fortune-telling, which stated that he would die at the age of eighty-three in 71 Ibid., 7: 25. 72 Developed by N. F. Makarov immediately after the War, the PM [pistolet Makarova] was adapted as the standard-issue pistol of the Soviet military and police forces in 1951. D. N. Bolotin, Istoriia sovetskogo strelkovogo oruzhiia i patronov (St. Petersburg: Poligon, 1995), 28. 73 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 38.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

Greenland, pressed a TT-3074 pistol to Snegovoi’s forehead and pulled the trigger. The misfire that spares Snegovoi’s life instantly recalls one of the most famous moments from Lermontov’s 1841 Geroi nashego vrememi [A Hero of Our Time], the “test-suicide” of Vulich in the “Fatalist” chapter. The reference is made more explicit by the narrator’s comment that Snegovoi believes in his predetermined death “fatally” [fatal′no].75 The astute reader of Za milliard let will recall that Vulich is cut down by a drunken Cossack later in the story, and will not be surprised to find that Snegovoi does not live to see the end of the novel. The association of Snegovoi with Lermontov is deepened by an earlier moment in which Malianov mentally labels the tall, grey-headed physicist “grey-haired Shat” [sedovlasyi Shat], an epithet for Mount Elbrus (after the word for “ledge” in Karachai-Balkar Turkish) in the poet’s 1841 poem “Spor” [An Argument].76 The poem takes the form of a debate between the mountains Elbrus and Kazbek, in which the former accuses the latter of having submitted to humans, of having allowed itself to be tamed. Thus, even this poem fits into the problem of defiance versus capitulation. Given the prominent role of this problem in Lermontov’s biography, it seems appropriate for Snegovoi, if he is to capitulate, to do so defiantly, on his own terms. Later, again in chapter eight, Malianov comments on the futile light of Snegovoi’s lamps: “He sat there all alone in his apartment, lit all the lamps, and for what? You can’t illuminate that kind of blackness with lamps [Etu chernotu lampami ne vysvetish′].”77 According to the Pushkinian binary, Snegovoi capitulated because he was using the wrong kind of light: the false illumination of the lamps in his apartment was insufficient to banish all the shadows. It could be for this reason that all of Malianov’s creative breakthroughs are confined to the daylight hours, when his apartment is awash in sunlight. Artificial illumination even plays a role in Malianov’s own capitulation, as he reads the telegram that threatens his son under artificial light, away from the sunlit portion of his apartment, “in the entryway, under the bright five-hundred-lumen lamp.”78 74 The TT (Tula-Tokarev) pistol, developed by F. V. Tokarev, was adopted as standard-issue service pistol for the Soviet military from the 1930 and was produced “in the millions” until 1953, after which it was no longer manufactured. Fred A. Datig, Soviet Russian Postwar Military Pistols and Cartridges (Glenview, IL: Handgun Press, 1988), 21. 75 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 24. 76 Ibid., 7: 21. 77 Ibid., 7: 88. 78 Ibid., 7: 122.

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That the motif of artificial light in the novel fits neatly into the Pushkinian binary makes the thematic overlap between the poem and the novel almost uncanny, and the parallelism between poets and scientists— those who create—becomes increasingly pronounced with each rereading. This parallelism, in fact, is one of the first examples in the Strugatskiis’ works of what was called at the beginning of this chapter a “literary cosmology,” or, perhaps more accurately, an anti-literary cosmology. This term describes a cosmology in which (literary) creativity is hindered or made impossible, one suggested not only by the Pushkinian subtext, but by the partially destroyed novel itself: there is a strong implication that Malianov has turned from scientific to literary creativity, only to once again draw the terrible attentions of the Homeostatic Cosmos. In this sense he is joined to Vecherovskii in his defiance of the supostat. As was mentioned above, Malianov is last seen clutching his manuscript, in the throes of indecision. But the more compelling evidence of his defiance is the form of the novel itself, which has the subtitle Rukopis′, obnaruzhennaia pri strannykh obstoiatel′stvakh [A Manuscript Discovered under Strange Circumstances]. The state of the novel strongly suggests that Malianov’s life after the end of the narrative was not quiet, and that he either continued his astronomical work or was pursued by the Homeostatic Cosmos for some other reason, most likely that of the writing the manuscript itself. The possibility that he may have perished as a result of his literary efforts means that he, like Pushkin, “had something to die for/ by the Chernaya River.” Pushkin is a crucial presence also in Den′ zatmenia [The Day of the Eclipse], the screenplay-novel that the Strugatskiis developed for the director Aleksandr Sokurov in the mid-1980s for an adaptation of Za milliard let, but which ultimately was not used as the basis for his 1988 film. While many elements of the novel are preserved in the screenplay, the derivative work is perhaps most noteworthy for the nearly absolute absence in it of the impression that the struggle is shared, shouldered not only by Malianov, but by his friends and wife. The Malianov of the screenplay—in character much closer to Weingarten (who himself is reduced only to a name on one of the folders on Vecherovskii’s desk)—is divorced, living alone in the apartment he used to share with his wife and son. (One wrenching detail in the description of his son’s former bedroom is the squares of unfaded wallpaper that mark where pictures once hung.) Pressure is brought to bear on Malianov not via a threat to his son, but through a child of about seven, Vit′ka, who shows up at the astronomer’s apartment as a reminder that any

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

suffering that will be inflicted as a result of a refusal to capitulate will fall on him. Vit′ka even grabs a volume of Dostoevskii from the bookshelf to quote from Ivan Karamazov’s famous speech in which the suffering of a child is balanced against the good of the world—thus recalling Maria Shuhardt in Piknik. When Malianov attempts to question the child, to learn his name, he says: “What’s your name, strange child?” [Kak tebia zovut, strannoe ditia?].79 This inquiry echoes the final line of Pushkin’s 1832 unfinished verse play Rusalka, in which the prince, seeing the daughter of the titular heroine emerge from the river, asks, “From whence have you come, lovely child?” [Otkuda ty, prekrasnoe ditia?].80 The parallel between these two texts goes beyond this citation: Pushkin’s prince is the father of the girl-rusalka [Rusalochka]: he abandoned her pregnant mother, who then threw herself into the Dniepr. Just as the prince “made” this child-rusalka, Malianov has “made” Vit′ka—the child exists, seemingly, only to be punished for the astronomer’s refusal to capitulate. Vit′ka’s semi-artificial nature connects him to the Russian fairy-tale trope of children who are not born, but made out of non-living materials, such as Tereshechka (from a block of wood), Snezhevinochka (from a lump of snow), or the Finger-Sized Boy [Mal′chik s pal′chik] (from his mother’s severed finger).81 Vit′ka even makes reference to this last character in the final scene of the screenplay when, apparently dead on the beach, he jolts awake as the Sun rises and sets off along the shore, shaking the water from his ears and repeating his own variant of a line from one version of the tale: “Ear, ear, pour water on the stump in the thick of the forest…” [Ukho, ukho, vylei vodu na dremuchuiu kolodu…].82 Early in the screenplay, Malianov receives a phone call from his co-worker Zakharov, whom he addresses with the phrase of the Golden Fish [Zolotaia Rybka] from Pushkin’s 1833 Skazka o rybake i rybke [The Tale of the Fisherman and the Little Fish]: “Whatever do you need, Old Man/Zakharov?” [Chego tebe nadobno, starche/Zakharov?].83 Casting Malianov as Pushkin’s wish-granting fish serves not only as a reminder that the workings of his mind drive the events of the narrative—his assertion that being a theoretical astron79 Ibid., 9: 284. 80 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7: 212. 81 In Afanas′ev’s seminal collection, these characters are featured respectively in tales 112, 246, and 300. See A. N. Afanas′ev, Narodnye russkie skazki v trekh tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1984). 82 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 305. 83 Ibid., 9: 247; Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3: 535. Malianov replaces the original starche (Old Man) with Zakharov’s surname.

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omer involves “universes flaring up and extinguishing” [vspykhivaiut i gasnut vselennye] in his brain84 is in a sense realized in the physical world—but also places the screenplay within a larger fairy-tale context. Another image late in the screenplay reinforces the suggestion that Malianov unwittingly manipulates reality. Just before a man arrives at his apartment claiming to be Vit'ka’s father, Malianov is sitting at his desk working while the boy sleeps. It is dark outside, and numerous moths fly in through the open window: Moths would fly in through the open window, circle about the lamp, fall onto the paper in front of Malianov. Malianov, irritated, would sweep them off, but they would return to the bright whiteness—again and again.85

Besides recalling Porfirii Petrovich’s compelling depiction of a criminal as a moth drawn to a flame,86 the abundance of moths suggests the trope— common in both Russian fairy tales and folk narratives—in which insects and other creatures boil out of the stomach of a sorcerer as he is burned to death.87 When Malianov returns to his desk following Vit′ka’s exit, his papers are crawling with insects: […] then he slowly returned home, to his desk, where the lamp brightly illuminated the scribbled-over sheets of paper, decorated with graphs, over which black moths and all kinds of little green winged things crawled madly [oshalelo polzali].88

The very setting of the screenplay is somewhat otherworldly, a kind of late-Soviet thrice-ninth kingdom: on one side, the unnamed earthquake-prone city borders the sea, and on the others, it is surrounded by volcanoes with a desert beyond them. Yet, this city is made up of the same kinds of Soviet apartment blocks that populate the novel from which the screenplay is derived. Even the nature of the novel-as-screenplay contributes to the sensation of the narrative as a fairy tale, as there are no glimpses into Malianov’s mind: like a fairy-tale hero, he has no inner dialogue. The screenplay’s fairy-tale cosmology is one of the qualities that sets it apart most starkly from the novel, and Pushkin’s poetry plays a key role in the formation of both cosmologies. 84 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 262. 85 Ibid., 9: 294. 86 Part 3, chapter 5 of Prestuplenie i nakazanie. 87 See Afanas′ev’s Narodnye russkie skazki v trekh tomakh, vol. 3, 60–70. The tales, collectively called Rasskazy o mertvetsakh [Stories of Dead Men], are numbered 351–62. Several of these tales depict sorcerers. 88 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 297.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

Poetry in a wider sense is fundamental to the narrative of Za milliard let, where the connections between science and poetry seem to become more widespread the closer one looks, and, as these connections are revealed, the protagonist’s exclamation Ai da Malianov! grows ever more important as a key to understanding the novel. It has been observed numerous times over the course of this book that the cosmologies of hell that the Strugatskiis construct seem designed as terrible prisons for their author. In Za milliard let, by designing a cosmology that destroys even great poets, the brothers have crafted a much larger prison, one that can house the entire Russian cultural tradition. This assertion is supported by the poetic subtexts of the novel that reach beyond Pushkin. For instance, even Vecherovskii’s term— Gomeostaticheskoe Mirozdanie—is a welding of the scientific and the poetic. When the mathematician first states the concept, Malianov notes his use of “precisely this archaic and poetic word” (mirozdanie).89 The oddness of this phrase is underscored by the fact that Irka, having learned of the hypothesis, gets mixed up and calls it the “Homeostatic Universe” [Vselennaia].90 (Recall, too, Irka’s “mother’s” telegram about the “Homeopathic Cosmos.”) The use of a word of markedly poetic register to describe a scientific concept fuses Vecherovskii’s scientific and poetic halves. Moreover, his decision to struggle against the Homeostatic Cosmos may be an oblique reference to the final word of the final line of poetry that Maiakovskii is known to have written, in which his poetic persona faces the Universe with calm defiance: Just look at what quiet there is in the world Night has encircled the sky with starry tribute at such hours you stand up and speak to the ages to history to the cosmos [vekam istorii i mirozdaniiu]91

Maiakovskii is referenced explicitly when Malianov, late in the novel, having internalized Vecherovskii’s hypothesis, answers the door, expecting the worst: My head was clear, and I felt somehow unusually combative. I was somehow all prepared for death and posthumous glory [k smerti i k posmertnoi slave]. 89 Ibid., 7: 96. 90 Ibid., 7: 119. 91 V. V. Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955–1961), 10: 287. The two poems that Maiakovskii apparently wrote in the days before he shot himself in the heart on April 14, 1930 are not punctuated, which forces the translator to make interpretive choices. In the final line, for instance, istorii can be dative, as it is translated above, or genitive (“to the ages of history…”).

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I understood that a new cycle had begun, but I no longer felt fear—only desperate, fierce resolve.92

Malianov’s “prepared for death and posthumous glory” is a paraphrasing of lines from Maiakovskii’s final long poem, Vo ves′ golos [At the Top of My Voice], written in 1929–1930: The verses stand lead-heavily, Prepared both for death and for deathless glory. The poems have stopped still, pressing muzzle to muzzle Of their gaping titles as they take aim at one another.93

By paraphrasing Maiakovskii in his desire to meet the agents of the Homeostatic Cosmos with violence (he later answers the door holding a meat-tenderizing mallet), Malianov aligns himself, even if only temporarily, with Vecherovskiias-Pushkin. (Also, Maiakovskii’s poem opens by addressing his “comrade-descendants” [tovarishchi potomki] of the future, a readership to which Malianov’s novel may also be addressed—as a warning.) Later, in Malianov’s final moment of active defiance, he writes up a draft summary of his findings, feeling proud and brave, like a machine gunner who, knowing that he will be killed, covers his comrades’ retreat. His work is interrupted by Irka, who has found Lidka’s bra, which compels Malianov to tell her the whole story. They are later interrupted by the doorbell, and Malianov answers, forgetting his mallet, while humming Vysotskii’s 1966 “Farewell to the Mountains” [Proshchanie s gorami], a song that predicts both the astronomer’s probable capitulation and Vecherovskii’s plans to stand against the Homeostatic Cosmos in the Pamir mountains. The first verse and chorus read: Into the bustle of cities and rivers of cars We return: there’s nowhere else to go! And we descend from conquered peaks, Leaving in the mountains, leaving in the mountains our heart. So put aside these useless arguments, I’ve already proven it all to myself: 92 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 109. 93 Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh, 10: 282.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

The only thing better than mountains are mountains On which you have not yet been.94

Vysotskii is yet another defiant poet in the Russian literary tradition, and, together with Pushkin, Maiakovskii and Lermontov, makes up a group of such poets who died (or would die: Vysotskii died in 1980 at forty-two95) before their time.96 These Russian poets are narratively linked to Malianov, not to Vecherovskii. Organizing the poets quoted by national origin reveals a very simple division: Vecherovskii quotes mainly foreign poets (Yosano, the French pre-Surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire97), whereas Malianov is associated with Russian poets. This difference is reflected even in their lifestyles: Malianov’s apartment is typically Soviet Russian in every sense of the word, whereas Vecherovskii’s is furnished only with the finest Western appliances, and the mathematician himself works at home in an elegant foreign-made suit and tie. At the very end of the novel, this pattern is broken: Vecherovskii quotes, or seems to quote, Okudzhava’s “That Lucky Pushkin,” and Malianov repeats Yosano’s “Death” to himself. This broken pattern serves to blend the two to a certain degree, making each into a kind of poet who stands against the Universe. This blending of the two central protagonists is prefigured by another of Vecherovskii’s poetry quotations: just a few pages before the end of the novel, Malianov comments that there is a little of Vaingarten in Vecherovskii. The mathematician agrees, and paraphrases Walt Whitman’s 1892 lyric “We Two, How Long Were We Fool’d”: “There is,” he agreed. “And not just of Vaingarten. Of you, of Zakhar, of Glukhov… More than anything of Glukhov.” He carefully poured himself some more coffee. “More than anything of Glukhov,” he repeated. “A hunger

94 V. S. Vysotskii, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh knigakh (Moscow: Nadezhda, 1997), 2: 70. 95 AN knew Vysotskii well, as the two shared overlapping social circles in Moscow in the 1970s. It is inevitable, then, that he witnessed the poet’s self-destructive habits and may have feared that he would not live to see old age. See chapter 14 of Skalandis’s biography, which is devoted to the artistic and personal interactions of the brothers with the famous Soviet bard. 96 Even Vecherovskii’s preferred poet Apollinaire died in 1918 at the age of thirty-eight during the Spanish flu pandemic after his service in World War I, weakened by a head injury and exposure to gas. See Peter Read, Introduction to Apollinaire’s Zone: Selected Poems (New Yorks: NYRB/Poets, 2015), xxiv. 97 Apollinaire was known to his Russian contemporaries (Voloshin among them) who could read French, but was not introduced to the wider Russian public until a selection of poems was published in the 1960s (Giiom Apolliner. Stikhi, trans. M. P. Kudinov, introduction by N. I. Balashov [Moscow: Nauka, 1967]). It is Kudinov’s translations that Vecherovskii quotes.

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for a peaceful life, a hunger for a lack of responsibility… We will become grass and bushes, we will become water and flowers… […]”98

The excerpt in the original reads: “We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark […]”.99 The thematic dualism of the title—together with Whitman’s seven repetitions of “we (are) two”—suggests that Malianov and Vecherovskii, despite the latter’s greater knowledge, were “long fool’d” with respect to the nature of the Homeostatic Cosmos, will face it together, and will in some sense fuse together. It is not difficult to see how the line from Whitman connects Vecherovskii (and Malianov) to Glukhov and his proselytizing for capitulation, but Apollinaire’s 1899 “Il me revient quelquefois…” also figures into this problem. The section quoted by Vecherovskii ends with the phrase, “Don’t sink your eyes into the future” [Ne nado/ V griadushchee vzor pogruzhat′].100 It is striking not only how this exhortation anticipates Glukhov’s argument for capitulation, but how the lines that complete this section of the poem recall his attempts to convince Malianov to enjoy life, rather than to defy the Homeostatic Cosmos: Isn’t it better to live and to breathe in with one’s whole chest, To breathe in the cool of the land of evening, Where people sleep and dream, not knowing hope. Don’t sink your eyes into the future.101

Vecherovskii’s quotation of this poem anticipates, then, his assertion that he is the most similar to Glukhov, one underscored by fact that his voice is described as glukhovatyi [(somewhat) hollow] twice during his first conversation with Malianov in chapter four, the second time being used to describe his “Martian hooting” after his first recitation of Apollinaire. Linking Malianov to both is the moment when Irka returns unexpectedly from Odessa, and he asks Vecherovskii “loudly, like a deaf man” [gromko, kak glukhoi] when “Snegovoi” had sent the telegram that summoned her home. Finally, there are the two quotations of Yosano’s “Sea of Death,” which ends 98 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 130. 99 Whitman, Complete poetry, 264. 100 As the Strugatskiis would not have been familiar with the original French, the “authoritative text” is in this case Kudinov’s Russian translation. Thus, my English version is translated from Kudinov, not from Apollinaire. For the original French, see Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Guettuer mélancolique suivi de Poèmes retrouvés (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 29–30. 101 Apolliner, Stikhi, 165.

“Long live darkness!”: A Billion Years until the End of the World

with the “dead-ended, crooked, circuitous paths” [glukhie krivye okol′nye tropy].102 The adjective glukhoi has a fairly wide semantic range, which the Strugatskiis use to full effect: Vecherovskii’s voice is “hollow,” or “toneless,” Malianov is “deaf,” the paths are “dead-ended” or “closed off.” Glukhov, with his (initially) unconvincing arguments that close off research perspectives, embodies much of this range. What is more important, however, is how the adjective links Malianov to Vecherovskii, making them both, even as they contemplate defying the Homeostatic Cosmos, potential Glukhovs. As the state of the manuscript that makes up the novel and BN’s unambiguous comments in his Interv′iu make clear, the two scientists’ combined efforts will result only in tragic ends for both. It follows immediately that the reader is meant to see poets and scientists bearing the same weight of responsibility, and thus subject to the same dangers. Therefore the Hadean cosmology of the novel is anti-literary in a very direct sense: it kills those who create. It should come as no surprise that the Strugatskiis, writing this novel during the period in which they regularly experienced impediments to seeing their works published, would imagine a science fiction scenario that reflected and amplified a Soviet reality. At this point, it may be appropriate to recall that Za milliard let was written in a context of displaced pressure. The pressure that BN felt and that gave the novel much of its atmosphere of dread, was “pressure by association.” Kheifets experienced the tension more directly, but even his pressure radiated from that felt by Brodskii, the persecuted and exiled poet. As Skalandis writes, “for the gravamen of the charge one required simply the name of the disgraced, banished poet in the article’s title.”103 The notion of a cosmology that is hostile to literary creativity is greatly expanded and deepened in Grad obrechennyi, written in the years both before and after those in which Za milliard let was composed. This problem will be one of the key topics of the next chapter. For the present, as a coda to this chapter, it will be instructive to consider the final essay that the Strugatskiis wrote together, published in Nezavisimaia gazeta in January of 1991: “Voprosy bez otvetov, ili ‘Kuda zh nam plyt′?..’” [Questions without Answers, or “Whither Should We Sail? …”]. The essay, set against the uncertainty of Perestroika that would contribute to the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the end of the year, considers the problem of utopias and dystopias in both literary and historical senses. Pushkin’s famous rhetorical question—the final line of his 1833 lyric

102 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 132. 103 Skalandis, Brat′ia Strugatskie, 392.

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“Osen′” [Fall]—serves not only as the subtitle of the essay, but as a motif, one to which they return at the very end. They write: And no one has yet proposed a new goal… Whither should we sail? … Can it be that all the miracles of the future have henceforth boiled down to the window of a grocery store that sells sausage? Sausage is wonderful, but there is something infinitely impoverished in considering it to be the strategic goal of society. Even of such an unkempt and impoverished one as ours. It is clear, after all, from the most general considerations that an abundance of sausage cannot be the crown of historical progress. Something else should be the crown. Generally, something that already exists cannot be considered the crown of history… It must be supposed just the same that before us is waiting something else, something besides an abundance of sausage. But what is it?104

Immediately following this section, the brothers quote the same lines of Apollinaire’s “Il me revient quelquefois…” that Vecherovskii quotes in chapter four during his and Malianov’s first conversation of the novel. They go on to tell the story of Apollinaire’s death, when, delirious and feverish, he imagined that the shouts of “Down with Wilhelm!” that celebrated the end of the War were actually “Down with Guillaume!” They depict Apollinaire as one who followed his own advice, as having been right in expecting nothing good from the future. They add: “Don’t sink your eyes into the future”—nothing is there save omnipotent meanness, mean omnipotence, and death that dots the “i” for everything and everyone…105

It seems fitting that, almost twenty years after having written Za milliard let, the Strugatskiis would unite the poets Pushkin and Apollinaire one last time, and that, in their presentation of a future in which sausage would be valued above all things, would depict a poet who, in dying, imagined that the Universe wanted him dead. It is a grim but appropriate coda to the Strugatskiis’ career— to show a kind of tentacle of the Homeostatic Universe reaching into the “real” world. The elegant pessimism of this essay is no outlier, but rather a logical progression from the mindset that predates Za milliard let and that is developed more fully in the works to be considered in the remaining chapters. 104 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 11: 492. 105 Ibid., 11: 493.

The Island Universe and the Copper Doorknob: The Doomed City Но уж дробит каменья молот, И скоро звонкой мостовой Покроется спасенный город, Как будто кованой броней. But hammer already crushes stones, And soon a ringing sidewalk Covers the rescued city As if in forged armor. From Pushkin’s Selections from Onegin’s Journeying

Grad obrechennyi [The Doomed City] is the only work by the Strugatskiis to have been explicitly written v stol [for the drawer], in full knowledge that it could never be published. They had at first entertained the notion of submitting the novel for publication in the hopes that the rejected manuscript would find some sort of existence in samizdat, but the fate of Grossman’s 1959 Zhizn′ i sud′ba [Life and Fate]—which had gone straight from the publisher to the secret police—made them think better of it. In the end, BN typed up two clean copies in 1974, each of which was given into the care of a trustworthy, but not too close friend, one in Leningrad and one in Moscow. They remained hidden until conditions under Perestroika allowed the novel to be issued, in two parts, in 1988–89.1 1 Ibid., 7: 585–87.

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Originally to have been titled Moi brat i ia [My Brother and I], the novel is their most personal work. BN writes that: On no other of our writings (neither before nor after) did we work for so long and so meticulously. For about three years we amassed, grain by grain, scenes, biographies of the protagonists, certain sentences and little phrases; we were thinking up the City, its strange features and the laws of its existence, as sound a cosmography and history as was possible to make for that artificial world: it was in truth a sweet and engrossing pursuit, but all things in the world come to an end, and in June of 1969 we put together the first detailed outline and settled on the final title—The Doomed City […].2

The careful work that the Strugatskiis put into their building of the novel is evident in its cosmological complexity: Grad obrechennyi is the Strugatskiis’ only work to feature distinct sub-cosmologies. The novel features not only the physical, (somewhat) scientifically observable cosmology of the universe of the City, but also its peculiar cultural cosmology. Finally, the City is defined by a Pushkinian cosmology that is shaped by both an extension of the poet’s Petersburg Myth and what Jakobson terms his “myth of the destructive statue.”3 These three sub-cosmologies combine to form the Strugatskiis’ most fully realized “island universe,” the world in which they set what may be their single greatest literary achievement. At the very least, the novel is their central cosmological document. The inhabitants of the City in which the novel is set have been recruited, invited, or captured (a process never depicted) from various temporal points of the twentieth century to participate in an “Experiment” with unstated goals—the resigned phrase “That’s the Experiment for you” [Eksperiment est′ eksperiment] is repeated dozens of times over the course of the novel. Though the characters come from a variety of countries, in a kind of reversal of the Tower of Babel all languages are mutually intelligible, and each participant in the Experiment experiences the City in their native linguistic context. The denizens of the City are employed not on the basis of their “earthly” work experience or education, but, under the Soviet-sounding “Law on the Right to Variegated Labor” [zakon o prave na raznoobraznyi trud], are regularly rotated to new jobs. Andrei Voronin, the protagonist of the novel, whom the narrator calls only “Andrei” (this intimate mode of narrative address could be connected to his having been 2 Ibid., 7: 585. 3 See Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1987). This myth will be discussed in greater detail below.

The Island Universe and the Copper Doorknob: The Doomed City

based on the young BN), begins as a trash collector, then works as a police investigator and a newspaper editor before serving as a presidential advisor. The putative experimenters are the human-appearing Nastavniki [Mentors], about whom essentially nothing is known, save for the fact that each inhabitant of the City regularly meets with their assigned Mentor; in the hell of the City, the Mentors represent a class of Virgils. The reader comes to know the Nastavniki through one individual who appears once in each of the six parts of the novel in order to talk with his mentee Andrei. That the Nastavnik can appear out of nowhere (at one point he seems to disappear as he passes through a door, at another he appears by taking over the body of another character) gives some indication of the great powers of this group, the members of whom may or may not control the Experiment.

Physical cosmology The City is lit by an apparently artificial sun, which, fixed in the sky, switches on and off like a light bulb. There is no period of dimming or twilight: night descends instantaneously; morning is heralded by a sun that warms up and sputters to a blinding brightness. The initial lighting of this “sun” serves as the first direct indication to the reader that the novel takes place not on Earth: Having difficulty staying on his feet, every now and again grabbing at those standing around him, Andrei, twisting his neck, observed the raspberry-red disk flaring up in its usual place. At first the disk shuddered, as if it were pulsating, becoming brighter and brighter, flushed orange, yellow, white, went out for a moment and then instantly blazed forth at full power, so that it became impossible to look at it.4

The notion of a tamed or conquered sun occupies an important place in Russian literature, and has a particularly close association with Futurism. Aleksei Kruchenykh’s 1913 Futurist opera Pobeda nad Solntsem [Victory over the Sun], in which “strong men” [silachi] destroy the Sun, is one of the more prominent examples of this motif. There are also compelling parallels with the artificial sun that is mounted on the top of a watch tower at the Dobroe nachalo [The Kind Beginning] collective farm in Platonov’s 1931 novel Vprok [For Future Use], which, according to a document posted at its top, “is organized for the covering of the dark and dreary deficit of the 4 Ibid, 7: 159.

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heavenly body of the same name.”5 Finally, in Maiakovskii’s 1925 lyric “Dva maia” [Two Mays], the poetic persona—in an image conveying awesome power—carries a pair of keys to the Sun and the Moon, each of which can be switched on and off like a light bulb: I carry —to the Moon and to the Sun— If you want—

turn them off.

two keys.

If you want— just turn them on.6

The Strugatskiis have warped this solar trope: a conquered sun illuminates a captive population, and one of the ideological-technological touchstones of the early Soviet period is severed from the notion of a conquering humanity. In the light-bulb sun there is not even a glimmer of the Futurist pobeda. In fact, the sun most resembles the warming light inside a cage, as if Prisypkin’s invitation to the audience at the end of Maiakovskii’s Klop [The Bedbug, 1929] had been accepted—or enforced—on a massive scale. There is a hint of Prisypkin’s imprisonment as a zoo animal in the conviction among the inhabitants of the City that they live in an “aquarium.” This idea is first put forth by one of the more important minor characters in the novel: the former Red Army soldier—now a farmer to the south of the City—Iurii Davydov, whom Andrei comes to know as Uncle Iura. He and Andrei become acquainted in part one of the novel, when the former happens to arrive in the City as—in yet another inexplicable permutation of the Experiment—the streets are being overrun by baboons. Uncle Iura, having learned that Andrei is an astronomer, says: There are people, you know, who think that here it’s like we’re sitting in an aquarium, but just where we were, on Earth. It’s a hefty kind of aquarium, but instead of fish, it has people.7

We should pause for a moment on the Strugatskiis’ choice to have the first cosmological speculation in the novel emerge from Uncle Iura’s mouth. Of the Russian characters in the novel (the others being Andrei and Izia 5 Andrei Platonov, Sobranie (Moscow: Vremia, 2011), 2: 293. 6 Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh, 3: 107. 7 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 175.

The Island Universe and the Copper Doorknob: The Doomed City

Katsman, who will later be discussed in great detail), Uncle Iura is the only one possessing a kind of inherent “Soviet” moral weight. Before his name and background are provided, this weight is implied by his clothes: With a kind of tenderness that surprised him, Andrei examined the faded tunic, drenched with sweat under the armpits, with a single (unbuttoned, however) brass button on the collar, the forage cap familiarly cocked over the right eyebrow with the imprint of a five-cornered star, the mighty tarpaulin shitkickers—only the giant beard, you could say, seemed out of place, didn’t fit the image…8

Uncle Iura’s Red Army uniform, dating from World War II, gave him a great deal of moral authority when the Strugatskiis were writing in the early 1970s, one that is still more or less intact in today’s Russia. His dilapidated state (the faded uniform, the cap missing the red star, the beard) suggest possibly a prisoner of war or a partisan fighter. (Recall that the moral meaning of Russian partisan fighters underpins a key moment in the discussion of Vtoroe nashestvie marsian in Chapter Three.) Uncle Iura’s last name, in fact, is likely a reference to Denis Vasil′evich Davydov (1784–1839), probably the most famous leader of partisan warfare against Napoleon during the War of 1812, and the basis for Tolstoi’s character Denisov in Voina i mir. The contrast between these two possible interpretations of Uncle Iura’s state parallels the choice each inhabitant of the City has made to participate in the Experiment: while it is apparently a bold goal worthy of those who volunteer to fight in wars, it is being carried out in what is essentially a prison. That the first direct comment on the City as a prison or a cage is proposed by a Red Army soldier is particularly significant given his account of his life after the war, before he chose to participate in the Experiment: he describes returning to a village emptied of men, with few resources, and choosing the Experiment in 1947 as the only escape from hopelessness. When Andrei, who was still “out in the world” in 1951, assures Uncle Iura that, “judging by movies, by books, now people are living richly out in the countryside” [esli sudit′ po kino, po knigam, zhivut teper′ v derevne bogato],9 the veteran is doubtful. The implicit comparison between the postwar Soviet Union and the universe of the City provides just one reason for the brothers’ resolve to hide Grad obrechennyi for more than a decade: no pre-Perestroika publisher 8 Ibid., 7: 168. 9 Ibid., 7: 173.

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would have accepted a novel in which a Red Army soldier has chosen a foreign prison over his homeland. The cosmography of this “prison-aquarium” is provided piecemeal over the course of the novel, but the resulting picture can be summed as follows: the City occupies a strip a few miles wide; to the “south”—the direction where the sun is fixed—are the swamps and farms where the food for the City is grown; to the “north” is a wasteland filled with previous, apparently abandoned iterations of the City; to the “west” is a bottomless blue abyss, the edge of which is called the precipice [obryv]; to the “east” is the Yellow Wall [Zheltaia Stena], a smooth surface that seems to disappear upwards into infinity. It is only at the beginning of part four that the visual scope of these features is shown, as Andrei is looking over the precipice at a spot north of the City: A person felt strange above the precipice. Moreover, apparently, the same sensation arose in everyone that the world—if you looked at it from there— was plainly divided into two halves. To the west was a boundless blue-green emptiness—not the sea, not even the sky—but precisely an emptiness of a bluish-greenish color. A blue-green Nothing [Sine-zelenoe Nichto]. To the east was a vertically towering boundless firmament with a ledge like a narrow strip along which stretched the City. The Yellow Wall. The Yellow absolute Firmament. An infinite Emptiness to the west and an infinite Firmament to the east. It would seem that there was no possibility of understanding these two infinities. You could just get used to them. Those who could not or were unable to get used to them tried not to walk by the precipice, and so it was rare to meet someone there. These days only couples in love came out there, and they mainly came at night. At night in the abyss something glowed with a weak greenish light, as if there in the deep something was quietly rotting through the ages. Against the background of this luminescence the black, shaggy edge of the precipice was quite easy to see, and the grass there was everywhere surprisingly high and soft.10

This notion—that an average person living in this environment cannot hope to understand these ever-present infinities, but can only get used to them—is remarkably similar to Privalov’s confusion regarding the spatial properties of the Institute in Ponedel′nik nachinaetsia v subbotu, discussed in Chapter Two. Privalov’s inability to understand, however, is almost 10 Ibid., 7: 356.

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pleasant, like the wonder one experiences before a miracle of science; the confusion described in this later work is much more bewilderingly sinister.11 Very late in the novel it is discovered that there is an essential connection between the abyss and the Wall: objects that fall into this blue-green infinity finish their descent when they crash to the ground at the base of the Wall. Thus the apparent infinities east and west of the City are false—the two are closed into some kind of loop. Late in the novel, this connection is described visually by the so-called Mute [Nemoi], an inhabitant of the wastes north of the City: […] the Mute made a strange gesture: he extended his index finger, abruptly lowered it towards the floor, and then raised it above his head, describing in the air an elongated ring [opisavshi v vozdukhe vytianutoe kol′tso].12

Even this thumbnail sketch of the cosmology of the City shows the degree to which it is fundamentally and frighteningly distinct from that of the “real” world, that from which the citizens of the City have come and in which the reader lives. Andrei’s previous profession puts him in a particularly good position to notice just how distinct this new universe is. For instance, in the section quoted above in which the sun is lit for the first time in the novel, Andrei does not look or watch as the sun comes on, but observes: the verb is nabliudat′. Moreover, Andrei’s perspective as an astronomer provides the very first indications of the true nature of the cosmology of the City. At the end of part one, chapter one, as he and the other trash collectors are lined up in their trucks at the dump and the first baboons begin to pelt them with garbage, the narrator, yoked to Andrei’s perspective, describes the scene: “It was hell on earth in the convoy. Mufflers were firing off, headlights flared up and went out, engines roared bitterly, blue-grey smoke rose in puffs towards the starless sky.”13 The absence of visible stars over a usual city could be due to light pollution or clouds, but, considered in the context of this City, as the structure of the (local) universe becomes known, this passage is revealed as simply 11 An intermediary between these two poles is Robert Skliarov’s mental picture of the cyborg Kamill’s inner world in Dalekaia Raduga [Distant Rainbow, 1962], an image that strongly anticipates that of the precipice in Grad obrechennyi: “Robert imagined a yawning abyss, in the depths of which formless, phosphorescent shadows streaked by at blistering speeds [stremitel′no pronosiatsia besformennye fosforestsiruiushchie teni].” Ibid., 3: 135. 12 Ibid., 7: 490. 13 Ibid., 7: 151.

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an “astronomically accurate” description of the night sky. Given that the narrative voice is Andrei’s, we might detect a quiet note of mourning for the lost celestial sphere. The other mention of the starless sky is paired with the first description of the cosmology of the City: A new day had begun. The pitch-black starless sky became a dull light-blue, smoldering color; a hot wind, like one from the desert, could be smelled, and the City appeared all around as if from nothing: bright, multi-colored, slashed with dark, bluish shadows, enormous, wide… Floors towered above floors, buildings towered over buildings, and no single building resembled any other, and the white-hot Yellow Wall became visible, departing into the sky to the right, and to the left, through the gaps above the buildings, appeared a light blue emptiness, as if there were a sea there, and right away one got thirsty. Out of habit, many people immediately looked at their watches. It was exactly eight o’clock.14

This passage contains all the components of the universe of the City: the sun, just lit in the paragraph above, illuminates the City from a starless sky; to the east and west are the precipice and the Yellow Wall. This passage suggests implicitly what later is made explicit: there is an inherent connection between the structure of the City and the lack of stars in the sky. The Strugatskiis provide an earlier, implicit indication of the City’s alien cosmology. In the second paragraph of the novel, as Andrei and his fellow trash collector Donald load cans of garbage onto their truck from the yard of their building, assisted by their friend Van, the dvornik, the gateway of the yard is described: The raw, nighttime cold was being drawn in through the wide-open gate, and under the arch [svod] of the gateway a bare yellow light-bulb dangled on the end of a cord that was caked with filth.15

The noun svod [dome, arch] frequently refers to the heavenly firmament in an archaic sense, as in the eternal arches [vechny svody] under which all mortals must pass in Pushkin’s 1829 “Brozhu li ia…” [Whether I wander…]. In the context of the novel, this svod is clearly not at all heavenly, but is simply the roof of the gateway. However, a filthy enclosed space lit by a single light bulb is essentially the “aquarium universe” of the City: this

14 Ibid., 7: 160. 15 Ibid., 7: 135.

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moment serves as a kind of “microcosmic foreshadowing” of the cosmology that will later be described explicitly. Another early indication on the space of the City can be found when Andrei, cleaning his apartment in part one, chapter three, marvels at the room he is granted: Having washed all the dishes, he grabbed the mop. He worked zealously and with enthusiasm, as if he were washing the filth from his own body. But he didn’t have enough energy for all five rooms. He limited himself to the kitchen, the dining room, and the bedroom. He just glanced into the remaining rooms with a kind of bewilderment—he simply couldn’t understand or get used to one person needing so many rooms, particularly when they were so horribly enormous and musty. He closed the doors into those rooms as firmly as he could and blocked them off with chairs.16

Andrei limits his living space to the traditional three-room Soviet apartment: kitchen, common room, bedroom; the remaining rooms are of no use to him; his apartment reflects the cosmology of the City in the sense that a five-room apartment represents a kind of functional infinity for a Soviet person. The space is too large to be inhabited, and the extra rooms must be sealed off to avoid a sense of uncomfortable vastness. Thus the large apartment recalls the unsettling infinities contained within the universe of the City, particularly the long line of decaying, abandoned cities found during the expedition in part five: like Andrei’s spare rooms, they are left empty. Still another early indication of the space of the City can be found in a comment that Andrei makes to himself when he feels belittled by Donald, formerly a professor of sociology from Texas: “[b]ut what do you know about integrals? Or, let’s say, about the Hubble Constant?”17 This mention of Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) is much more than a bit of astronomical verisimilitude. Hubble is credited with proving that the Universe goes beyond the Milky Way, and that all extragalactic nebulae are themselves galaxies. In The Realm of the Nebulae [1936], his popularization of this discovery, Hubble mentions the theory—confined prior to his conclusions to the writings of philosophers like Kant—of “island universes,” and gives what he calls “rather free translation” of some passages from Kant’s 1755 Allgemeine

16 Ibid., 7: 177. 17 Ibid., 7: 138.

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Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels [Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven]:  It is much more natural and reasonable to assume that a nebula is not a unique and solitary sun, but a system of numerous suns, which appear crowded, because of their distance, into a space so limited that their light, which would be imperceptible were each of them isolated, suffices, owing to their enormous numbers, to give a pale and uniform luster. Their analogy with our own system of stars; their form which is precisely what it should be according to our theory; the faintness of their light, which denotes an infinite distance; all are in admirable accord and lead us to consider these elliptical spots as systems of the same order as our own—in a word, to be Milky Ways similar to the one whose constitution we have explained.18

This concept loosely reflects that of the isolated “island” of the City: like the nebulae, it seems to be part of “our” world, but is actually far removed from it. Thus, there is a hint of the cosmological isolation of the City’s universe in this very first mention of astronomy. Furthermore, the Hubble Constant describes the rate of expansion of the Universe, so its mention in a closed, static universe is a potentially disturbing reminder of this confinement. Finally, Hubble is considered the greatest observational cosmologist of the twentieth century, having used hard observational data to prove Kant’s intuitive leap. His quotation of Kant ends with the philosopher’s comment: “A vast field lies open to discoveries, and observation alone will give the key.” Hubble then continues: The theory, which came to be called the theory of island universes, found a permanent place in the body of philosophical speculation. The astronomers themselves took little part in the discussions: they studied the nebulæ. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the accumulation of  observational data brought into prominence the problem of the status of  the nebulæ and, with it, the theory of island universes as a possible solution.19

The applicability of Hubble’s observational approach to the universe of the City is central to the novel. As will be shown, it is strongly implied that the “island universe” in which the work is set falls beyond the reach of what 18 Edwin Hubble, In the Realm of the Nebulae (New York: Dover, 1958), 24–25. 19 Ibid., 25.

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Hubble calls “the measuring rod”—it cannot be studied as astonomers “studied the nebulæ.” Such is the confined isolation of the City—recall that BN explicitly calls this world “artificial”—that Andrei initially assumes that his skills as an astronomer have no application in the “island universe” he inhabits. When Uncle Iura presents his Aquarium Hypothesis, Andrei responds: It’s all complicated. It’s beyond me. But from the scientific point of view I’ll say only this: it’s unlikely that this is another planet, certainly not a star. In my opinion, everything here is artificial, and has no relation whatever to astronomy.20

Later, at a party at his apartment, Andrei gives a drunken speech made up primarily of Soviet bromides that he concludes with a promise of seeing stars in the sky: Most of the people here lack real ideological tempering, lack real conviction in the inevitability of a bright future. They don’t understand that today might be as grinding and bad as you can imagine, and tomorrow will be as well, but on the day after tomorrow we will surely see a starry sky [my obiazatel′no uvidim nebo v zvezdakh] and a holiday will come to our street… [emphasis added]21

Even on Earth, this expression is figurative, but is nonetheless based on the reasonable expectation that a cloudy sky will always eventually clear and that the stars at night will again be visible. As was shown in the chapter on Obitaemyi ostrov, the revoking of this possibility is one that fascinates the Strugatskiis. But while on Saraksh, the stars are there, albeit hidden, in the City there are not and can be no stars—Andrei’s drunken optimism has no physical underpinning. With one crucial exception that will be discussed at the end of this section, stars in the novel are mentioned only in terms of their absence, or as a metaphor. To the second group belongs the delo o Padaiushchikh Zvezdakh [the “Falling Stars” case] that Andrei’s superior Martinelli asks him to take on in part two, when the astronomer is working as a police investigator: at the bottom of the Yellow Wall are periodically found the bodies of citizens of the City who have apparently fallen from a great height. The Wall is perfectly smooth, so there is no conceivable way that the anyone could ascend 20 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 175. 21 Ibid., 7: 204.

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it. Late in the novel, in part five, Andrei and Izia witness a tractor—one that days before had fallen over the precipice—plummeting down the Wall. This incident, together with the aforementioned strange circular gesture of the Mute, allows Andrei to “solve the case” well after doing so has ceased to matter. Here there is a certain bleak humor: Andrei, an astronomer, is asked to look into a matter concerning “stars” in which no actual stars are involved. That he fails to understand the “falling stars” phenomenon until he witnesses it in action is potentially connected to his shortcomings as an astronomer: he lacks the imagination to explain it theoretically. In part two, while in the Red Building (which will be discussed in detail later in this section), Andrei underscores his failings as an astronomer while producing the only actual details of his work in astronomy that can be found in the novel: I am a little stellar astronomer of average abilities [malen′kii zvezdnyi astronom srednikh sposobnostei], and if I had been successful in proving that there exists some kind of link between wide pairs and Schilt streams,22 then that would have been so much for me. But as concerns great solutions and great achievements…23

This passage contains a biographical kernel of BN’s own career in astronomy, as his dissertation work had been on wide stellar pairs. Also, his participation in the 1960 expedition to the northern Caucasus to find a site for the BTA-6 telescope, as well as his having worked on various archeological expeditions, may be reflected in the expedition to the north of the City that Andrei and Izia plan in part four and carry out in part five. It is in the planning stages of this expedition that Andrei, for the first time in the novel, shows an interest in using his skills as an astronomer to map the world of the City. Andrei and Izia, serving as advisors (scientific and archival, respectively) to now-president Fritz Geiger have a detailed conversation over lunch about just what will be necessary to map the cosmography of the City by going north. (Earlier attempts to send observation balloons up into the atmosphere—recalling the transformation of the unmanned vessel sent beyond the heliopause in Put′ na 22 Jan Schilt (1894–1982) was a Dutch astronomer who concentrated on problems of galactic structure. While the term “Schilt streams” does not appear to exist in astronomy, Schilt’s name is closely connected with the concept of tidal star streams, and one of his earlier papers is entitled “The Star Streams” (Astronomical Journal 927 [August 20, 1929]). Given his own research interests, BN would have been familiar with Schilt’s results. 23 Strugaskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 253.

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Amal′teiu—had ended with their explosion due to unknown factors.) They begin with the fact that the sun, fixed in the sky, should approach the horizon as the observer moves northward away from it. Since all the lands beyond it would be in permanent darkness, they think of this spot at which the sun would appear to set either as the beginning or the end of the world of the City. Andrei characterizes it—in a moment of metaphor trumping astronomical fact24—as “the far side of the Moon.” Andrei’s desire to map the world of the City recalls early scientific efforts that sought to describe the Earth, such as Eratosthenes’s measurement of the circumference of the planet. Just as the earliest modern astronomers could not progress in describing the universe without maps and figures (the primary contribution of Tycho Brache, for instance), Andrei understands that the universe of the City will remain wholly unknowable in the absence of certain data: Here all the difficulty is in the fact that we know neither the curvature of the earth nor the distance to the sun. If we have many observations along the entire line of the City—you understand?—not the present-day city, but from the beginning to the end—then we could define these values. We need a large curve, you understand. Of at least a few hundred kilometers. But all our material is on a fifty-kilometer curve. That’s why our accuracy is so pitiful.25

Andrei, in his estimate of the size of the curve the expedition will need in order to define these two values (the distance to the sun and the curvature of the “earth”), makes reference to a discarded earthly cosmology, recalling the opening lines of Obitaemyi ostrov: “The maximum is infinity […] That’s if the world is flat. But the minimum is in the order of thousands of kilometers.”26 In that work, however, the “biblical firmament” and “local Atlas” are known to be metaphorical, nonexistent. In the universe of the City, it may very well be the case that the world is flat. This is the last time these values are mentioned; the universe of the City proves to be beyond measurement, not only in terms of physical distance, but in any quantitative sense. This problem of measurement again recalls one of the contradictory “inner infinities” of the Institute building in Ponedel′nik, discussed briefly in Chapter Two and mentioned earlier in this chapter. There Privalov observes the turning of “Fortune’s Wheel” [Koleso Fortuny], which 24 Though hidden from earth-based observers, the far side of the Moon receives sunlight in amounts equal to that which shines on the Earth-facing side. 25 Strugaskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 383. 26 Ibid., 7: 383.

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supplies the Institute with free mechanical energy. The small portion of the Wheel’s perimeter that is visible above the floor of the room is so infinitely distant from its axis of rotation that the rim does not appear to be curved: it is, to borrow a term from calculus, locally linear. Privalov comments that: It had at one time been fashionable to defend dissertations on more accurate measurements of Fortune’s Wheel’s radius of curvature, but, insofar as all these dissertations gave results of exceedingly low accuracy—up to ten megaparsecs—the Institute’s Academic Council had resolved to cease considering dissertations on this topic until such time as the creation of intergalactic means of transport should permit the possibility of a marked increase in accuracy.27

In purely mathematical terms, the problems posed by Andrei and Privalov are essentially similar. In Ponedel′nik, however, the problem arouses more fascination than dread, which is to be expected of a work produced in a more hopeful period. In Grad, the determining of this radius of curvature is a first essential step to describing—and therefore understanding—the world. The only real physical “mapping” of the City is the assignment of cardinal directions: three of the cardinal directions of the City are defined by fixed points of reference: the sun, the Wall, and the precipice. North is the remaining direction. Izia proposes this arrangement at the end of part one: “If we arbitrarily decide that the direction of the sun—the side with swamps, fields, farmers—is the south, then the opposite side, into the depths of the City, is the north.”28Andrei is initially confused by what he sees as Izia’s arbitrary imposition of earthly cardinal directions on an unearthly world: he had never thought of the City as having a “north.” Slightly later in the conversation, Izia utters to Andrei what will prove to be a privotal sentence: “I’m trying to explain to you what kind of world you live in—that’s all.”29 Izia’s statement is crucial for understanding both the novel and his own role in it. Determining the kind of world one lives in—its shape, structure, the natural laws which govern it—is the fundamental goal of cosmology. Andrei repeats Izia’s words to Geiger when justifying the expense of the expedition:

27 Ibid., 3: 514. 28 Ibid., 7: 205. 29 Ibid., 7: 206.

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I’ve been trying to get you to agree to this expedition for two years. If you want to know what kind of world you live in, then give me money, give me transportation, give me people… Otherwise nothing will happen.30

But, once on the expedition, Andrei’s original comment to Uncle Iura about the (in)applicability of astronomy to their “island universe” proves prophetic: the more observations they conduct, the more data they collect, the less they seem to understand the City. The head mechanic Ellisauer complains that the sun is not behaving in the expected way as they move “northward,” apparently away from it: How long can we keep going? My people are asking me: what’s going on, mister engineer? We agreed to go on until the sun set beyond the horizon. But instead it got higher in the sky. Then we decided to go until it reached the zenith… But it’s the same thing again: it doesn’t rise, doesn’t reach the zenith, but jumps up and down [a skachet to vverkh, to vniz]…31

This passage may be the best illustration in the novel of the degree to which “earthly” physics have limited application in the universe of the City. The sun’s positions in the sky relative to the members of the expedition are as improbable as those of the peak of a mountain that, as one moves away from it, becomes higher relative to the horizon. But even such a physical impossibility could be cataloged and described mathematically: the peak’s altitude (the angular distance from the horizon) increases in inverse proportion to its distance from the observer. But this simple relation does not hold, as the sun’s altitude inexplicably increases and decreases with respect to apparent distance. It is as if the cardinal directions of the world of the City rotate under the explorers’ feet: they maintain one heading, but are sometimes headed “north,” sometimes “south.” Scientific methods cannot be applied to a world that refuses to remain consistent, and this notion of natural law in flux is a prime example of how cosmological disorientation is woven into the novel’s structure. The geometric impossibility of the sun’s apparent position relative to the observer is foreshadowed much earlier in the novel, in the scene which introduces the so-called Red Building [Krasnoe zdanie], which is first mentioned as a creation of City folklore that Andrei is tasked with investigating in part two. According to numerous accounts, the Red Building appears in various 30 Ibid., 7: 383. 31 Ibid., 7: 429.

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locations through the City after the sun is turned off, and those who enter the Building never emerge. Andrei encounters and enters the Building twice in the novel, once in part two, and again at the end of part four, the final scene to take place in the City before the expedition. The “character” of the Building will be discussed extensively in part three of this chapter, but for the present it will be sufficient to note that Eino Saari—a saxophonist whom Andrei is questioning as one who has witnessed the Building “swallow” an acquaintance through the front door—somehow recalls details of the Building’s roof. Andrei points out that it would be impossible to see the roof while standing just in front of the Building, and rejects Saari’s account as “improbable,” one that “contradicts elementary physical laws.”32 After Saari is escorted out, Andrei congratulates himself for having deployed some elementary geometry, thinking to himself that “the lying Eino Saari had been exposed scientifically, by the book” [Zavravshiisia Eino Saari byl ushchuchen po vsem pravilam nauki].33 Yet Saari’s seeing the roof of the Red Building from a vantage point at its foot is no less physically or geometrically improbable than the changes in the sun’s position noted by the members of the expedition, and the application of “earthly” scientific methods to either case is misguided. Andrei’s own failure to “quantify” the universe of the City may be reflected in the last name the Strugatskiis have given him: Voronin. Recall from Chapter One the scandal surrounding the fraudulent celestial mechanician Nikolai Voronov, whose new mathematical methods in determining the orbits of minor planets were praised until it emerged that he had been forging his results. Voronov’s rise in astronomy was celebrated in the amateur astronomy journal Mirovedenie in 1936, when AN was eleven years old. McCutcheon describes Voronov’s work as having produced “an immediate international sensation,” and the astronomer himself as having become “an internationally known specialist in less than four years.”34 It seems quite likely that AN was aware of Voronov’s accomplishments, particularly since, as he writes in “Moi Zhiul’ Vern” in 1978, he “dreamed of learning to calculate an orbit from three observations.”35 It stands to reason, moreover, that BN learned something of the Voronovshchina during his time at Pulkovo. The Strugatskiis’ Voronin is not guilty of having forged scientific data (his career in astronomy consists, after all, of a failure to reach a desired result in stellar dynamics), but his various moral lapses over the course of the novel are in line with Voronov’s monumental lie. Voronov’s conscription 32 Ibid., 7: 232. 33 Ibid., 7: 233. 34 McCutcheon, “The 1936–1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers,” 105. 35 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 11: 349.

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into the Red Army and his subsequent disappearance from the historical record reflect Andrei’s disappearance from the Soviet Union of 1951, as well as in his eventual fate within or without the universe of the City. After the expedition has failed—nearly all the participants killed or scattered—Andrei and Izia continue northward alone, looking now not for the point at which the sun will set permanently, but the point where it stands at the zenith—ninety degrees above the mathematical horizon. That the expedition had already been nearing this point is indicated by the “short, deformed shadows” [korotkie urodlivye teni] that follow the characters as they move through the ruined urban landscape.36 There is no indication, however, that Andrei’s scientific knowledge is a factor in determining his and Izia’s path. In fact, as they near the zenith point, Izia mocks Andrei’s knowledge of astronomy, the first time he has been called an astronomer by another character and the first mention of his profession since part two: Izia craned his neck and looked at the sun. “It’s at the zenith,” he reported. “Or almost at the zenith. What do you think, mister astronomer?”37

Andrei’s only answer is “looks that way” [pokhozhe], a response not characterized by quantitative confidence. Izia asserts that things will get interesting once they reach the zenith point, and, indeed, as they draw near to it, they see two figures approaching them through the hot, shimmering air. Andrei, convinced of danger, retrieves his semi-automatic rifle, exchanges fire with them, and seems to be shot: “And there was a blow to his chest that instantly made the sun go out” [I byl udar v grud′, ot kotorogo razom pogaslo solntse].38 This last sentence set in the northern wasteland suggests both Andrei’s death (the sun goes out for him) and the extinguishing of the world, as every other instance in the novel in which the verb pogasnut′ is paired with the noun solntse [sun] is a description of the sun of the City being turned off. In a sense, the zenith point is the “edge of the world” that Andrei had originally predicted: the sun disappears as one crosses the threshold. On the final pages of the novel, Andrei finds himself back in what seems to be Leningrad. He recognizes his “earthly” surroundings by personal markers and Soviet realia: the sound of his mother talking in the communal kitchen with a neighbor and an issue of Leningradskaia pravda featuring the “mathematical” headline “Leningraders’ love for Comrade Stalin is 36 Ibid., 7: 471. 37 Ibid., 7: 504. 38 Ibid., 7: 517.

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Boundless” [Liubov′ leningradtsev k tovarishchu Stalinu bezgranichna].39 But it is also immediately clear that he is still connected to the City: the final sounds of the novel are the shouts of children in the courtyard below telling Izia that his mother is calling him to dinner, and the very first detail of the scene is the sound of Andrei’s Nastavnik telling him, in a line that echoes both Dante and Solzhenitsyn, that he has completed the “first circle.” In response to Andrei’s inquiry as to why the circle he has just left behind is the “first,” his Nastavnik replies that “many of them are still ahead” [ikh eshche mnogo vperedi].40 But Andrei is only vaguely interested in the Nastavnik’s pronouncements, and even looks at the newspaper “without interest” [bestsel′no]. His only other action is to go to the window and crane his neck to look up at the sky, where he sees Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, and the sixth brightest star in the sky. This glimpse of the bluish Vega is the astronomer-protagonist’s first and only connection with his object of study over almost four hundred pages, and yet this moment is passed over without comment. But Andrei’s motivation is obvious, as it should be only natural that an astronomer would wish to orient himself with respect to the night sky: Then Andrei, trying not to look in the direction from which the voice was coming, stood up and leaned his shoulder against the bookcase next to the window. The black well of the yard, weakly illuminated by yellow rectangles of windows, was below him and above him, and somewhere far overhead in the now completely darkened sky burned Vega [a gde-to naverkhu, v sovsem uzhe potemnevshem nebe gorela Vega].41

The mention of Vega here is crucial for understanding the cosmology of the Leningrad in which Andrei has found himself, but getting to a conclusion requires some mathematical legwork. First, in this scene there are a few concrete clues that allow the time of year to be determined within a relatively narrow range. The narrator mentions, with strong lexical echoes of the “microcosmic foreshadowing” that opens the novel,42 that “through the open ventilation window came the damp wind of snowbreak” [Cherez raskrytuiu fortochku tianulo vlazhnym ottepel′nym vozdukhom].43 In the 39 Ibid., 7: 517. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 The past passive participles raspakhnutyj and raskrytyi are very close in meaning, and the subjectless construction featuring the verb tianut′ is used in precisely the same sense in both sentences: to indicate air being drawn through an aperture. 43 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 517.

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passage quoted above, the sky is described as “completely darkened.” Thus, we have an early spring scene in the evening, under a completely dark sky, around seven pm, the approximate end of astronomical twilight44 in the latitude of Leningrad (about 60o north) in the spring of roughly 1937. The year can be determined by the fact that children in the courtyard are calling for Izia, who departed for the City in 196745: it follows from the assumption that Izia is approximately forty in the City that the scene must take place roughly thirty years prior to this date.46 With these two data points (year, time of day), a range of values for the altitude (angular distance above the horizon) of Vega can be calculated. It emerges that, at the beginning of March 1937 in Leningrad, Vega is just beyond 11° above the horizon, about the same as the span of a fist held at arm’s length. By the end of May, Vega is passing 20° above the horizon, the span of two fists. In other words, even well into spring, Vega is close to the horizon, far too close to be visible to one whose view of the sky is confined to a 10°–15°-radius circle centered at the zenith by the kolodets of a Russian apartment building, inscribed in the zvezdnyi bilet seen by Viktor in Aksenov’s novel, discussed in Chapter Four. Vega could come into view for such an observer only when it gains an altitude of over sixty degrees, which will not happen until late August. Finally, sunset in Leningrad in early March occurs around 18:30, and by the end of March takes place past 19:30. This means that, during the earliest period that could be called spring, the light of the Sun would drown out Vega’s until well past dinner-time. The calculations that allow these conclusions are presented in detail in Appendix I. 44 Twilight begins when the Sun is below the horizon. Civil twilight is the period during which the sky is still bright and outdoor actitivies are possible; during nautical twilight, the brightest navigational stars become visible; the fainter stars can be seen during astronomical twilight. Ridpath and Woodruff, Cambridge Astronomy Dictionary, 220. 45 The date given of Izia’s year of departure is not wholly consistent: at the beginning of the novel Andrei is angry about the knowledge that he lacks about the outer world when talking to Donald and Izia, who both come from 1967. When Andrei is interrogating him in part two, Izia gives his year of departure as 1968. At any rate, the difference that these two dates make in the calculations to follow is insignificant. 46 I would like to thank Marat Grinberg—with whom I sat at a round table on Grad obrechennyi at ASEEES in Chicago in November 2017—for inadvertently helping me correct my estimate of the year in this scene. In his comments on the novel, Professor Grinberg mentioned that Izia’s age must place the final pages in the 1930s. I had previously assumed that Andrei had returned to 1951, his year of departure from Leningrad, having failed to incorporate this particular data point. While recalculating has changed none of my conclusions, failing to do so would have been mathematically dishonest.

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It follows that there is no scenario in which Vega will be visible from Andrei’s apartment window during the early spring, certainly not, as the narrator describes it, “far overhead” [daleko naverkhu]. Thus we have direct mathematical-astronomical evidence that the final scene cannot take place in the “former” Leningrad. In other words, Andrei remains in hell, outside his “home” universe. Andrei, doubtless familiar with the constellations from a young age, would immediately notice that Vega is not it its proper place. This is not to say that the Strugatskiis sat down and did these calculations, though, given their background, they could have easily done so. Rather, they, knowing the night sky intimately from a lifetime of experience, took a well known star that approaches the zenith much later in the year, and then spun the sidereal clock in such a way as to indicate that the setting of the final scene cannot be the world from which Andrei had departed. Vega, moreover, is at its lowest altitude during the spring months, when it is visible roughly between Polaris and the northern horizon. In looking at this star far above him in the sky, Andrei is facing “north,” continuing on the path that he and Izia had been following when he was “killed.” This suggests a continuity with the unpredictable apparent movements of the sun as the expedition moved northward, and implies that Andrei is looking in the (metaphorical) direction in which his Nastavnik expects him to go as he will move through further circles of hell. Such an interpretation builds on Howell’s assertation that, in writing Grad obrechennyi, the Strugatskiis “have chosen to guide the protagonist through Dante’s circles of hell again.” Prior to this, she suggests that Andrei’s vision of Vega corresponds to the bright, hope-giving planet that is glimpsed by Dante’s protagonist in the opening lines of the Inferno, and later speculates as to which of the Italian poet’s circle(s) Andrei inhabits. Howell makes a strong argument that the Strugatskiis’ novel parallels Dante’s poem in that each can be read both as a vision of hell and as a “political jeremiad.”47 In general, her discussion serves as an essential predecessor to the cosmological problem being considered here: while the Strugatskiis are still “borrowing” Dante’s cosmology as they did in Strana bagrovykh tuch, in Grad obrechennyi they are contributing their own circles, thus joining Dante’s cosmological tradition. In Andrei’s vision of Vega there is also a potential connection with the final scene in Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, in which Levin reaches one of his (rare, temporary) moments of inner calm while pondering the triangle of stars in the constellation Auriga, almost certainly ε, ζ, and η Aurigae, known as the Haedi or Kids, the children of the she-goat for which the star Capella 47 Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 73–75.

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(α Aurigae) is named. The contrast between these scenes is stark: Levin looks at the stars and feels calm and order, while Andrei looks at Vega and feels only confusion, cosmological disorientation. BN has characterized Grad obrechennyi as the story of “the fate of a man who is initially deeply driven by ideology, but later, under the blows of fate and circumstances, has utterly lost his ideological footing and ends up hanging in a kind of conceptual emptiness” [v edakoi ideinoi pustote].48 The threat of “conceptual emptiness” might be called Levin’s—and, by extension, Tolstoi’s—central obsession, an abyss into which he never lets his protagonist disappear.49 The Strugatskiis, on the other hand, set their entire novel in this abyss. The question of Vega’s “dislocation” and the seeming unpredictability of the “second circle” in which the final moments of the novel are set recall that there is strong evidence that the City is unpredictable even for those who apparently made it. A major blow to perceptions of the orderliness of the Experiment is struck by an accident that precedes the opening of part three of the novel: the sun goes out unexpectedly and is not relit for several weeks. This state of affairs is popularly known as the t′ma egipetskaia [the Egyptian darkness], the Russian term for the Plague of Darkness visited upon Egypt in Exodus 10:21–29. Andrei, no longer believing implicitly in the wisdom and power of the Nastavniki, mutters to himself about the “great experimenters” who cannot even supply sunlight. During their meeting in chapter two of this section, Andrei finds his Nastavnik visibly agitated, and full of vague excuses regarding the darkened sun. He says that the extinguishing was an accident: “‘But we didn’t turn it off!’” he said with anguish. ‘It was an accident. Not in accordance with any plan [Vne vsiakogo plana]. No one expected it.’”50 This exchange undermines the assumed orderliness of the captive universe in which the City exists, and implies that the Nastavniki are not the gods or demi-gods that Andrei had imagined them to be. For Andrei the participant in the Experiment, the t′ma egipetskaia is less a biblical punishment from the heavens than a tremor in the foundations of the “world.” The “gods,” after all, have not designed this Plague of Darkness and have lost control of the Experiment. For Andrei the astronomer, his witnessing of the extinguishing of the sun is his first step away from thinking of the cosmology of the City—a world he had previously regarded as artificial—as 48 Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 233 49 It could be noted as an aside that the image of Andrei hanging in an emptiness is not dissimilar from that in the dream Tolstoi describes in his 1883 “Ispoved′” [Confession] in which he wakes up to find his bed suspended over an abyss. 50 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 330.

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outside the bounds of scientific inquiry. To be more specific, it follows automatically from the Nastavnik’s admission that they did not turn off the sun that there may be someone else, or no one, at the cosmological helm. The rest of the novel chronicles Andrei’s attempts to understand this universe in the most basic way, an effort which yields strikingly limited results. Every other work considered in this book takes place in what the reader can recognize as a distorted version of “our” world. This distortion is enacted by essentially one key concept, such as that of the Homeostatic Cosmos in the previous chapter. Grad obrechennyi is the Strugatskiis’ sole work for which an entire physical cosmology has been created, and, as such, represents the pinnacle of this trend in their work. Yet the cosmology of the City is not only physical, but cultural as well, and an approach from this cultural angle may be far more effective in describing the universe of the City than Andrei’s futile scientific investigations.

Cultural/literary cosmology At the end of part three of the novel, Geiger leads a coup—called the Course-Correction [Povorot]—which, buoyed by citizens’ outrage over two weeks without sunlight, apparently overthrows the Nastavnik-approved power structure of the City. In part four, Geiger, now president, has declared the Experiment over and has initiated an ambitious building project (the Velikaia Stroika) the goal of which is not stated, but involves the digging of a vast foundation pit. The grim reference to Platonov seems quite deliberate: the pit is twice called a kotlovan.51 Pro-Geiger slogans announce: “The Great Building Project Is a Blow Against Non-People!” [Velikaia Stroika — udar po neliudiam!], “An Experiment on the Experimenters!” [Eksperiment — nad eksperimentatorami!]. Within this context of the rebuilding and reforming of the ideological foundations of the City, Geiger has lunch with Andrei and Izia, the same lunch at which plans for the expedition to the north are discussed. As they talk, Geiger, who personally has no interest in art, expresses concern about the lack of artistic talent in the City: In the City are published two literary journals, four literary newspaper supplements, at least ten serial publications of trashy adventure stories… and that’s it, it seems. And fifteen or so more titles a year. And, at that, none 51 Howell discusses the Strugatskiis’ novel’s intertexuality with Platonov’s in greater depth (Howell, Apocalyptic Realisms, 97–8).

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of it is any good. I’ve spoken with well-read people. Not a single noteworthy work of literature has appeared in the City either before or after the CourseCorrection. Just pulp. What’s going on?52

The dearth of artistic creativity in the City is the focus of the remainder of their conversation—about four pages. The discussion stands out not only by virtue of its length, but also in terms of its expansion of the City’s cosmological structure into an additional—cultural—“dimension”: “They’re hacks, they’re hacks,” nodded Izia. “They told you right. There are no Tolstois, no Dostoevskiis to be seen. No Levs, no Alekseis even…” “But, seriously, why is it this way?” asked Andrei. “No prominent writers,” continued Geiger. “No artists. No composers. No… what’re they called… sculptors.” “No architects,” Andrei took up the thread. “No filmmakers.” “There’s nothing of the sort,” said Geiger. “A million people! At first it just surprised me, and then, to be honest, it disturbed me.” “Why?” Izia asked immediately. Geiger chewed his lips in hesitation. “It’s difficult to explain,” he admitted. “I myself don’t understand why any of this is necessary, but I’ve heard that every respectable society has all of it. And since we don’t, it means that something is wrong.”53

Andrei speculates that artistically talented individuals are not recruited to come to the City, and Izia imagines that such people choose not to come. Izia also says—in a moment that explicitly evokes Soviet history—that Geiger would not like it were there such people in the City, as he would have to threaten and arrest them: Well, great writers are also always grumbling. It’s their normal condition because they’re society’s aching conscience [bol′naia sovest′ obshchestva], the existence of which society itself may not even suspect. And since the symbol of society in the present case is you, then you’ll be the first in line to have cans thrown at you…54

This conversation highlights the function of the written word in the narrative: books are mentioned rarely, and, with one exception to be discussed, 52 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 392. 53 Ibid., 7: 392–93. 54 Ibid., 7: 394.

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never by name. Yet the novel is overflowing with “non-literary” writing: there are numerous examples of newspaper headlines and articles, letters, and diaries. But the written word is by far the most present in the detritus of documents left in the ruined northern cities. It is no accident that the assiduous collector and reader of these documents is Izia, the self-declared “high priest of the Temple of Culture.”55 Numerous depictions of Izia as a voracious consumer of documents—of any written material—are scattered throughout the narrative, and twice his reading is modified by the adverb zhadno [greedily]. In the first such instance, when Andrei returns to his office in part two—having taken Izia into custody and having left him with instructions to describe the contents of a folder that he had managed to throw into an open manhole during the motorcycle ride to the station—he finds his friend reading case files from the safe: In room thirty-six all conceivable lights had been turned on. Mister Katsman stood, leaning his shoulder against the open safe, and greedily thumbed through some case file, habitually tearing at his skin tag and grinning about who knows what.56

In the second instance, in part three, when Andrei and his newspaper staff, fearing the worst after Geiger’s coup, are hurriedly burning letters to the editor, Izia happily grabs papers to read from a pile so large that it has been heaved into the room on a raincoat: The raincoat was placed by the hearth, and everyone set to throwing letters into the fire. The hearth immediately began to roar. Izia thrust his good hand into the depths of the pile of multicolored papers covered with writing, extracted some or another letter, and, grinning in advance, greedily set to reading.57

In part five, during the expedition, Izia comes into Andrei’s room to read found documents by the light of his friend’s lamp, and when Andrei asks 55 As a side note, it should be mentioned that the prominence of documents as literature in Grad obrechennyi suggests an artistic justification for the narrative structure of the Strugatskii’s late novel Volny gasiat veter [The Waves Still the Wind]. Their final work to be set in the Noon Universe, Volny is composed largely of documents and reports linked together by the explanations and hypotheses of Maksim Kammerer, first seen in Obitaemyi ostrov, now an old man of eighty-nine. For the Strugatskiis, there is a compelling link between literary and documentary narratives. 56 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 287. 57 Ibid., 7: 339.

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him a question, Izia is too utterly engrossed in his reading to answer: “Izia was already reading again. Quickly, like a machine” [Izia uzhe snova chital. Bystro, kak mashina].58 In Izia one can recognize the Soviet archetype of the voracious reader, yet his reading material is not the poetry and prose that Soviet citizens suffered to produce and to read—it is primary documents. The Strugatskiis do not state outright that Izia’s reading diet contains no “capital-L” literature, but the conclusion can easily be reached when considered against the lunch conversation on the lack of real art in the City: the cultural cosmology of the City is such that literature does not exist, and Izia is following the only available path towards the truth and understanding that literature offers. Literature was the best means of understanding and coping with life in the Soviet Union; in the City, the best means are history and documentary fact. This reality follows from the secrecy surrounding the mere existence of the City’s previous iterations. Thus, documents in the City serve a purpose analogous to that of literature in the Soviet Union: a means of learning the true nature of things. Late in the novel, recalling Voland’s famous assertion,59 Izia states: “Manuscripts don’t lie. They’re not like books. You just have to know how to read them” [Rukopisi ne vrut. Eto tebe ne knigi. Nado tol′ko umet′ ikh chitat′].60 If we accept as an axiom that documents are the literature of the City, then this allows an essential conclusion: literature is the only reliable means for understanding the City’s cosmological structure, while all other means fail utterly to do this. There are hints of this fact early on in the novel. Izia’s first mention of going “north” is centered around his search for documents, for information unavailable by any other means: I’ve found documents there in empty buildings that’ll make your head spin. Have you heard of the monarch Veliarii the Second? Didn’t think so! But he, as it happens, ruled there. But in those times when he ruled, here—he tapped a fingernail on the table—here there were just swamps and serfs—or

58 Ibid., 7: 424. 59 In part three, while the newspaper staff are burning letter, Denny Lee, a newspaper employee who will in part four blow himself up in protest of the Geiger regime, quotes Voland’s famous line about manuscripts not burning, adding, however, that they seem to be burning quite well. The Strugatskiis owed a great creative debt to Bulgakov, and some of their key late works—Khromaia sud′ba [A Lame Fate, 1982], Otiagoshchennye zlom [Those Burdened by Evil, 1988]—contain explicit references to his. 60 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 500.

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slaves—worked their butts off in those swamps. And this was not a bit less than a hundred years ago…61

When Izia meets Andrei after the latter’s first visit to the Red Building, he has just returned from a similar expedition: I excavated the old mayor’s office; it’s about fifteen kilometers from here. I’d been digging there all day, the sun went out, total darkness, like in a negro’s butt, it’s been twenty years, you yourself understand, since there’s been any sort of lighting there.62

The folder that Izia is carrying in this scene becomes a kind of MacGuffin for the remaining chapters of part two of the novel: Andrei’s suspicions of what it might contain prompt him to take his friend into custody, and, once at the police station, his single-minded desire to compel Izia to reveal the contents of the folder causes him to allow Geiger and his fellow ex-Nazi Rumer (a former boxer) to interrogate him, resulting in the breaking of Izia’s arm, an injury that heals poorly. The contents of the folder are never revealed to the reader, and, when Andrei asks Izia about them as they are burning documents at the newspaper office, his friend’s answer is evasive—he implies that they may reveal some great secret of the Experiment, but there is a strong suggestion that he is lying. Whether or not he was able to assimilate the contents of this particular folder, Izia is far and away the most informed of the characters in the novel because he is constantly reading the literature of the City. This fact is underscored in part five of the novel, during the expedition, among the members of which Izia is the sole person capable of mapping the world in which they are traveling, and, most importantly, of finding water and fuel. At one point, Andrei mentally lists the ways in which Izia has contributed to their effort: In the first place, he was finding water. The geologists looked much and in vain for sources, bored into the cliffs, sweated, carried out exhausting expeditions during periods of general rest breaks. Izia simply sat in the trailer 61 Ibid., 7: 205–6. 62 Ibid., 7: 264.

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under his hideous homemade umbrella and dug through the old papers of which he had already amassed several boxes worth. And four times he had predicted where to dig for underground cisterns. It was true that one cistern turned out to be dry and in another the water had already become quite foul, but twice the expedition had gotten lovely water thanks to Izia and Izia alone. In the second place, he found a diesel depot, after which Ellisauer’s anti-Semitism became to a large degree abstract. “I hate Yids,” he explained to his head mechanic. “There’s nothing in the world worse than a Yid. But I’ve never had anything against Jews! Take, for example, Katsman…”63

Ellisauer’s anti-Semitism raises the issue of Izia’s role within the novel as a Jewish person. The Strugatskiis—with their own lifelong experience of Soviet anti-Semitism—knew that the presence of Izia in Grad obrechennyi would be one of many barriers to publication. BN writes in his commentary: And what about our Izia Katsman, an undisguised Jew, even more so, a defiantly truculent Jew [evrei demonstrativno vyzyvaiushchii], one of the main characters, but, what is more, one who is constantly lecturing the protagonist, a Russian, as if he were a little boy, and not just lecturing him even, but also regularly triumphing over him in all their ideological clashes?64

That Izia is Jewish is mentioned repeatedly over the course of the novel. Geiger—a former SS officer!—repeatedly refers to him as “my Jew,” and, when Andrei is interrogating him in part two, Izia’s response to the question of his nationality is “Yes!” Here the Strugatskiis are repeating a variant of a Soviet joke that apparently first appeared in literature in Evgenii Agranovich’s 1962 poem “Evrei-sviashchennik” [The Jew-Priest], a lyric that was passed from hand to hand for decades (during which it was misattributed both to Slutskii and Brodskii) before being officially published in 1993 in the almanac Noi. The poem describes a Jewish man who, having

63 Ibid., 7: 424–25. 64 Ibid., 7: 587.

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completed his technical education in 1950, and, barred from working as engineer, becomes a priest.65 The effects of anti-Semitism on the Strugatskiis were first mentioned in Chapter One, and an entire book could be written on how this prejudice affected their career. For example, in 1943 or 1944, AN wanted to marry the daughter of a butcher in Moscow who was a friend of his uncle Sania. But the engagement was broken off because of the family’s objections: “the guy’s great in every way, but he’s a Jew” [vsem khorosh paren′, no — evrei].66 Later, the Strugatskiis’ acceptance into the Writers’ Union in 1964 was complicated by an odd alliance of Jewish writers and anti-Semites. Skalandis writes: The selection committee formally took exception to the fact that the coauthors lived in different cities. But rumor had it that no one liked the fact that the Natanovichs were pretending to be Russian (the Jewish members of the committee were annoyed by their “dissimulation,” the Russians by the fact that “they worm their way in everywhere [eti vsiudu lezut bez myla]”), and in their dislike for science fiction the “Semites” and the anti-Semites amicably joined forces.67

65 The stanzas most relevant to the present discussion: Он кончил институт в пятидесятом — Диплом отгрохал выше всех похвал. Тогда нашлась работа всем ребятам — А он один пороги обивал. He graduated from the institute in year fifty—/ Finished with flying colors, beyond all praise./ But then jobs turned up for all the other guys—/ And he was the only one with his hat in his hand. Он был еврей — мишень для шутки грубой, Ходившей в те неважные года, Считался инвалидом пятой группы, Писал в графе «Национальность»: «Да». He was Jew—a target of a rude joke/ That was circulating in those trifling years,/ He was considered an invalid of the fifth paragraph,/ He would write under “Nationality”: “Yes.” Evgenii Agranovich, “Ia v vesennem lesu pil berezovyi sok…”: Pesni, ballady, rasskazy, povesti dlia chteniia i ekrana (Moscow: Knizhnyi magazin “Moskva,” 1998), 64. In Soviet identification forms, the fifth paragraph was reserved for stating one’s nationality. 66 Skalandis, Brat′ia Strugatskie, 69. 67 Ibid., 274.

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Later that same year, when the Strugatskiis’ 1964 novel Popytka k begstvu ran into trouble with the censor, Valentin Osipov, the editor-in-chief at Molodaia Gvardiia, summoned the brothers’ editor Bela Kliueva to his office and said, “Well, what have these Yids of yours cooked up this time? [Nu i chto opiat′ natvorili eti tvoi zhidy?].68 Finally, late in the Strugatskiis’ career there were constant rumors that the brothers were planning on emigrating to Israel or America. In December of 1981, during a public assembly at Moscow Polytechnic, AN said, “If we do end up leaving our country, it will only be tied up on the floor of a tank” [Esli my i uedem iz nashei strany, tak tol′ko sviazannymi i na dne tanka].69 The brothers had no doubt that those like Osipov and the selection committee of the Writers’ Union would strenuously object to Izia’s presence as a central protagonist of Grad obrechennyi, and his status as the only character with any real perspective on the world of the City is one of the more significant literary counter-blows against anti-Semitism that the Strugatskiis would strike over the course of their career. Another is their final work, the 1990 play Zhidy goroda Pitera [The Yids of the City of Peter], which will be discussed in the “coda” that follows Chapter Eight. Crucially, Izia is not only intelligent, but hugely charismatic. In part one, when Andrei meets his future partner Selma, the self-proclaimed “slut” from Sweden, he, in a moment that recalls the trope of “saving the prostitute”—encountered in the works, for example, of Gogol, Nekrasov, and Chernyshevskii70—unleashes a moralizing speech, at the end of which she asks whether everyone in the City is an idiot like him. When Izia arrives, with his irreverent joking and boundless enthusiasm, the contrast to Andrei’s dull Chernyshevskiesque sermonizing is profound, and Selma looks at him “in rapture” [s voskhishcheniem].71 (Andrei, echoing the polemic with Turgenev that inspired Chernyshevskii’s novel, thinks of Izia’s attitude as “nihilism and spit-on-it-ism” [nigilizm i naplevizm].) But charisma aside, Izia’s sincere devotion to the written word and his ability to apply his knowledge show him to be a kind of rumpled, Soviet member of the People of the Book—in a world in which there is no Book. For him, knowledge—knowledge that only he is capable of securing—is an end unto itself. Neither Andrei’s training as an astronomer nor that of the other 68 Ibid., 303. 69 Ibid., 406. 70 See Gogol’s story “Nevskii prospekt” (1834), Nekrasov’s poem “Kogda iz mraka zabluzhden′ia [When from the murk of error…, 1846], and Chernyshevskii’s novel Chto delat′? [What Is to Be Done?, 1863] 71 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 185.

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scientists on the expedition are of any use. Only Izia, with his iron boxes of documents, is able to describe and predict the world in which they live. He says as much during an argument among the leaders of the expedition: So geology has sold us short? Well the hell with it, with geology, we’ll get by without geology. We’ll certainly get by without cosmography… Is it really not clear that our main purpose is scouting, gathering information?72

So honed is Izia’s sense for information that, late in the novel, he is able to find a library by smell alone, and his affection for the written word is underscored when he at one point falls asleep with an open book as his pillow. His unique ability among the inhabitants of the City to map the world in which they live is indicated by Colonel St. James (the military head of the expedition) in a conversation with Andrei in part four in which he states that the sole map of the regions north of the City in existence was drafted, however approximately and however coffee- and food-stained, by Izia. The logical endpoint of all of Izia’s enthusiasm for written information is the writing of a document of his own. In part six, as he and Andrei are walking through the wasteland south of the zenith point, they periodically stop where there is a good supply of stones to inter a copy of the former’s Putevoditel′ po bredovomu miru [A Guide-book to the Raving World] in a cairn. Izia had produced fifty copies of the Putevoditel′ using a typewriter and copy machine in the “Crystal Palace” [Khrustal′nyi Dvorets] (another reference to the Turgenev-Chernyshevskii-Dostoevskii polemic), a place shown only in a handful of flashbacks, and one that appears as a legend among those who live north of the City. Izia’s Putevoditel′—produced through what any Soviet reader would recognize as samizdat—is ultimately a description or distillation of all that he has learned from documents and personal experience: it is both a book and a map. Or, rather, such contents might be assumed, since no information is given about Izia’s work beyond its title. Of greater significance to the cultural cosmology of the novel is his concept of the Khram kul′tury [the Temple of Culture], on which he expounds in part six of the novel. His description is worth quoting at length: … All the rest is just scaffolding around the walls of the Temple, he said. All the best things that humanity has thought up over a hundred thousand years, all the important things that it has understood and figured out go into the construction of the Temple. […] [B]ut the Temple goes on growing and growing, unconcerned, from century to century, from millennium to 72 Ibid., 7: 431.

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millennium, and it’s impossible to demolish it or to bring it low for good… The funniest thing, said Izia, is that each brick of the Temple, each eternal book, each eternal melody, each inimitable architectural silhouette carries within itself the compressed experience of that very same humanity, its thoughts and thoughts about it, its ideas about the objectives and contradictions of its existence; that, no matter how much it seems separate from all the transitory interests of this herd of cannibalistic pigs, it, at the same time and for all time is inseparable from this herd and is unimaginable without it… And it’s also funny, said Izia, that no one actually builds this Temple consciously. It cannot be planned in advance on paper or in anyone’s genius mind; it grows on its own, unerringly taking into itself all the best things that human history brings forth… Maybe you think (Izia asked acidly) that the dedicated builders of this Temple are themselves not pigs? Lord, but what pigs they sometimes are! Benvenuto Cellini the thief and scoundrel, Hemingway the unrestrained alcoholic, Chaikovskii the pederast, Dostoevskii the schizophrenic and reactionary, François Villon the burglar and hangman… Lord, I mean respectable people are really a rarity among them! But they, like coral polyps, know not what they make [No oni, kak korallovye polipy, ne vedaiut, chto tvoriat]. And all of humanity is the same. Generation after generation eats, revels, preys on others, kills, croaks—but, look!—an entire coral atoll has grown up, and such a beautiful one! And so steadfast [Da kakoi prochnyi]!73

Through his concept of the Temple of Culture, Izia has found a kind of “wormhole” connecting the universe of the City to that from which its inhabitants have been recruited. While the position of Vega casts doubt on whether or not Andrei does in fact return to Leningrad, there can be no doubt that Izia has found a cultural door out of the aquarium in which all the characters are trapped. Through this door he maintains a connection with that world, where cosmological structures allow literature to exist. Izia has also developed a kind of Temple hierarchy, which he explains to Andrei: But listen. I’ll tell you how I picture it. The Temple has (Izia began to bend back his fingers) builders [stroiteli]. They are the ones who erect it. Then, say, hmmm… dammit, I can’t pick the right word, religious terminology keeps creeping in… Well, okay, let it: priests [zhretsy]. They are the ones who carry it in themselves. Those through whose souls it grows and in whose 73 Ibid., 7: 505–6.

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souls it exists… And there are consumers [potrebiteli]: those who, so to speak, partake of it… So Pushkin is a builder. I am a priest. And you are a consumer…74

Andrei’s status as “consumer” is underpinned by a moment near the beginning of the novel: in part one, returning home at the end of the day on which the City had been overrun by baboons, Andrei cleans his apartment, takes a shower, and lays in his bed next to a shelf of “carefully selected detective novels,” choosing to read Agatha Christie’s 1939 And Then There Were None, originally published in the United Kingdom as Ten Little N-grs, and in the United States as Ten Little Indians. Russian translations have stuck with the original title: Desiat′ negritiat. This is the previously mentioned sole work of literature cited by name in the novel. The starting conditions of Christie’s novel bear striking parallels to those of Grad obrechennyi: ten individuals, all connected, to a greater or lesser degree, to various suspicious deaths, are invited under a variety of pretenses to the privately-owned “Indian Island” (originally “N-r Island”) off the southern coast of Devon, nothing but a bare rock with a luxurious house on its south side. Over the course of the novel each meets their death, the isolated miniature universe of the island preventing them from escaping or seeking help. There are numerous references to the closed-off nature of the island, such as the following internal monologue of Dr. Armstrong, one of the ten protagonists: There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.75

Given the Strugatskiis’ tastes, particularly those of AN, it is likely that Christie’s novel comprises one of the bricks in Izia’s Temple, and so the inclusion of the novel’s title serves as an intersection of cosmological problems: its plot reflects the aquarium in which the characters are imprisoned, while its status as a work of literature from that world anticipates Izia’s “door” out of the literary desert of the City. Another such “door” is not named, but is quoted: during the party at the very end of part one, Izia sings lines from chapter six (“Ave Maria”) of Aleksandr Galich’s late-1960s underground Poema o Staline [The Poem About Stalin], lines that, to Andrei, seem

74 Ibid., 7: 511–12. 75 Agatha Christie, Ten Little Indians (NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1967), 31.

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to come “from another planet.”76 Stalin is present throughout the chaotic conversation among Andrei’s guests; Andrei himself, upon recalling suddenly that Stalin is dead in the “outer” world, falls into contemplation at trying to reconcile the Experiment with Stalin’s goals, and connects them by concluding that both are “cosmic” in scale. In her “Stalin and Stalinism as Demonic,” in Pamela Davidson’s Russian Literature and its Demons, Rosalind Marsh argues that Galich’s poem “presents Stalin as a demonic figure in direct competition with Jesus.”77 This citation of Galich thus serves a purpose similar to that of Christie, in that they provide information on the City’s cosmological structure. In this particular case, the demon Stalin stands at the “exit,” just as he will do in the newspaper headline that Andrei reads when he seems to return to Leningrad at the end of the novel. While it is implied that Christie and Galich have provided bricks for the Temple, it is no surprise that, when Izia starts in part six to talk in earnest about this edifice, he introduces Pushkin as a “builder.” Pushkin’s name appears three times in the novel, all instances clustered towards the end: once in Andrei’s speech to the statues in part five, and twice in Izia’s monologues on the Temple in part six. This can be no accident: as Izia’s ideas take shape, the physical distance to Pushkin, trapped in that world, grows shorter. Pushkin is present throughout the entire narrative, woven into crucial elements of its structure. The Pushkinian cosmology of the novel will prove to be the essential linking element between the City’s physical and cultural cosmologies.

Pushkinian cosmology Izia’s Temple is not the only example in Grad obrechennyi in which the universe of the City seems to exhibit a certain “porosity” with respect to the “outer” universe. These instances recall one mistaken pre-Kantian interpretation of the nebulæ—attributed to English clergyman and natural philosopher William Derham (1657–1735)—as “openings in the firmament through which the fiery Empyrean is seen.”78 The best example of this phe76 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 209. BN mentions in his commentary to the novel that their inclusion of lines by Galich was “a bomb thrown at the feet of the editor, the chief editor, the publisher” [bomba — pod redaktora, pod glavreda, pod izdatel′stvo]. Ibid., 7: 587. 77 Rosalind Marsh, “Stalin and Stalinism as Demonic,” in Russian Literature and its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 494. 78 Hubble, In the Realm of the Nebulae, 24.

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nomenon is the Red Building. The suggestion that the Red Building is a kind of doorway out of the City arises from a striking astronomical incongruity: it appears to be illuminated by moonlight, while the universe of the City contains no Moon. The saxophonist Eino Saari mentions having seen the structure bathed in moonlight: I was standing right in front of the building, by the front stoop… but I remember perfectly well the roof, and the bricks, and the smoke coming out of the chimney—a kind of white nighttime smoke, like it was lit by the Moon…79

Later, in part four, when Andrei enters the Building, he notices moonlight coming through the window: “The parquet cracked and gave way underfoot with every step; on the trash-littered floor lay squares of moonlight [lunnye kvadraty].”80 These descriptions of moonlight are the only appearances of the Moon in the novel, and this, together with the dreamlike atmosphere associated with the Red Building, may indicate a connection to the marked presence of the Moon in Raskol′nikov’s dream in part three, chapter six of Prestuplenie i nakazanie [Crime and Punishment, 1866], in which he attempts to repeat the murder of the pawnbrokeress Alena Ivanovna. Much of Dostoevskii’s novel takes place during the daytime (it is set in early July in St. Petersburg, when the days are still long), and the Moon does not appear at all outside this dream. Andrei’s visits to the Red Building are similarly dreamlike, distinct in tone from the rest of the novel. During Andrei’s first visit, he plays a game of chess in which all his pieces are people he knows, living and dead, who watch him as he arranges them on the board. This element of performance recalls the moment in Rasol’nikov’s dream in which he seems to be onstage, subject to mocking laughter. The physical uncanniness of the Moon somehow shining into the universe of the City through the gap opened up by the Red Building is compelling in a cosmological sense, but moonlight is not the most salient feature of this mysterious structure, garnering only two appearances in the novel. The repeatedly mentioned copper doorknob [mednaia ruchka] on the front door of the Building, on the other hand, shows up so many times that there can be no doubt that the detail is intended to become fixed via synecdoche in the reader’s mind. While it would be tedious to enumerate each instance in which the copper doorknob is depicted, it will be necessary to highlight the most 79 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 231. 80 Ibid., 7: 410.

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important ones. The doorknob is a prominent feature of Saari’s first description of the Building: “A heavy sort of door… a kind of old-fashioned copper doorknob, embossed” [Tiazhelaia takaia dver′… mednaia takaia starinnaia ruchka, reznaia].81 A few pages later, when Andrei challenges Saari’s memory of having seen the roof of the Building from an impossible angle, the saxophonist defends himself in part by providing even more details about the doorknob, details that are somehow visible even in total darkness: And the knob on the door… A kind of copper one, polished by the touches of many hands [otpolirovannaia mnogimi prikosnoveniiami]… A cunning sort of tangle of flowers and small leaves [etakoe khitroe spletenie tsvetov, listikov]… I could draw it now, if I were able to draw… But at the same time the darkness was absolute: I couldn’t make out Ella’s face, it was only by the sound of her voice that I could tell she was smiling, when…82

When Andrei is about to enter the Red Building, the copper doorknob is mentioned three times in about two hundred and fifty words, and, at the end of the chapter, when he is exiting, three times in about one hundred words. As in this second case, if three percent of the words in a given short passage are identical, the repetition will be difficult to miss. But the copper doorknob is also the object of the Strugatskiis’ narrative focus—as an agent of change—in a way that is impossible to overlook, as in the passage in which Andrei resolves to enter the Building: Then Andrei looked to the right down Main street into the foggy gloom [v tumannuiu mglu], to the left along Main street into the foggy gloom, said farewell to all of it, just in case, and placed his gloved hand on the ornately embossed, gleaming copper [na vychurno-reznuiu blestiashchuiu med′].83

Crucially, once Andrei has emerged from the Building, he intuits that the touch of the copper doorknob has changed him permanently: He knew only that the Andrei Voronin who had gone through the door with the copper doorknob was not at all the same Andrei Voronin who had come out through that door. Something had broken in him there, something had been irreparably lost…84

81 82 83 84

Ibid., 7: 229. Ibid., 7: 231. Ibid., 7: 242. Ibid., 7: 276.

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The change that Andrei has experienced is underscored by a conversation he has with an old man whom he finds sitting on the bench beside him after he has left the Building. Izia approaches the pair as they are talking, later telling Andrei that he had been talking to “Judas” Stupal’skii, a notorious (albeit apparently fictional) informer for the Gestapo in wartime Poland. Stupal’skii is convinced that the City is Hell itself (he cites the famous inscription over the gates of Hell in the Inferno), and claims that the Building is described in a passage that may or may not have been written by Dante, one that seems also to depict the result of the crimes the old man had helped to perpetuate: “By the way, there exists a manuscript attributed to Dante in which this building is mentioned. How does it go…” The old man closed his eyes and raised his splayed fingers to his forehead. “Umm… ‘And my fellow-traveler, extending his arm, dry and bony…’ Mmm… No… ‘A tangle of bloodied bodies in dimly lit rooms [Krovavykh tel nagikh spleten′e v pokoiakh sumrachnykh] …’ Mmm…”85

The word “tangle” [spleten′e] is the higher-register spelling of the same word [spletenie] used by Saari during his interview with Andrei to describe the pattern of leaves and flowers on the copper doorknob. It follows that the doorknob may contain a compressed vision of Dante’s Hell, and thus, along with the light bulb in the opening sentences, is a second (micro)cosmological object in the novel. When the Building appears in the garden behind Andrei’s apartment in part four, emphasis is again placed on the copper doorknob, particularly on the fact that it has oxidized from disuse, its decay a reflection of Andrei’s steady moral decline: He went out towards the Building, scattering frightened fireflies, going ever deeper into the dead silence, not taking his eyes off the familiar copper doorknob on the oak door, but now that doorknob was dull and covered in greenish patches [tusklaia i pokryta zelenovatymi piatnami].86

Finally, he grabs the doorknob with the same sense of irrevocability as he did the first time, repeating even the phrase “all that” [vse eto]:

85 Ibid., 7: 259–60. 86 Ibid., 7: 409.

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He went up onto the front stoop and looked back. In the brightly lit windows of the dining room human shadows were happily jumping, bending grotesquely; dancing music wafted over weakly, along with—once again for some reason—the ringing of knives and forks. He kissed all that goodbye, turned around and took hold of the sticky embossed copper [vzialsia za vlazhnuiu reznuiu med′].87

The reader may have guessed already that the evidence is leading to Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik, with the copper doorknob and its tangled pattern serving, via the Dantean image of tangled corpses, to evoke the pile of corpses on which Petersburg is built. These connections are justified based not on the doorknob alone: the associations are much deeper and more profound, and do not all rest on this small object, which itself serves mainly to alert the reader to their presence more effectively. Even if there were no copper doorknob on the door of the Red Building, there is still the compelling association with Pushkin’s Horseman—a stationary object that moves, one that is dangerous to all who encounter it. Moreover, when we consider the ways in which the City represents a permutation of the Petersburg Myth, the Pushkinian text in the novel immediately starts to reveal itself. For instance, the City seems to have been “made” for the purposes of the Experiment, as Saint Petersburg was made for Peter’s experiments in Westernization. Furthermore, as Izia has discovered, each iteration of the City is founded where there had once been a swamp. Finally, for the eastern Yellow Wall and the western precipice, Howell suggests real-world equivalents of the Bay of Finland and the Ural Mountains, the dividing line between European and Asian Russia, a role also served by Peter’s Window to the West.88 There is, in fact, a fairly direct reference to the artificial granite banks (featured in the preamble to Pushkin’s poem on lines thirty-five and forty-six) that line the Neva as it flows through Petersburg. At the beginning of part four, as Andrei and Selma are walking along the edge of the precipice, it is mentioned that this abyss is fenced off by a granite “embankment”: They had not yet extended the granite parapet to this area, and Andrei instinctively tried to keep a distance above about five or six meters between himself and the edge of the precipice.89

87 Ibid., 7: 410. 88 Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 93. 89 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 356.

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Most important in this regard may be the legend of the “iron-headed ones” [zheleznogolovye] that circulates among those who live north of the City and later proves not to be a legend at all. The members of the expedition encounter animated statues that suddenly and unpredictably move from apparent immobility; these statues will be addressed in greater detail below. Even the “polyglot” population of the City seems to be connected to Pushkin’s poem, in which Peter imagines his city as a destination for all the other countries of the world. On line 19, he declares that “[a]ll flags will come to us as guests” [Vse flagi v gosti budut k nam], and later, the poetic speaker states that “ships,/ In a crowd, from all ends of the earth/ Rush to our rich quays” [korabli/ Tolpoi so vsekh kontsov zemli/ K bogatym pristaniam stremiatsia] (32–34).90 In the City, Peter’s vision is realized both geographically and temporally, as the citizens of the City come not only from various countries, but from “every end” of the mid-twentieth century. Finally, the Strugatskiis consciously modeled the City on Leningrad, and the building in which Andrei lives is a literal copy of that in which the Strugatskii family lived before and after the war.91 But these details are ultimately less crucial than the overarching fact that the oppressive atmosphere of the City and its unpredictable, nightmarish qualities clearly mark it as a literary product of the Petersburg Myth. This designation encompasses not only the current iteration of the City, but also—maybe more so—the derelict previous versions. In one abandoned city north of the City, the members of the expedition begin to find the remains of people who died in their apartments, having barricaded themselves away—in a macabre echo of Andrei’s empty rooms blocked with chairs—with furniture piled against the door. Izia finds the journal of one such person, from which they learn that the local climate (now unbearably hot) was cold, and that it had been necessary to burn furniture to survive—a fact that echoes the privations endured in Petrograd during the Civil War and in Leningrad during Blockade. Moreover, as Izia relates to Andrei, anyone who ventured into the street was in danger of being swept from existence by a so-called “ripple” [riab′]: “Anyway. People here lived under the government of the Kindest and Simplest. Note that all those letters are capitalized. They lived well, had everything to their heart’s content. Then the climate began to change, an abrupt cooling spell set it. But then something happened, and they all 90 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 136. 91 Bondarenko, Neizvestnye Strugatskie: pisˊma, rabochie dnevniki: 1942–1962 gg., 19.

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perished. I found a journal in here. The owner of the apartment barricaded himself inside and died of starvation. He didn’t die, rather, but hung himself, but did so because he was starving: he lost his mind… It all began when a kind of ripple appeared on the street…” “What appeared?” asked Andrei, pausing as he pulled off his boots. “A kind of ripple appeared. A ripple! Anyone who fell into the ripple disappeared. Sometimes they had time to begin screaming, and sometimes they didn’t even have time to do that: they just dissolved into the air, and that was it.” “It’s some kind of nonsense…” muttered Andrei. “Well?” “Those who went outside, they all perished in this ripple. But those who got scared or realized that things were bad, they survived at first. In the beginning they talked to one another on the telephone, but then began to die off one by one. There was nothing to eat, after all, and there was frost outside; they hadn’t stored up firewood, the heating didn’t work…” “And what happened to the ripple?” “He doesn’t write anything about it. I’m telling you that he lost his mind in the end. His final entry goes like this…” Izia rustled the papers. “‘I can’t go on anymore. And why should I? It’s time. This morning the Kindest and Simplest walked along the street and glanced into my window. It’s a smile. It’s time.’ That’s it. Note that his apartment is on the fifth floor. The poor guy fixed the noose to the ceiling lamp… The noose is still hanging there, by the way…”92

Given that this is the same area in which the walking statues are first witnessed, we are fairly compelled to extend the Petersburg Myth of the City to these empty cities, particularly since the waterless ripple can be connected to Pushkin’s flood as fluid, indiscriminatе death. Crucially, it is Izia’s description of those who suffered under the riab′ that prompts Andrei’s second, much longer recollection of the Blockade, in which he offers his child’s perspective, one that BN will later develop significantly in the “Schastlivyi mal′chik” [A Fortunate Boy] portion of his 1995 S. Vititskii novel Poisk prednaznacheniia [A Search for Purpose]. Thus the Strugatskiis assimilate and extend the Petersburg Myth by casting their experiences in the Blockade as a modern variant of Pushkin’s flood. It is no accident, given the cosmological porosity associated with the Red Building, that Andrei’s first detailed memories of the Blockade assault him during the aforementioned 92 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 448–49.

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chess game he is compelled to play there, reliving the deaths of his loved ones as they are removed from the board: Then he could see his brother and father carrying the body of his grandmother, Evgeniia Romanovna, sewed up in old bedsheets, down the ice-covered stairs and laying it on the stack of corpses in the yard… And then his father, too, was buried in a mass grave somewhere in Piskarevka,93 and a sullen driver, hiding his unshaven face from the cutting wind, rode back and forth in a steam roller over the frozen-stiff corpses, flattening them in order to fit some more bodies in the grave…94

Furthermore, in the first conversation that Andrei has about the Red Building with Eino Saari, it is established that the saxophonist saw his acquaintance enter the Building “on September eighth of the current year.” The mention of a day and month is noteworthy for two reasons, the first being cosmological: since the novel takes places in an “island universe” there is no compelling reason, other than convention, for the inhabitants of the City to continue to use the Julian calendar, which is based, after all, on the apparent movements of the Sun. In fact, there are no mentions of months or days of the week95 anywhere else in the novel. Mentions of seasons either occur within recollections of the outer world or are metaphorical. So this single occurrence must be significant, and it is: September eighth is the day in 1941 on which the Blockade began, still observed as a day of remembrance. Having established that the Blockade is woven into the novel’s Pushkinian text as a permutation of the flood, deeper conclusions can be reached. To this end, the question of animated statuary in the novel needs to be considered more closely. First, it should be mentioned that the Red Building does not simply appear and disappear as it moves about this City: it is seen in movement. As Andrei rashly attempts to enter the Building after having exited, he is almost “bucked” off of it as if it were a horse:

93 The village of Piskarevka, north of Leningrad, was the site of most of the mass graves that were dug during the Blockade. The Piskarev Memorial Cemetery is one of the most prominent public sites dedicated to those who died during the “900 Days.” 94 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 249. 95 The sole exception to this absence in the novel of days of the week is one memory Andrei has about subbotniki, the Soviet “voluntary” work Saturdays. Ibid., 7: 183.

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With a cry of “Don’t!” Andrei turned around and stretched his hand towards the copper doorknob. But it was already too late. The Building was leaving. It was slowly backing away into the pitch black of the gloomy alleys behind the synagogue and the “New Illusion” movie theater. It crawled away with a distinct murmur, rasp, and squeak, its windows rattling, its beams groaning. A tile broke off of the roof and smashed to pieces on a stone step. Andrei pushed on the copper door handle with all his might, but it seemed to have grown into the wood of the door, and the building was moving faster and faster, and Andrei was already running, almost being dragged behind it as if it were a train leaving the station. He tore and yanked at the doorknob and suddenly tripped on something, fell, and his fingers, crooked from exertion, tore free from the smooth copper whorls [s gladkikh mednykh zavitkov]. He hit his head—very painfully—on something, saw sparks, and something in his skull crunched, but he still saw the building—backing away, extinguishing its windows—turn beyond the yellow wall of the synagogue, disappear and appear again as if it were peeking out with its two remaining lit windows, but then those windows went out as well, and darkness descended.96

In addition to the suggestion that Andrei is bucked to the ground by the Red Building as if from a horse, there is some lexical overlap with the beginning of part two of Mednyi vsadnik: Andrei’s “cry” at the beginning of the passage is rendered by the Russian vopl′, and the “scraping” of the Building as it crawls away by skrezhet. Both nouns are found in line 268 of Pushkin’s poem, in the section that describes the waters of the Neva receding from the streets of Petersburg within the extended metaphor of a gang of thieves ridding themselves of their plunder as they flee: But then, satiated on destruction And exhausted by insolent mischief, The Neva drug itself back, Marveling at its rebellion And carelessly tossing aside Its loot. So a scoundrel, With his fierce gang, Having burst into a village, smashes, slashes, Wrecks and robs; cries [vopli], scraping [skrezhet], Assault, cursing, alarm, wailing!… 96 Ibid., 7: 255.

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And, burdened by their spoils, Fearing pursuit, exhausted, The robbers hurry home, Letting fall their loot along the way. (265–273)97

The semi-animate escape of the Building is not unlike Pushkin’s robbers: it even throws down a roofing tile as it rumbles away. That the Red Building is connected both to the Horseman and to the Neva certainly deepens and complicates the role of Mednyi vsadnik within Grad obrechennyi, as these two connections link it with the “natural” cosmology of the City and the experimenters who (seem to) control it. When the statues in the ruined northern city move, they are described mainly in terms of heavy, ringing sound, an exaggeration of Pushkin’s famous lines describing the metallic gallop of Peter’s horse as he chases after Evgenii: [He] runs and hears behind him— Like the rumbling of thunder— A heavy ringing gallop [Tiazhelo-zvonkoe skakan′e] Along the dazed sidewalk. (444–7)98

Compare to Pushkin’s passage the Strugatskiis’ descriptions of one of the moving statues, such as when Andrei and the other members of the expedition are awoken by smashing footfalls: And right away Andrei heard heavy, crunching blows, as if someone enormous was striking rhythmic blows against crumbling stone with an enormous sledge hammer.99

Later, while Izia and Pak (a member of a community of separatists who had fled from the City) are exploring an abandoned library and Andrei and the Mute are waiting in the vestibule, Andrei’s experience of the sound is described in greater detail: Some sort of vague, distant sound had appeared—not voices, the voices above were droning on as before. No, there, on the street, beyond the tall, nearly closed doors of the vestibule. It was plain to hear the multicolored panes in the stained-glass window beginning to ring [zazveneli], and it was plain to feel the stone steps beginning to vibrate under his elbows and butt, 97 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 143. 98 Ibid., 5: 148. 99 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 455.

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as if somewhere not far away there was a railroad and a train was passing over it—a heavy freight train. […] In the building across the street a cracked store window shattered with a ringing sound [so zvonom]. […] The hammer was getting still closer, and it was quite impossible to discern where it was coming from, but the blows were getting heavier and ringing more loudly [vse zvonche], and in them was a kind of indestructible and inevitable sense of triumph. The footfalls of fate, flashed through Andrei’s head.100

The root -zvon- occurs three times in the passage above, each time translated ring-. While this may be difficult to identify as a direct reference, its presence is compelling, particularly given the degree to which Pushkin’s sound-image has been celebrated and permutated by such poets as Blok (in his 1911 poem Vozmezdie [Retribution]) and Belyi (in his 1913 novel Peterburg). At the most basic, we have the heavy, metallic footfalls of an animated statue, a sound that, within the context of Russian literature, cannot be separated from Pushkin’s Horseman. It is consistent with the Strugatskiis’ expansion and amplification of the Petersburg Myth that their own walking statues have a much heavier step than Pushkin’s (at one place where many statues have passed the cobblestones have been pulverized), and that the sound and the sensation of their ringing footfalls themselves penetrate the ground and the surrounding buildings. Also of potential interest is the description of the face of the sole statue that is seen moving through the streets of the ruined city. It lacks the traditional features of statuary: “The statue depicted a stocky specimen in something like a toga, shaved bald, with an unpleasant toad’s face [s nepriiatnoi zhab′ei fizionomiei].”101 Later, when the statue comes to a halt near the abandoned library, it adopts a distinct pose: […] on the closest intersection, its head reaching to the third floor, towered a dark figure. A statue. An ancient metal statue. That same specimen with the toad’s ugly face [s zhab’ei mordoi], but now he stood, stretched out tensely, jutting out his stodgy chin, with one hand behind his back, and the other— either threatening or pointing into the heavens—raised up, displaying his pointer finger…102

100 Ibid., 7: 466–67. 101 Ibid., 7: 420. 102 Ibid., 7: 467.

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Howell points out that the statue’s pose combines at least two famous “graven images”: In this striking image, the most ominous features of the equestrian statue of Peter the Great are conflated with the statue of Lenin on top of an armored car in his iconographic “Finland Station” pose. Like Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, the statue Andrei sees has assumed enormous proportions and terrifies the little man with his thundering steps. Like the statue of Lenin at Finland Station, “he is depicted in the usual quasi-romantic fashion, with his hand poking into the air, supposedly addressing the masses…”103

Howell does not address the question of the statue’s “toad” face, a feature that is mentioned each time the statue is described—for a total of five. All depictions of Peter show bulging eyes, prominent cheeks, and a weak chin, a face that might be described as toad-like. And while the bald pate of the statue might recall Lenin, it also recalls the famous wax mask of Peter made by Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli in 1721. This depiction of Peter—jowly and bald—could very well be the inspiration behind the “toady mug” of the Strugatskiis’ walking statue. This assertion is backed up by the fact that the statue is dressed in “something like a toga”—the Bronze Horseman himself is wearing a toga and sandals. Thus this statue is a kind of warped Peter the Great, wandering about the ruined streets without his horse and without his hair—recall that Belyi had already brought the Horseman down from his horse in Peterburg. In fact, the detail that the Strugatskiis’ statue is itself covered in “something like cinders or black oxides” [ne to okalinoi, ne to chernoi okis′iu]104 may be a reference to Belyi’s Horseman: cinders form on the surface of molten metal, and Belyi’s permutation of Pushkin’s metallic being is consistently described as glowing like phosphorus. At any rate, the statue in Grad obrechennyi is connected both to Pushkin’s experimenter and to the Nastavniki, the Strugatskiis’ experimenters. The assumption that this statue is a direct descendant of Pushkin’s Horseman compels one to consider just what has set it into motion. Is the City populated by generations of Evgeniis whose collective reproach has animated the statue and those like it? There is no evidence for this interpretation in the text, unless we regard the iterated collapses of the abandoned 103 Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 81. She is quoting from Brodskii’s essay “A Guide to a Renamed City.” 104 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 467–68.

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portions of the City as a rebuke of the Nastavniki. There is an example, however, of the “Peter” statue delivering a permutation of Evgenii’s uzho tebe! rebuke. Following the scene in the library, Andrei sees the statue again standing still: He paused on the crosswalk, looked askance into the alley. The statue was there: it threatened with its half-meter-long black finger, unpleasantly smirking with its toad’s maw [ukhmylialas′ zhab′ei past′iu]. “I,” it seemed to say, “will get you, you sons of bitches [Ia, mol, vas, suk-kinykh kotov]!”105

It might be argued that the statues represent a kind of preemptive action with respect to the denizens of the City: having “learned” from their predecessor, they do not wait for rebuke and do not chase; but their constant motion wears down the citizens psychologically, leading, perhaps more slowly, to a collective version of Evgenii’s end of madness and death. The presence of Peter/the Horseman is not confined to the statue with the toad’s face. In part five, chapter three, as the “mini-expedition” of Andrei, Izia, Pak, and the Mute approaches the so-called “Pantheon” after their discovery of the library, there are two sights that prepare the reader for the peak of the statuary motif in the novel. Before they reach the square, Andrei looks up and sees a face in a window high above the street: And nothing else happened save for one time when Andrei, before he could get control of himself, gave a start when, happening to raise his eyes, he saw in the wide-open fourth-story window an enormous face discolored green that was staring at him with blind, bulging eyes. What could he do? The sight truly was terrible: the fourth floor and a spotted, ugly green face that filled the whole window [piatnistaia zelenaia kharia vo vse okno].106

The huge size and the sightless eyes of this face strongly suggest the features of a statue, while the bulging eyes again recall Peter. Furthermore, the greenish color of the face can suggest both decaying flesh and oxidizing copper, an image directly connected not only to the Bronze Horseman monument, but also to the greenish spots covering the once-polished copper doorknob of the Red Building when Andrei encounters it for the second time. Thus this moment, when the green face stares at Andrei without seeing him, is the first, but far from the only, case in which the trope of the Red Building intersects with that of the moving statues of 105 Ibid., 7: 471. 106 Ibid., 7: 471.

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the north. Furthermore, this moment serves as a kind of reversal of the incident, recounted in the journal of the man who hung himself, in which Kindest and Simplest looks in through his fifth-story window, suggesting that that suicidal “Evgenii” was also driven to madness by a giant walking statue. On the square of the Pantheon itself there is an untold number of abandoned pedestals, the statues that stood upon them having climbed down long ago. One feature stands out in this monotonous scene: And all the pedestals were empty, but about fifty meters ahead a broken-off leg as tall as a person—barefoot, with an unusually muscular calf—trod on the head of a winged lion.107

In the given context, this winged lion recalls the marble lion on which Evgenii rides out the flood, the broken-off leg a remnant of the rider.108 Thus the references to Pushkin—and particularly to Mednyi vsadnik—grow more dense as the end of the novel approaches. But it is during Andrei’s speech in the Pantheon to the audience of statues that these references become still more pointed. First, the mere fact that Andrei—a twentieth-century “little man,” a “little stellar astronomer of middling capabilities,” as he calls himself—is speaking to statues immediately recalls Evgenii’s address to the Horseman. But the parallels go far deeper than this general opposition. For instance, after Evgenii has shouted to the Bronze Horseman, the first indication that the statue has noticed him is the apparent turning of its head (lines 439–42). When Andrei is speaking to the statues, the only movement he observes among them is the turning of their heads away from him: With a very unpleasant feeling, Andrei suddenly spotted in the even rows of attentive listeners a few heads turned away from him. He looked more closely. There was no doubt: backs of heads. One, two… six of them! He cleared his throat with all his might and sternly rapped his knuckles on the galvanized surface. It did not help. “Just you wait [Nu, pogodite],” he thought threateningly. “Now I’ll show you [Ia vas seichas]! How would that be in Latin?” “Quos ego!” he bellowed.109

107 Ibid., 7: 471. 108 See footnote 29 to Chapter Five. 109 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 478.

The Island Universe and the Copper Doorknob: The Doomed City

The turning of the statues’ heads is interesting enough on its own, but Andrei’s desire to threaten the statues (Nu, pogodite […] Ia vas seichas!) is strikingly similar to Evgenii’s Uzho tebe! The results are reversed: in Pushkin’s poem, the threat draws the statue’s attention; in the novel, the threat causes Andrei to lose the statues’ attention, as still more of them turn their heads following his outburst. This recalls the non-threat of the moving statues in the streets: unlike the Bronze Horseman, these statues do not pursue anyone, despite the panic their movements cause. Their metaphorical heads—their attention—are turned away from people. Even when the sentry fires at the “toad-faced” statue it does not respond. As was posited above, the movement of the statues, albeit preemptive, is consistent in motivation and result with that of Pushkin’s Horseman. Once all the statues have turned their faces from Andrei, he thinks to himself, “they’re used to anthems, to odes. Exegi monumentum.” The Latin is the first line of the thirtieth poem of Horace’s third book of odes (23 BC), but the vast majority of Russian readers will first recall this line as the epigraph to Pushkin’s 1837 lyric “Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi…” [I erected a monument to myself not made by human hands…]. As if to drive this association home, a few lines down Andrei names Pushkin: What was it I told you? No, I didn’t lie, of course, I didn’t play some cruel trick on you: I said what I thought. I’m not against greatness, after all. Pushkin, Lenin, Einstein… I don’t like idolatry. One should bow down before deeds, not before statues.110

Pushkin’s monument poem is among his most famous, and its presence in a scene in which Andrei is addressing monuments is compelling, particularly if this poem is placed alongside those examined by Jakobson in his 1937 essay “The Statue in Pushkin’s Poetic Mythology,” first published in Czech as “Socha v symbolice Puškinově.” This is not to suggest that the Strugatskiis read Jakobson, but instead to point out that they are perceiving some of the same connections that the great Slavist had already described. We will return to Jakobson’s essay shortly, but first should point out that the poem itself contains some lines with implications for the novel:

110 Ibid., 7: 479–80.

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Я памятник себе воздвиг нерукотворный, К нему не зарастет народная тропа, Вознесся выше он главою непокорной Александрийского столпа. Нет, весь я не умру — душа в заветной лире Мой прах переживет и тленья убежит — И славен буду я, доколь в подлунном мире Жив будет хоть один пиит. Слух обо мне пройдет по всей Руси великой, И назовет меня всяк сущий в ней язык, И гордый внук славян, и финн, и ныне дикой Тунгус, и друг степей калмык. И долго буду тем любезен я народу, Что чувства добрые я лирой пробуждал, Что в мой жестокий век восславил я Свободу И милость к падшим призывал. Веленью божию, о муза, будь послушна, Обиды не страшась, не требуя венца, Хвалу и клевету приемли равнодушно И не оспоривай глупца. I erected for myself a monument not made by human hands;/ The people’s path to it will not become overgrown;/ It has raised up its insubordinate head higher/ Than the Alexandrian column. No, not all of me will die: my soul in the sacred lyre/ Will outlive my ashes and will escape decay:/ And I will be praised as long as in the sublunar world/ At least one poet lives. Word of me will travel across all Great Rus′,/ And every tongue that exists in her will name me,/ The proud grandson of the Slavs, the Finn, and the now wild/ Tunguz, and the Kalmyk, the friend of the steppes. And long will I be dear to the people/ Because I tried to awaken kind feelings with my lyre,/ Because, in my cruel age, I sang praise of Freedom/ And called for mercy for the fallen. Be obedient, o Muse, to God’s Will,/ Fearing no insult, demanding no crown,/ Accept praise and slander coolly,/ And dispute not the fool.111 111 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3: 424.

The Island Universe and the Copper Doorknob: The Doomed City

The poet’s listing of the various peoples who will name him after his death calls to mind the population of the City: all its citizens speak their own language, but nonetheless understand one another. For the reader, crucially, they all speak Russian—they all “name” Pushkin. This phenomenon is addressed by Andrei’s Nastavnik during their first meeting, in part one, chapter two: Remember how you were always trying to find out from me how this is possible: there are people of different nationalities, but they all speak the same language and don’t even suspect that they’re doing so. Remember how it astounded you, how you were puzzled, frightened even, how you tried to prove to Kensi that he was speaking Russian, and Kensi tried to prove to you that you yourself were speaking Japanese, remember? But now you’ve gotten used to it, now these questions don’t even enter into your head. It’s one of the conditions of the Experiment. That’s the Experiment for you, what else can you say?112

Pushkin’s mention of the “sublunar world” also has implications for the novel: as has already been discussed, the Red Building is illuminated by moonlight despite there being no Moon in the universe of the City. The Bronze Horseman is similarly described: as he pursues Evgenii, he is “illuminated by the pale Moon” [ozaren lunoiu blednoi] (448). But, most importantly, the central theme of (the first part of) Pushkin’s poem—permanence versus decay— is also central to the novel. Izia’s concept of the Temple of Culture is a kind of collective version of Pushkin’s monument: a permanent “structure” not made by hands that is beyond the reach of destruction. Yet all the actual structures featured in the novel are in a state of decay, or soon will be. So, the essential tension of Pushkin’s poem is essential also to the novel. Though the dilapidated state of the Red Building during its second appearance in part four might suggest that some component of the Experiment has failed, Andrei’s behavior in the Pantheon strongly suggests that the machinery of the Experiment is humming even in the northern wastes. In fact, the Red Building and the Pantheon should be viewed as part of a whole, not only because in both spaces Andrei loses control of his conscious self and takes part in some activity—the chess game and the speech—with no prompting and yet with total understanding of what is required of him. Some key visual links strengthen this association. For instance, one of the details that catches Andrei’s eye during his first visit to 112 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 157.

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the Red Building is the high ceiling of the main room—described with an astronomy metaphor—and a row of busts in niches along the wall: […] from the infinitely distant ceiling hung enormous purple and gold stripes of cloth, like the strands of some improbable northern lights made material [slovno materializovavshiesia lenty kakogo-to neveroiatnogo severnogo siianiia], everyone stood along the wall with high, rounded niches, and, in the niches, proudly humble busts were hiding in the gloom, busts of marble, of plaster, of copper, of gold, of malachite, of stainless steel…113

The busts are still present during Andrei’s second visit, but they are no longer imposing, now part of the general decay and ruin: It was just as cold in the enormous hall, it was drafty there at night; dusty black rags hung from the unseen ceiling, the marble walls were darkened by suspicious, messy spots and shone with streaks of dampness; the gold and purple had flaked off of them, and the proudly humble busts—of plaster, of marble, of copper, of gold—blindly and mournfully stared out from the niches through shreds of dusty spider webs.114

The blind eyes of the busts anticipate those of the green oxidized face that Andrei sees as he and his companions approach the Pantheon. The statues that make up Andrei’s audience in the Pantheon are listed by their materials in such a way that the reader is compelled to remember the busts in the Red Building, as if the busts are linked to the phenomenon at the moving statues, just pared down for economy of space: the busts move when the Red Building moves, while the Pantheon seems set in place. The materials of the Pantheon statues are listed twice, once when they are paying attention to Andrei, and once when they have turned their faces away from him: They sat solemnly and still on either side of the table, turning their attentive faces to him—faces of stone, of cast iron, of copper, of gold, of bronze, of plaster, of jasper… and whatever other kinds of faces they might have. […] Before him were only the back of heads—of cast iron, of stone, of steel, of jade… shaved, bald, curly, with pigtails, with dents and scratches, and some completely hidden behind chain-mail, helmets, tricorns…115

113 Ibid., 7: 243. 114 Ibid., 7: 410. 115 Ibid., 7: 475, 479.

The Island Universe and the Copper Doorknob: The Doomed City

Note the presence of the adjective “copper” [mednyi] in the first list. This adjective appears once again, now referring to the copper doorknob of the Red Building (when it is stained with oxidation at its second appearance), as Andrei is leaving the Pantheon: No one paid any attention to him. He turned and made his way back out, feeling a draft reaching to his bones, a stinking draft saturated by the vapors of the crypt, of rusting metal, of corroded copper [propitannyi ispareniiami sklepa, rzhavchiny, okislivsheisia medi]…116

Finally, it should be mentioned that the galvanized zinc table that stands before Andrei as he speaks to the statue is also reminiscent of the Red Building: both times Andrei sees the Building, it is mentioned that the roof is made of galvanized tin. In Jakobson’s article on Pushkin’s animated statues, he describes what he calls the poet’s myth of the destructive statue. He posits that, while the motif of statuary is present in works written throughout Pushkin’s career, three works in particular feature an animate statue in their title and share a host of key traits. They are, in addition to Mednyi vsadnik, the “little tragedy” Kamennyi gost′, [The Stone Guest, 1830], and the Skazka o zolotom petushke [The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, 1834]. While Kamennyi gost′ does not seem to be intertextually present in Grad obrechennyi, the Skazka o zolotom petushke is cited explicitly. When Andrei and Izia are arguing about the reliability of Pak, Izia says that he would have just as much reason to have concerns about Mymra, the (apparently) developmentally disabled girl whom the soldiers are using as a sex slave: “‘You would be better to suspect Mymra,’ said Izia. ‘How is it… like in the tale of Tsar Dodon… The Tsarina of Shemakhan.’”117 While Izia does not quite remember the name of Pushkin’s Tsar Dadon, his comparing of Mymra to the Tsarina of Shemakhan is apt and telling. First, there is the parallel of Mymra’s functional muteness: she speaks a language that no one can understand, a phenomenon unknown under the apparent laws of the Experiment. (Her name, applied to her by Izia, is a Russian slang term for a gloomy, uncommunicative woman.) The Tsarina of Shemakhan never once speaks in the poem, but only laughs when Dadon strikes the astrologer dead. Like Dadon and the astrologer, the scientists and soldiers on the expedition fight over the young woman: Andrei’s informant Permiak, a former Soviet zek with the tattoo “Khrushchev’s slave” on 116 Ibid., 7: 480. 117 Ibid., 7: 441.

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his forehead, says that, “[e]very blessed day they squabble with the soldiers over Mymra” [Kazhdyi bozhii den′ u nikh s soldatami iz-za Mymry gryznia…].118 Furthermore, the scene in which Andrei and Izia emerge from the Pantheon to find the members of the expedition killed by one another strongly recalls the scene in Pushkin’s poem in which Tsar Dadon finds his sons slain—each by the other’s sword—together with all their soldiers in front of the Tsarina’s tent.119 Mymra is not among those killed, which deepens her connection to Pushkin’s Tsarina, who, after having been involved in the death of every other character, disappears. The presence in Grad obrechennyi of two out of the three works that form the nucleus of Jakobson’s analysis suggests that it may be possible to apply elements of his analytical framework to the novel. His “plot kernel” linking these works consists of three parts: 1.  A man is weary, he settles down, he longs for rest, and this motif is intertwined with desire for a woman. 2.  The statue, more precisely the being which is inseparably connected with the statue, has a supernatural, unfathomable power over this desired woman. 3.  After a vain resistance the man perishes through the intervention of the statue, which has miraculously set itself into motion, and the woman vanishes.120

Andrei’s path in part five of the novel follows Jakobson’s plot kernel to a remarkable degree. For instance, Andrei as the head of the expedition, is exhausted and wishes deeply that he could turn back without losing face; he considers raping Mymra: “I’ll get up now,” he thought. “I’ll go down to the first floor… Where’s she sacked out now—it is in the kitchen? Before, such a thought had called up in him only a healthy disgust. Now this was not happening. He imagined Mymra’s naked, dirty legs, but he did not linger on them, but went higher…

118 Ibid., 7: 446. 119 The scene when Evgenii looks for Parasha’s house after the flood along a street strewn with bodies, is also worth recalling here: “all around/ As if on a field of battle/ Bodies sprawled” [krugom/ Kak budto v pole boevom,/ Tela valiaiutsia] (304–6) (Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochninenii, 5: 144). 120 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 321–25.

The Island Universe and the Copper Doorknob: The Doomed City

He was suddenly interested in knowing what she looked like naked. In the end, a bitch is a bitch [baba est′ baba]…121

Mymra is an inhabitant of the northern wastes where the statues move, which parallels Jakobson’s second trait. Finally, the toad-faced statue first displays movement immediately after Andrei thinks about raping Mymra. The aggregate of the Andrei’s interactions with animated statues—the Red Building, the Pantheon—lead directly to his apparent death at the end of the novel. Mymra vanishes after the speech in the Pantheon. For further parallels with Mednyi vsadnik, consider that, in part six, as they wander further north in search of the zenith point, Andrei and Izia can be likened to Evgenii after the flood. Like Evgenii, whose “[s]habby clothing on him/ Tore and rotted” [Odezhda vetkhaia na nem/ Rvalas′ i tlela] (366–67),122 their clothes are rags: Izia is described wearing a ripped and torn coat on his naked body, trousers that barely cover his knees, and a right shoe that exposes black, broken toenails.123 Most importantly, Andrei “dies” under the zenith point, shot by what may be his double. This point is a kind of door, either out of one circle of the universe of the City or into its mirror version. Recall that the corpse of Evgenii is found on the threshold of Parasha’s house. None of this is to suggest that the Strugatskiis necessarily sought to incorporate Pushkin’s myth of the destructive statue into their novel to such a great degree, and certainly not that they were familiar with Jakobson’s essay. It seems most likely that some elements (the Petersburg Myth, the copper doorknob, the moving statues, Peter’s face, Pushkin’s monument poem) were included consciously, that some of the supporting structure came out of the Pushkinian cosmology that supports Russian literary culture. This is why it is quite possible, even inevitable, that, in a work structured in part on Mednyi vsadnik, Andrei’s path in parts five and six contain all three elements of Jakobson’s statue-myth plot kernel. Pushkin’s poetic mythology of statuary plays a crucial role in building the cosmology of the City because, while the elements of this universe that can be “observed” (or not) scientifically help to define the (hell-like, unknowable) shape and structure of this island universe, it is the problem of decay/permanence and mobility/immobility that, together with a Strugatskian variant of the Petersburg Myth, defines the nature of life inside this world. This “interior” problem is brightly illuminated by considering 121 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 454. 122 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 146. 123 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 498–99.

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Pushkin’s founding of these trends in Russian literature. This novel, among all their works, represents the brothers’ deepest engagement with the poet. There is no point in attempting to identify the Strugatskiis’ “best” work, a category impossible to separate from any individual reader’s personal preferences. Grad obrechennyi is certainly a rare entry as most readers’ personal favorite. It is a difficult, challenging work, and, as the argument above has tried to demonstrate, profoundly complex. But, for all its complexity, the novel is quite entertaining, and rewarding to read and reread. The love with which the Strugatskiis built this work is evident on every page, and the freedom with which they allowed themselves to write, never even daring to hope that the result would be published, imbues it with a bracing honesty. Given the degree to which Grad obrechennyi is profoundly personal for the brothers, it follows from the overarching thesis of this book that it would be the most cosmologically significant. The argument above bears this out. None of their other works are so cosmologically complex, and the universe in which the novel takes place rivals—for completeness and immersiveness—even the “Secondary World” (to use Tolkien’s term) of their Noon Universe, which spans nearly the whole of their writing career and makes up about half of their works. In many ways, Grad obrechennyi represents the peak of the Strugatskiis’ artistic achievement, and no works that follow it match its depth and ambition. There is, however, one work remaining in which the brothers once again imprison an astronomer in a cosmology of hell: the 1988 novel Otiagoshchennye zlom [Those Burdened by Evil]. While this work does not approach Grad obrechennyi as an artistic achievement, it is no less ambitious in terms of scope. It is also their most cosmologically bleak work, and, as such, will serve as a fitting focus for the final chapter.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil Скажи, когда ты не скучал? […] Тогда ль, как погрузился ты В великодушные мечты, В пучину темную науки? Tell me, when were you not bored? […] Not when you immersed yourself In noble-minded dreams, In the deep, dark sea of science? Mephistopheles, from Pushkin’s “Stsena iz Fausta” [A Scene from Faust, 1825]

Otiagoshchennye zlom, ili sorok let spustia [Those Burdened by Evil, or Forty Years Later, 1988]—the Strugatskiis’ final, least-read, least-beloved novel— is built on a complex foundation of nested narratives. Igor V. Mytarin—the frame narrator—has sat down with two manuscripts in order to write a book about his teacher and mentor Georgii Anatol′evich Nosov, whom he calls simply “G. A.” A teacher in the fictional city of Tashlinsk in the middle of the twenty-first century, Nosov has posthumously come to be regarded as something of a Christ-figure and prophet.1 The first manuscript consists of 1 In his “Off-line interview,” BN states that the name G. A. Nosov is meant to mimic the name Ieshua Ga-Notsri [Jesus of Nazareth], as it appears in Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita [The Master and Margarita, 1940]. Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 276.

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Mytarin’s journal entries, made apparently during the final days of Nosov’s life. His goal at the time—never realized—had been to write a paper on his mentor entitled “The Teacher of the Twenty-First Century” [Uchitel′ dvadtsat′ pervogo veka]. The second manuscript was given to Mytarin by Nosov to aid him in formulating his topic, to help move him, in his teacher’s words, “out of the plane of ordinary thoughts” [iz ploskosti obydennykh razmyshlenii].2 The manuscript had been found several years before Mytarin began to write, during the demolition of the old hotel-dormitory of the Steppe Observatory, the oldest scientific institution of the Tashlinsk region. There is no name on the manuscript, only the letters О and Z. As Mytarin points out, OZ is most likely an abbreviation for the phrase found in the epigraph of the manuscript: “among the Gnostics the DEMIURGE is the creative beginning who makes material that is burdened by evil.”3 He also points out that the Russian phrase otiagoshchennye zlom [those burdened by evil] can be abbreviated OZ, and that the corresponding Cyrillic letters ОЗ can look like the sequence of numbers 03, the Soviet emergency services dialing code, a coincidence that, as Mytarin notes, gives the title “a peculiar and even sinister meaning” [osobyi i dazhe zloveshchii smysl].4 Otiagoshchennye zlom, in both its narrative structure and its focus on manuscripts, cannot but recall Master i Margarita [The Master and Margarita, 1940]. Though BN, in his Offline Interview, pushes back at the notion that the brothers were following Bulgakov,5 the degree to which they draw on their predecessor in their novel Khromaia sud′ba [A Lame Fate] indicates that he was a lodestar of their late period.6 This study will not take great pains to draw connections between Otiagoshchennye zlom and Bulgakov’s work, as the topic has already been thoroughly explored by Howell in chapter three of Apocalyptic Realism. For the present, it should suffice to point out that the “inner” OZ manuscript, in a reflection of Bulgakov’s Pilate chapters, features alternate accounts from the life of John the Apostle. The ways in which the Strugatskiis employ these semi-biblical stories to shed light on Soviet realities will be discussed later in the chapter. 2 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 9. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Bondarenko, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 275. 6 Feliks Sorokin, the protagonist of Khromaia sud′ba, reads and comments on Bulgakov’s Teatral′nyi roman [The Theatrical Novel, 1936] and seeks advice from a linguist named Mikhail Afanas′evich who operates a machine that evaluates the value of literary works. In a nod to Master, the chapters on Sorokin alternate with those of one of his manuscripts, the brothers’ own Gadkie lebedi, which had been circulating via samizdat for several years.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

The genre of the second manuscript in the novel is difficult to determine. It is structured for the most part like a personal journal, but in it, as Mytarin writes, “elements of grotesque science fiction are intricately interwoven with completely real people and circumstances” [elementy groteskovoi fantastiki zateilivo perepleteny s sovershenno real′nymi liud′mi i obstoiatel′stvami].7 If the manuscript is to be read as a journal, then its author must be considered be the astronomer Sergei Korneevich Manokhin, who for a long time worked at the same Steppe Observatory. Mytarin, however, also suspects that the work was written by Nosov himself, but nonetheless was never able to determine just what his teacher expected him to gain from reading the manuscript. He states that he will incorporate passages from the work in his book as he read it at the time: “in bursts, night after night” [uryvkami, po nocham].8 The result, then, is an interwoven narrative, the OZ manuscript alternating with entries from Mytarin’s journal. The discussion here will concentrate on the second, innermost manuscript, which, according to Skalandis, was the first narrative layer of the novel to be written.9 The focus will be on the astronomer Manokhin, specifically on the moral and intellectual crisis he experiences as he comes to understand that the discipline to which he has devoted his life rests on a false cosmological foundation. Specifically, it will be shown that the novel presents the astronomer as a kind of moral “lab animal” who is allowed to operate within a cosmology that has been created by an experimenter as a maze is built for a rat. While this element is present in some of the works discussed thus far, in those, the putative experimenter may not exist (Za milliard let) or is present only intermittently (Grad obrechennyi). In this novel, however, the experimenters are among the central protagonists, and are in constant contact with Manokhin—their primary lab rat. The experimenters in question are a pair of figures derived from an amalgam of Christian and Gnostic religious texts and legends. The first is the Demiurge, a term adopted by the Gnostics and associated with the creation of the physical world. In the Strugatskiis’ conception, the Demiurge is Christ, or, rather, Christ was one iteration of the Demiurge in his quest across the millennia to save various humanities on various worlds; his crucifixion on Earth was only one of the numerous ways in which he has died, and his terrible appearance upon his Second Coming is a reflection of these multiple deaths: 7 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 10. 8 Ibid., 9: 11. 9 Skalandis, Brat′ia Strugatskie, 581.

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[His face] was lean like an ascetic’s, cut along the cheeks by vertical wrinkles, as if by scars on either side of a lipless mouth, itself narrow like a scar and deformed either by chronic palsy or cruel suffering, but possibly simply by a deep dissatisfaction with the general condition of things. Still worse was the color of the emaciated countenance: greenish, unalive, suggesting, it must be said, not decay, but rather verdigris, disordered oxides on old bronze that has gone long uncleaned. And his nose, disfigured by some sort of lupus-like skin disease, looked like a discarded bronze casting that had been carelessly welded to the statue’s countenance. But most terrifying of all were those eyes below the high, eyebrowless forehead, huge and bulging, like apples, gleaming, black, the whites riddled by bloody veins. Always, in all circumstances they burned with one and the same expression: fierce, rabid aggression and loathing in equal parts. The gaze of these eyes worked like a cruel blow that brings on ringing, halfswooning silence.10

The other figure is Ahasuerus Lukich Prudkov, currently a Soviet insurance agent, once the disciple John the Apostle, who, in a complicated series of events, has taken on the name and curse of the legendary “Wandering Jew” Ahasuerus (also spelled “Ahasver”).11 The appearance of Ahasuerus Lukich, unlike that of the Demiurge, gives no indication of his origins, though it could be said to recall the human form of Bulgakov’s Begemot: A little, pudgy, somewhat dirty man of indeterminate age, in a grey, shabby little suit: tapered pants, drooping socks, also grey, and half-boots, grey as well from long use, never having known brush, shoe polish, or rag. And a grey, contorted little tie with its knot, as the English say, under his right ear. The little man was probably hot, his plump face was red and covered in small beads of sweat, his moist whitish hair, through which his skin shone pink, clung to his skull. The little man had taken off his hat and little coat, and they sprawled in the corner in a disorderly, soaked-through pile together with a bulging, scratched-up briefcase from the days of the first NEP.12

The reason for the presence of these mutilated or greatly changed versions of Christ and John the Apostle in Tashlinsk is not immediately made clear. Over the course of the novel, the Demiurge conducts interviews with 10 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochnineii, 9: 19. 11 For more on the origins of this legendary figure, see Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 143. 12 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochnineii, 9: 17–18.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

various cranks and eccentrics with proposals that involve, for example, preparations for the Apocalypse, mass racial resettlement, and the formal reinstitution of the biblical law of an eye for an eye. In the end, he appears to find a “new Christ” in the person of the aforementioned Nosov, but this is the precise moment at which the OZ manuscript ends. Ahasuerus Lukich, while serving as a sounding-board for the Demiurge, also indulges his own passion for “collecting” souls: in a scene early in the novel, Manokhin serves as a confused and unwilling witness to the signing of a document whereby his friend Grinia13 rents his soul to Ahasuerus Lukich for ninety-nine years in exchange for two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine three-ruble notes of 1961 issue. Both beings are engaged in various experiments on the local population, one of which involves compelling everyone to be overly polite against their will, an experiment to which Manokhin is an unwilling witness as he goes to buy groceries: on the way to the store he is splashed by a passing truck, the driver of which runs out and insists on cleaning Manokhin off, even begging to lick his shoes. While the presence of the Demiurge and Ahasuerus Lukich in Tashlinsk is left unexplained for the better part of the narrative (and is clarified only implicitly by the late mention of Nosov in the OZ manuscript), their literary necessity in the novel might be explained by considering their respective physical depictions within the context of the subject of the previous chapter—Grad obrechennyi. Recall from the above description of the Demiurge that the skin of his face is “greenish, unalive,” covered by something suggesting verdigris (the green patina that forms on weathered copper or bronze), and that his nose resembles “a discarded bronze casting” poorly affixed to a statue’s face. Later in the narrative, during an altercation with Ahasuerus Lukich, the Demiurge seizes his own left arm with his “pike’s teeth” [shchuch′imi zubami] and tears it off with a furious shake of his “enormous copper head” [besheno motnul mednoi golovishchei]. After this battle, the apartment smells of “sweat, smoke, and copper cinders” [Pakhlo potom, gar′iu i mednoi okalinoi].14 These details, together with the Demiurge’s bulging eyes and lack of hair (he wears what appears to be a powdered wig), strongly recall the wandering statue of the wastelands 13 This minor character, Grinia Bykin, prompts the mention of a biographical detail linking Manokhin to BN: he was the driver and Manokhin the leader of a expedition scouting in “Turkestan” (a Russian misnomer for Kazakhstan) for a spot on which a “Big Telescope” was to be built. As was mentioned in Chapter One, BN participated in a similar expedition in the northern Caucasus in 1960. 14 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochnineii, 9: 107.

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north of the City in Grad, which not only shares facial features with the Demiurge, but also is similarly weathered, being covered in “something like cinders or black oxides” [ne to okalinoi, ne to chernoi okis′iu].15 This repetition of the Pushkinian trope of animated statuary links Otiagoshchennye zlom not only to Grad obrechennyi, but to the Petersburg Myth, and the Demiurge thus takes on both the appearance and the menace of the most potent and terrible “creator” of Russian history and culture: Peter, Pushkin’s “wonder-working builder” [stroitel′ chudotvornyi]. Ahasuerus Lukich, on the other hand, can be seen as an extreme parody of Evgenii’s Little Man. Not only does he occupy the lowly clerical rung of a Soviet insurance agent, but the initial description of him in the novel is replete with diminutives: he is a malen′kii, tolsten′kii, griaznovatyi chelovechek; he wears a kostiumchik and a seren′kii tie.16 Furthermore, in his marked slovenliness and perpetual good humor, Ahasuerus Lukich recalls no one if not Izia Katsman, the “Wandering Jew” of Grad obrechennyi. The “team-up” of a Bronze Horseman and a Evgenii is, within a Russian literary context, nothing short of apocalyptic, with the implication that the experiments they will conduct will be far more terrifying that Peter’s. For the purposes of the present discussion, the most relevant subject of these experiments are Karl Rosliakov, the director of the Steppe Observatory, and Manokhin himself. Rosliakov, a sports enthusiast permanently consigned to the role of spectator by a withered arm and a congenital dislocation of the left hip, instantly agrees to Ahasuerus Lukich’s “usual” proposition, and finds himself physically fit and healthy for the first time in his life. His health, however, comes at the price of his intellect: where he had previously been known for his astonishing memory and seemingly inborn mathematical insight, Rosliakov finds that he is suddenly unable to handle the most basic physical modeling. It should be said that Ahasuerus Lukich’s role in this “devil’s bargain” is not the usual one played by a demon: he does not seem consciously to desire Rosliakov’s unhappiness, but proposes that too much stress was placed on the “mysterious sinews” [tainstvennye zhily] that connect the physical to the intellectual, leading to their failure.17 Manokhin considers it quite possible that the sum of the physical and the intellectual in a given person is a constant, and that one cannot be increased without a corresponding decrease in the other. At any rate, the ultimate fate of Rosliakov is a kind of death before dying: Manokhin writes that, by the end of that August, he had become “simply a machine for 15 Ibid., 7: 467–68. 16 Ibid., 9: 17. 17 Ibid., 9: 43.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

signing papers” [byl prosto mashinoi dlia podpisyvaniia bumag], and that he later had become an alcoholic.18 Rosliakov is a lab animal in the moral sphere. Unable to resist the temptation of physical perfection, he pays for his failure by losing the mathematical talents and scientific insight on which his entire existence had been based. But his tragedy is personal, and has no wider significance beyond the loss of the papers that he might have written and the discoveries that he might have made, unless it is meant to function as a comment on the loss to a given field when a talented scientist becomes an administrator. Ultimately, Rosliakov’s transformation from scientist to a paper-signing machine is simply a variant of the type of wish-fulfillment that comes as a terrible price—famously depicted by William Jacobs in his 1902 horror story “The Monkey’s Paw.” Manokhin sees some implicit connection between his own story and that of his director: after having related the events surrounding Rosliakov’s transformation, he realizes that he cannot now avoid writing about himself. He admits that: I’ve been trying to think of a way that I could avoid this most shameful part of my narrative, but see now that I won’t be able to avoid it entirely. I’ll try at least to be brief.19

Manokhin then relates how his dissertation had predicted the existence of the so-called “South-west Plume,” an astronomical object that should contain ten to fifteen globular clusters.20 Manokhin had been able to provide observational support both for the Plume and the predicted globular clusters, work that he calls “not at all ordinary and fully worthy of the doctoral degree that I earned.” But the astronomer, entertaining greater ambitions, had also included in his dissertation a chapter on what he calls “stellar graveyards” [zvezdnye kladbishcha]. Wanting to set himself apart (“I really wanted to shine, I’ll tell you that right now” [Ochen′ zakhotelos′ byt′ blestiashchim, vot chto ia vam skazhu]), Manokhin had published his results in the Russian-language Astronomicheskii zhurnal [The Journal of Astronomy], and had even sent an ill-advised “arrogant letter” [zanoschivoe pis′mo] to 18 Ibid., 9: 44. 19 Ibid. 20 A globular cluster is a roughly spherical cluster of older (Population II) stars, in aggregate usually found in a spheroidal arrangement around their parent galaxy. The stars at the center of a globular cluster are too closely grouped to be separated by ground-based telescopes (Ridpath and Woodruff, Cambridge Astronomy Dictionary, 83).

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the English-language Astronomical Letters.21 When other astronomers—in the prominent Astrophysical Journal and Royal Observatory Bulletins— comment that they have been unable to observe the effect Manokhin had predicted, he is not yet worried, as a negative result could be explained by technological limitations. However: […] when Senia Biriulin calculated how the “graveyard effect” should appear in millimeter waves, himself conducted observations, turned up nothing in millimeter waves, and reported on this with a certain perplexity at the July Leningrad symposium—it was then that I began to feel like I was in a frying pan [vot tut ia pochuvstvoval sebia na skovorodke].22

Manokhin reviews his calculations and finds a weak point, one that he sums up in a memorable image: I checked through all my calculations again. There were no mistakes, thank God. But one place did turn up… a sort of little logical leap… Dammit, dammit, I don’t want to write about it now. It’s even repulsive to recall the icy cold I suddenly felt in my guts in the moment when I understood that I could have miscalculated… I didn’t miscalculate, no, so far no one has the right to throw a stone at me, but it’s already apparent that the iron chain of my logic contains one link that isn’t metal, but is more like a poppy-seed bagel [bublik s makom]. (I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t yet gotten up the nerve to give that link the kind of yank it needs. I can’t make myself. I’m too much of a coward.)23

Manokhin’s shame is a result not so much of his mistake—science, after all, is built on mistakes—but of his behavior after having written the article and the letter: he publicly bemoaned that there is no Nobel Prize for astronomy and “pulverized” a graduate student who dared to test the strength of his “poppy-seed bagel.” Left with nothing but the hope that stronger telescopes will find observational evidence of the “stellar graveyards,” he confides in Ahasuerus Lukich, who, after some initial back-and-forth with the astronomer, comes up with a proposal:

21 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochnineii, 9: 44. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 9: 45.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

He proposed arranging comparatively small changes in the distribution of matter in our Galaxy so that, for the foreseeable future (1012–1013 seconds),24 my hypothesis would be impossible either to disprove or confirm. It was a question of the adjusting in space of a comparatively insignificant mass of dark matter and the unplanned denotation of two or three supernovae capable of substantially distorting the observed picture of my South-west Plume. The main difficulty here consisted in the fact that this work of cosmological temporal and spatial proportions needed to be accompanied by minute but extraordinarily painstaking and scrupulous erasures in the currently existing archives of observational astronomy. I didn’t completely understand why, but it was absolutely necessary to create the impression that the observed picture had always been there, and had not just recently appeared before the eyes of astonished observers.25

To reiterate: while suggesting the detonation of distant stars, Ahasuerus Lukich says that the main difficulty will be the covert alteration of observational notes, a task that, while laborious, would still be “humanly” possible. It should be noted that the events related by the OZ manuscript take place not in a distant future in which faster-than-light space travel is an ordinary feature of life, but in the Soviet 1980s—the willful destruction of a star should strike Manokhin as just as fantastically impossible as it does the reader. The manipulation of dark matter is more fantastic still. Dark matter describes material whose presence in the Universe has thus far been proven only implicitly; essentially, since there is too little observable material to account for orbital velocities of star and galactic clusters, there must be a great deal of material that cannot be detected by telescopic (optical, radio, etc.) observation. Though it is now known that dark matter makes up the vast bulk of material in the Universe, its exact nature remains an open question (perhaps the open question, together with the twin problem of dark energy) in astrophysics. Thus a being with the ability to manipulate dark matter is flatly god-like. The erasure of generations of observational notes presents not just a logistical difficulty for Ahasuerus Lukich, the Demiurge, and Manokhin. Such notes, made by professionals and amateurs alike, are the backbone of the field of astronomy, and their destruction should strike any astronomer as horrible, even perverse. Of greater significance is the way in which 24 Approximately 31,710–317,098 years. 25 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochnineii, 9: 47.

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Ahasuerus Lukich’s proposed erasure recalls the numerous photos from which Soviet political figures were removed in an attempt to deny that they had ever existed. This practice was sufficiently widespread to merit coverage in a book, David King’s The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia.26 The deepest connection, however, is probably to the Soviet erasure of art in the form of books that were removed from the history of Soviet literature and manuscripts that were lost, because they were either confiscated, or destroyed or hidden forever by their authors. This is not to mention the works of art that oppression prevented from ever being brought out of the minds of their creators. Here one might recall the protagonist of Shalamov’s 1958 “Sherri-brendi,” a poet—based on Mandel′shtam, but standing in for all poets—who mentally composes his greatest works as he lies dying in the camp barracks. It may be for this—moral—reason that the altering of the observational records would prove the most challenging aspect of Ahasuerus Lukich’s proposal.27 Finally, the destruction of the labors of generations of astronomers cannot but recall, for the Strugatskiis in particular, the effects of the Purges on the Soviet community of astronomers, as well as the razing of the Pulkovo Observatory during the Second World War. However fantastic or immoral, Ahasuerus Lukich’s proposal is not enacted, as Manokhin counters with a request of his own, one that involves far more radical action: Really, my hypothesis on “stellar graveyards” didn’t, after all, violate a single one of the fundamental laws of physics. It could be false, it could be true, but it couldn’t at all be called impossible. Nature could by all means be built in such a way that the “stellar graveyards” would exist in reality. And if it turns out that it isn’t built this way, then why not intervene, if there exist the desire and the appropriate resources? Let it be a comparatively rare phenomenon, I in no way insisted on its metagalactic distribution. Take Fuors,28 in the end. 26 David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997). 27 I would like to thank my colleague Sibelan Forrester, of Swarthmore University, for the question she posed from the audience when I presented a version of this chapter at ASEEES 2015 in Philadelphia. It was her idea to consider the erasures of observational notes within the context of the pervasive erasures of people and texts that took place during the Soviet era. 28 Fuors (also written FUors) are a type of star named for FU Orionis, the first star of this type to be observed, initially believed to be the only star of its kind. Fuors are characterized by extreme changes in both magnitude and spectral type, and there is evidence that these changes are are not characteristic of a distinct type of star, but rather

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

Only a few of them have been found in the entire Galaxy. They’re a rarity. A special combination of physical conditions. So let it be the same way with my “graveyards.” Just let them be (if they don’t exist). And I’m ready to make all of my calculations available immediately upon request.29

This passage contains a transparently self-serving wish on Manokhin’s part: the “stellar graveyards” do not seem to be inconsistent with physical law, but, if it happens that they are, then let the law be changed. The Demiurge’s execution of Manokhin’s request is the first indication that Otiagoshchennye zlom contains the bleakest of the Strugatskiis’ infernal cosmologies: no cosmology at all. If such a proposal can be executed, then it means not only that physical law can be casually altered, but also that that records can be forged so that no one notices the change. In a universe with such a cosmology, all the natural sciences are meaningless. The terrifying cosmologies of Za milliard let and Grad obrechennyi are at least characterized by some degree of internal consistency, but here the only constant is the ability of a higher power—the Demiurge as stroitel′ chudotvornyi—to change the rules at any moment. Einstein, in a letter to Max Born dated December 4, 1926, was famously dismissive of the apparent randomness implied by quantum mechanics. He wrote that, “I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice”30 This is one of the most famous quotations in all of modern physics, often cited in discussions on the degree of orderliness of the Universe. In the Strugatskiis’ novel, the Demiurge or the power he represents do not change the Universe based on a random outcome, but the result, from the perspective of an uninformed observer, is equivalent to that of a roll of dice. Ahasuerus Lukich’s proposal, while suggesting the near-omnipotence of the Demiurge, does not involve the altering of any the fundamental facts of astrophysics, but merely the rearrangement of matter on a very localized galactic scale. Manokhin’s request, on the other hand, represents a bending, possibly even a breaking, of physical law. Ahasuerus Lukich’s initial reaction to the request is striking:

of the types of eruptions undergone by the typical young star. See Juhan Frank et al., Accretion Power in Astrophysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 149. 29 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 47. 30 Albert Einstein and Max Born, The Born-Einstein Letters (New York: Macmillan, 2005), 88.

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At first he didn’t understand me. Then he fell deep into thought. Then, for the first time in my life, I saw greenish smoke coming out of Ahasuerus Lukich’s mouth—a somewhat frightful sight the first time you see it.31

This is one of many moments in which the Soviet insurance agent’s unkempt exterior is shown to conceal something almost demonic, and in this he is connected to many exemplars of ordinary, banal(-seeming) evil in the Russian literary tradition, prominent among them Gogol’s Chichikov, Tolstoi’s Stiva Oblonskii, and Saltykov’s Porfirii Golovlev.32 Ahasuerus Lukich’s exhalation of smoke strongly suggests that nothing good will come of Manokhin’s request, but, more importantly, the color of the smoke recalls the Demiurge’s oxidized-copper complexion, reminding the reader of the deep connections between the two experimenters. No further mention is made of Manokhin’s request or of Ahasuerus Lukich’s attempts to fulfil it until much later in the novel, in chapter twenty-four of the OZ manuscript. The insurance agent, shining “like a dish of red caviar under a bright chandelier” [kak bliudo s krasnoi ikroi pod iarkoi liustroi], presents to Manokhin the latest issue of Astrophysical Journal, which is entirely devoted to the recently observed “stellar graveyards”: Hann, Meyer, and Isikava independently of one another offered apologies for the innacuracies that they had allowed to slip into their earlier publications on the topic, and outdid one another in conveying their observations that confirmed all kinds of the varied consequences of the effect that had been predicted by doctor Manokhin. The Aeolus,33 launched at the beginning of November, had done its job. Not lagging back from them in the least, Semen Biriulin, using the data of our Luch, confirmed my “graveyards” in millimeter waves and predicted how they would theoretically appear in submillimeter waves. And Carpenter confirmed right away that in submillimeter waves everything looks just as was said. And also a large methodological article by de Pragesa… and also two letters from some Chinese researchers I had never heard of…34

The altering of the Universe—the fulfillment of the astronomer’s request— has also altered the astronomer. Manokhin is incapable of deriving any joy 31 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 47. 32 In Trudno byt′ bogom, the Strugatskiis describe their antagonist don Reba through a paraphrasing of one of Gogol’s descriptions of Chichikov. 33 An American spacecraft or space telescope invented by the Strugatskiis for this novel. 34 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 152–53.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

from a major journal in his field having devoted the better part of an issue to his discovery or from the very astronomers who had before expressed doubts about his findings now championing his cause: It seems surprising, but all this left me completely indifferent. As if I didn’t have—and never had—any relation to any of it. As if I had never tortured myself with pangs of conscience, shame, and the horror of public disgrace, as if back then I hadn’t taken up this wild, humiliating, and strange work really only to be able to flip through just such an issue of Astrophysical Journal, or at least Astronomical Letters. So many times I pictured how I would flip through it hungrily, feasting my eyes and drinking my fill of gloating relief and sated pride, and right now I flipped through it with indifference, with total apathy, and thought more about the fact that the button on my cuff had ripped off and slid down the sink, and that now I would have to go to the “Men’s Store” through the damn snowy rain for a single button…35

The naming of the Astrophysical Journal as the journal in which Manokhin’s “stellar graveyards” are given pride of place suggests a compelling autobiographical overlap with BN. As was detailed in Chapter One, BN’s graduate studies were cut short when he discovered, while reading journals in the Pulkovo library in 1957, that his dissertation topic was a duplication of work that had been published by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in 1943— in Astrophysical Journal. That the journal that prints Manokhin’s “triumph” is the same one that had sunk BN’s chances of becoming a research astronomer can be no coincidence, particularly since it is the arrival of this issue devoted to “stellar graveyards” that compels Manokhin to state explicitly that he is no longer a scientist, or even his previous self: All my former feelings had wilted, my bitterness had aired out, and my poison had dried up, as once said Sir Rudyard Kipling.36 The gigantic burden of new impressions, of new knowledge and new responsibility had literally crushed out, crowded out, steamed out of me the previous S. Manokhin, with his little ambitions, his childish caprices, and his completely microscopic lusts. In essence, I had long ago ceased to be S. Manokhin. I was now a trivial lemur in the dependable service of an inscrutable monster, but, unlike 35 Ibid., 9: 153. 36 This appears to be a paraphrase of a line spoken by the White Cobra in the “The King’s Ankus” chapter of The Second Jungle Book (1895).

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Faust’s lemures, I had retained my ability to be aware and was still trying to comprehend what was happening, to simplify it to such a degree as to be able to understand and, consequently—horribile dictu!—to influence it…37

In Roman mythology, lemures are “noxious ghosts” whose precise function and origin is a matter of debate for modern scholars.38 Manokhin is referring to the chorus of lemures in the service of Mephistopheles who dig Faust’s grave in act five of Goethe’s play. Operating on the assumption that these lemures are ghostly automata, Manokhin is fixated on his own curse of servitude-in-awareness. It is this awareness that leads the astronomer to a state of heightened confusion: he says that, “from the very beginning, for many months already, I have been dwelling in a state of chronic bewilderment [v sostoianii khronicheskogo nedoumeniia] regarding the world that has surrounded me.”39 Manokhin’s bewilderment can be described as the most extreme manifestation of cosmological disorientation in the Strugatskiis’ works. It would be more accurate to call his confusion a cosmological crisis: as an astronomer, he has spent his entire adult life seeking the proper tools for describing the Universe. While many people can exist without considering the structure of the wider world, the professional activities of an astronomer serve constantly to direct their attention at this very thing; as was addressed in Chapter Seven, the altered position of Vega at the end of Grad obrechennyi, while of no consequence to the vast majority of humanity, would be deeply unsettling to an astronomer. Thus the apparent ability of the Demiurge casually to alter the structure of the Universe undermines all that Manokhin has ever understood to be true. If distant astronomical phenomena can simply be made manifest by (semi-) divine fiat, then what is the point of seeking to understand the laws that underpin these phenomena? Manokhin’s cosmological “chronic bewilderment” that is not lessened by his scientific knowledge is anticipated narratively by his account of Ahasuerus Lukich’s time on the island of Patmos, where the Book of Revelation was written. Then John the Apostle, Ahasuerus finds himself overwhelmed by information—vseznanie [omniscience]—flowing into his mind from some unknown source, information that he does not understand or retain: 37 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 154. 38 George Thaniel, “Lemures and Larvae,” The American Journal of Philology 94, no. 2 (Summer, 1973): 182. 39 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 154.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

He had never been able to boast a good memory unless the matter did not concern revenge or hatred. During his waking hours the omniscience slept in him, like Leviathan in the depths of the waters [kak Leviafan v tolshche vod], and if at such times he had been asked, for example, why the heavenly bodies rise and set, he wouldn’t have understood the question.40

Just above this passage, Manokhin writes that John/Ahasuerus then believed that all the knowledge he was acquiring had an internal source, and that he pictured himself living forever, “with the entire Universe inside him” [so vsei vselennoiu vnutri].41 Thus Ahasuerus Lukich, whatever the source of his knowledge, progresses from one subject to cosmological confusion to its agent, perhaps suggesting a similar path for Manokhin in the future. The astronomer’s disappearance from the history of science, leaving only the metaphorical gravestone of his “stellar graveyards,” implies that he will be compelled to continue on as a variant of one of Faust’s lemures. Adding to the reader’s own bewilderment is the absence of even a basic definition of Manokhin’s “graveyards,” making them a kind of astrophysical MacGuffin. While not formally defined either in English or in Russian, the term “stellar graveyard” appears not infrequently in popular scientific literature to denote a region of space with a high proportion of stars nearing the end of their natural lifetimes. What Manokhin had predicted, but does not define, must be a great deal more specific; he mentions during his initial discussion with Ahasuerus Lukich that it is difficult to describe these graveyards, referring to them as “a particularly specialized thing” [veshch′ sugubo spetsial′naia].42 It could be that the Strugatskiis are avoiding technical language so as to avoid burdening the narrative (recall Malianov’s mathematical mutterings in Za milliard let that, in the end, give the reader no real insight as to the nature of his “M-Cavities”), but, knowing their late-career tendencies, it is more likely that the mystery surrounding Manokhin’s discovery is deliberate, a variation on the theme of their otkaz. This interpretation is supported by the term zvezdnye kladbishcha itself, which suggests both sepulchral, ghost-story sound effects and pulpy, space-opera pseudoscience. It also recalls the Jovian “graveyard of worlds” [kladbishche mirov] from Put′ na Amal′teiu discussed in the introduction. In a literary sense, at

40 Ibid., 9: 126. 41 Ibid., 9: 126. 42 Ibid., 9: 46.

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least, by allowing the Universe to be altered to contain these “stellar graveyards,” Manokhin has made it a grimmer place. There is a moment earlier in the OZ manuscript that prefigures Manokhin’s cosmological crisis. As he describes the interior of the apartment in which the Demiurge receives petitioners, the astronomer pauses on a “microscopic” bookshelf filled with very realistic “moulages”43 of books, essentially cardboard boxes decorated as books. He recalls the moment when he first saw these moulages, assuming that they were real: I remember, seeing for the first time R. Kipling, Petronius, Edgar Rice Burroughs in golden letters on the spines, I reacted instantly and reflexively: “That’s it! I’m taking these and I don’t care what happens!” And imagine my disenchantment when, plucking out a yearned-after volume, I discovered in my hands an empty cardboard cover, and Ahasuerus Lukich, who had surfaced just beside me, pronounced sympathetically: “It’s decoration, Serezha. It’s just decoration.”44

It cannot be accidental that Kipling surfaces again the later chapter in which Manokhin describes his intellectual and emotional death: the name recalls a time when the astronomer was still engaged. For the Strugatskiis themselves, the naming of a beloved childhood author45 is particularly potent, and, on the far side of the gap that Kipling spans in this novel can be glimpsed Malianov’s (and, by extension, the Strugatskiis’) memories of youthful devotion to astronomy as presented in Za milliard let. The false volumes can be seen as a microcosm of the false cosmology of the Universe, and the disappointment that Manokhin feels as he handles the empty books is a preview of the emptiness he will later feel. These false books, together with Manokhin’s status as the probable author of the OZ manuscript, connects Otiagoshchennye zlom to the problem of (anti-)literary cosmology discussed in the previous two chapters. The astronomer, having failed to understand the world he inhabits through science, has turned to literature, with decidedly mixed results—his experiment in writing has not eased his crisis. Recall that Mytarin describes the manuscript as one in which “elements of grotesque science fiction are intricately

43 In the early, censored version of Piknik na obochine, this is the term used to describe the pokoiniki, the deceased persons who return out of the Zone to their homes. 44 Ibid., 9: 26–27. 45 The Jungle Book is included in a list of BN’s favorite books featured in Interv′iu. Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 368.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

interwoven with completely real people and circumstances.”46 The resulting work, then, is partially real, partially fictional, at least from Mytarin’s perspective: he is not likely to perceive the Demiurge and Ahasuerus Lukich as “real people.” Like Malianov’s manuscript, Manokhin’s can be read both as a literary work and as an account of a disaster both personal and cosmic. Also, like Malianov’s manuscript, it was found under strange circumstances, in this case during the demolition of a building. The literary cosmologies of Za milliard let, Grad obrechennyi, and Otiagoshchennye zlom are linked by representing handwritten manuscripts—here, again Bulgakov is present through Voland’s famous pronouncement—that may only ever be read by a few people. There is a potential implicit contrast here between the “decorative,” empty, mass-produced books that will be seen by many and read by none and the manuscript which, up to the point that Mytarin sits down to write, has a total apparent readership of three, including the author. Certainly Manokhin’s manuscript is far more authentic than his “discovery” of stellar graveyards—a scientific lie, empty like the false books. Here it is impossible not to recall Izia Katsman’s assertion that “manuscripts don’t lie” [rukopisi ne vrut] together with Mytarin’s opening lines: “Two manuscripts lay before me when I made the final decision to write this book” [Dve rukopisi lezhali peredo mnoi, kogda ia prinial okonchatel′noe reshenie pisat′ etu knigu].47 It follows that the manuscript-novel must be true in some fundamental sense, and these two works, together with Volny gasiat veter— to be discussed further below—form a kind of late-career trilogy of primary-source truth. The literary cosmology of Otiagoshchennye zlom is expanded by the narratives that make up just over twenty percent of the chapters of the OZ manuscript, all concerning expanded or alternate accounts of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religious history. The primary thread is the long life of Ahasuerus/John, whom the Strugatskiis describe as Christ’s quick-tempered protector, always ready with his sword. In their version, it is John’s ear that is cut off—not that of the servant Malchus—when Judas brings the priest’s men to seize Christ. In the Interv′iu, BN clarifies that the brothers wanted to suggest that the Gospels had gotten this detail wrong in all four cases.48 To draw attention to their motif of “that’s not how it all was” [ne tak vse eto bylo], a phrase that is spoken by various characters, they include as one of the novel’s epigraphs John 18:10, one of the four Gospel accounts 46 Srugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 10. 47 Ibid., 7: 500; 9: 7. 48 Strugatskii, Interv′u dlinoiu v gody, 281

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of the severing of Malchus’s ear.49 Ahasuerus Lukich’s false ear is source of some fascination for Manokhin, and is mentioned numerous times. There is, in fact, a motif in the book of injured ears: Mytarin’s very first journal entry opens with his account of having been struck on the ear by a dikobraz—“porcupine,” the term used in the Tashlinsk of the near future to refer to violent street kids—with a bicycle chain repurposed as a weapon, a recapitulation of John’s assault on Malchus and a preview of Ahasuerus Lukich’s distinctive disfigurement. Later in the novel, in the fifteenth entry of the OZ manuscript, when Manokhin witnesses the aforementioned fight between the Demiurge and Ahasuerus Lukich, the latter, in a kind of semi-biblical re-injury, loses his false ear, reminding the reader that the “true” biblical account is apparently false. The novel’s manuscript versions of the Gospels are presented as more true that the canonical texts, which underscores the variant of Strugatskian literary cosmology that is particular to this work: the published, official version—always less valid that the truth-in-manuscript—is consistently triumphant. This problem is intimately connected to Howell’s discussion of plot prefiguration, though here she makes the argument that the prefigurative materials the Strugatskiis employ in Otiagoshchennye zlom are so obscure that they prevent the (Soviet) reader both from noticing deviations and from anticipating outcomes.50 Whether or not too much is expected from the reader in this case, a conflict between official accounts and historical manuscripts has obvious implications for the novel’s presentation of Soviet history. This dichotomy is underscored by chapter eight, one of briefest in the OZ manuscript, in which Manokhin recounts a screening for Stalin of the 1951 film Nezabyvaemyi 1919-i [The Unforgettable Year of 1919] (one of the most naked manifestations of the Cult of Personality, a revisionist history that presents Stalin at the center of every event of the Revolution), who comments at the end, “that’s not how it all was. Not at all.”51 Yet the OZ manuscript closes with what might be called a moment of spiritual truth, the discovery of the “new Christ” in Nosov, Mytarin’s teacher. The final words of the manuscript are Ahasuerus Lukich’s introduction of “Georgii Ana…,” the patronymic cut off at the second syllable.52 What follows is a note with Mytarin’s speculations as to why Nosov had removed from the text the parts that concern him personally. Thus Nosov, 49 The others are Matthew 26:51, Mark 14:47, Luke 22:50. Only John names the priest’s servant. 50 Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 59. 51 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 63. 52 Ibid., 9: 191.

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the putative protagonist of Mytarin’s work, is also the protagonist of a “new” biblical text—the Demiurge has returned to Earth seeking a new Christ, and has apparently found him. The Demiurge, then, who has destroyed Manokhin’s scientific truth, has fostered the rise of a new Truth. It is not at all clear whether this is an even trade, but the fact that Nosov has edited— or worse, destroyed—parts of the manuscript makes him at least partially complicit in the anti-literary cosmology for which the false volumes of Kipling, Petronius, and Burroughs serve as a microcosm. Mytarin himself mentions that he has edited his own manuscript: in the preface he states that some passages were written in a stenographer’s code that he can no longer read, some were unreadable, but that he also removed passages that struck him as too intimate or concerned persons other than Nosov. Thus he also has made the work less “true.” This action, together with the root of his name—mytar′ is the Russian biblical term for taxpayer, a word that appears twice in Ahasuerus Lukich’s account of his early life—suggests that he is an “unreliable editor,” “taxing” the manuscript. So he, too, plays a role in building the anti-literary cosmology of the novel. A link between the literary cosmology of Otiagoshchennye zlom and the Demiurge’s experiments—recall the driver who wanted to lick Manokhin’s shoes—can be found at the very beginning of the novel, before the first OZ entry, at the end of the first of Mytarin’s journal entries. Mytarin, confused by Nosov’s suggestion that he read the OZ manuscript, muses on the problem of improving mankind, and recalls a quotation from Shklovskii: … if someone were suddenly to want to create the conditions for the emergence of Pushkin in Rus′ [na Rusi], it certainly wouldn’t have occurred to him to send away for a grandfather from Africa [vypisyvat′ dedushku iz Afriki].53

Mytarin is paraphrasing a passage from Viktor Shklovskii’s 1927 study of early Soviet film Ikh nastoiashchee [Their Present], in which the formalist scholar discusses the heterogeneous elements that went into the emergence of the famous Russian director Sergei Eisenstein as a revolutionary filmmaker, among them his time working for Proletkul′t in the Moscow theater scene when he directed plays by Aleksandr Ostrovskii and Sergei Tret′akov:

53 Ibid., 9: 15.

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If Pushkin were ordered from some breeder of humans, then the breeder certainly would not have guessed that, in order to get a Pushkin, it would be desirable to send for a grandfather from Abyssinia.54

Shklovskii’s observation functions for the Strugatskiis as a reminder both of the unpredictability of experimentation and that ingredients do not predict results. This is related not only to Mytarin’s thoughts on improving humankind (connected to the problem of the New Soviet Man) but also to the Demiurge’s active attempts to do the same. Given what the narrative of Otiagoshchennye zlom will contain, it seems auspicious for there to be included a reminder of one of the arbitrary elements that gave rise to such an important figure as Pushkin. The Demiurge’s need for total control over his experiment together with Nosov’s destruction of the final pages (or more) of the OZ manuscript suggests a level of control that may prevent the emergence of further Pushkins. As was discussed at length in Chapter Six, Za milliard let pointedly implies that the cosmological structure of the Universe had a hand in the untimely death of the historical Pushkin. Here, the implication may be that, by interfering with this structure, by controlling too much, one may prevent the creation of a new Pushkin. (This recalls the lack of true art in the City as a side effect of the Experiment in Grad obrechennyi.) Thus Manokhin, in desiring to create his stellar graveyards, is complicit not in the murder of poets, but in preventing their potential birth. This possibility makes his sin at least hypothetically greater, and the Universe that may have come into being as a result of his interference all the more hypothetically hell-like. There is evidence, in fact, that a disruption in the emergence of Pushkins would undermine an entire category of humanity. Elsewhere in Mytarin’s first journal entry, he and his fellow students are discussing people in terms of the neediaki [non-eaters], aliens created by Il′ia Varshavskii in his 1963 story of the same name. The neediaki, akin to science fiction Lotus-eaters, lead a life of total indolence, and Varshavskii’s neologism has become a byword in Russian for laziness. Mytarin divides “human neediaki” into several types, only the first of which is relevant to the present discussion: Class A. “The Elite.” Homegrown philosophers, failed artists, graphomaniacs of all colors, unacknowledged inventors, etc. The invalids of creative labor. They have the tenacity to create. They lack the talent to create, and this is 54 Viktor Shklovskii, Ikh nastoiashchee (Moscow: Kinopechat′, 1927), 69.

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what breaks them. […] G. A. calls such people resonators and asserts that they are a great rarity. A certain strange bucking of the development of civilization. Truly, insofar as civilization gives birth to such a phenomenon as poetry, there clearly must arise individuals capable ONLY of consuming this poetry. They are capable of producing neither material nor spiritual good; they are capable only of consuming the spiritual and the resonating. And it’s this resonating of theirs that turns out to be extraordinarily important for the creator, the most important feedback element for one who gives birth to the spiritual.55

This section precedes Mytarin’s paraphrasing of Shklovskii by about a page, and so the careful reader cannot but recall this image of “consuming poetry” when Pushkin is mentioned. This relationship between reader and poet recalls Izia’s hierarchy of the Temple of Culture, where those who read but do not create are “consumers” [potrebiteli], a noun sharing a root with the verb “consume” [potrebliat′] that Mytarin uses above. The implication may be that the Demiurge’s experimenting threatens the entire Temple, and it is no wonder, then, that Manokhin feels emptied out when presented with the long-awaited issue of Astrophysical Journal: he may feel, at least implicitly, the burden of his complicity in the undermining of this great edifice. It might follow that his choice to write the work that forms the OZ manuscript is not only an act of atonement for the world he has changed, but also is a kind of “literary balm,” an attempt to seek solace through creation. By his own characterization of himself as a poor writer—a passage to be discussed below—Manokhin could be said to belong to this category of “resonator,” and is thus an agent of his own destruction. This explanation for the existence of the OZ manuscript makes particular sense in light of the passages devoted to Manokhin’s attempts to understand who or what the Demiurge is and how he fits—as a human and as an astronomer—into the (demi-)god’s plans. These sections essentially depict Manokhin writing his way towards understanding, as he attributes his hollowing-out precisely to his scientific worldview having come into contact with the Demiurge and Ahasuerus Lukich. He had first imagined that the Demiurge was the Antichrist, come to Earth to bring about the Apocalypse, a hypothesis that is detrimental to his atheist convictions: there is an inherent conflict, as he puts it, “between the aggregate of acquired materialist notions, on the one hand, and the iron logic of observation on the other.”56 55 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 12–13. 56 Ibid., 9: 154–55.

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He later abandons this hypothesis in favor of characterizing the Demiurge as a “kosmokrator,” a Greek term for “ruler of the world” (as opposed to “pantokrator”: “the all-powerful,” an epithet for Christ) that reflects the being’s connection to physical creation. He supposes that the Demiurgekosmokrator is conducting an experiment on humanity. This hypothesis, too, is flawed, and Manokhin despairs that his ability as a scientist to observe and draw conclusions is useless or even harmful, a realization that parallels his cosmological crisis: But I am, after all, a scientific researcher; my very profession, my very ideology obligates me, it would seem, to look widely, to analyze conscientiously and to regard with particular wariness that which lies on the surface and is accessible to any half-literate idiot. Because of the way my mind is built, I’m incapable of refraining from the construction of hypotheses regarding everything that surrounds me. I don’t like doing without hypotheses and cannot do so. For God’s sake! But if I must construct hypotheses, why must I right away construct such horrifying ones, ones that threaten to make me lose my mind? Why can’t I propose something good, something pleasant, something that delights the soul? Why shouldn’t I propose, for instance, that this famous individual, finally despairing of his effort to flood the Universe with good, should decide at least to deliver it from evil? How that would please me: to gather in the apartment with no number all the most loathsome, dogmatic, irredeemable and obnoxious bearers of various forms of evil, and, having gathered them, to drown them in the Tuskarora Trench?57 “Drown them all!” Faust. Pushkin.58

The paraphrasing of Faust’s final line of Pushkin’s 1825 poem/mini-drama “Stsena iz Fausta” [A Scene from Faust] is deeply significant in the context of Manokhin’s request and his cosmological crisis. “Stsena” is not a retelling of any particular scene from the Faust legend or Goethe’s play, but rather is Pushkin’s reworking of some of the central themes surrounding this legendary character. The poem begins with Faust’s complaint to Mephistopheles, Mne skuchno, bes [I’m bored, demon], and goes on to explore the terms of this boredom. Mephistopheles defines boredom as a limit [predel] beyond which no mortal can pass, and reminds Faust of all the activities that once bored him, significant among them—for our purposes—being science: 57 An outdated name for what is now known as the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench, an oceanic trench formed by a subduction zone off southeast coast of Kamchatka. 58 Ibid., 9: 156–57.

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Tell me, when were you not bored? […] Not when you immersed yourself In noble-minded dreams, In the deep, dark sea of science?59

The sentiment of Faust’s response to Mephistopheles’s question is strikingly similar to Manokhin’s attitude towards the renown he has achieved as a result of the Demiurge’s interference: In deep knowledge there is no life: I have cursed the false light of knowledge [znanii lozhnyi svet], And as for glory… its chance beam Cannot be caught. Mundane honor Is as meaningless as a dream…60

Faust next recalls Gretchen as an antidote to this boredom, despite Mephistopheles’s reminder that the scholar had been bored with her, as well. The poem ends with Faust, just to give Mephistopheles some sort of activity, instructing him to sink a Spanish ship—carrying monkeys, gold, chocolate, and a “fashionable disease,” apparently syphilis—that had been recently gifted to Faust or to all of Europe: this is Pushkin’s Vse utopit′ [Sink everything] that the Strugatskiis have modified. Here it should be mentioned that, after having noticed that the present of the fateful issue of Astrophysics Journal has failed to have the desired effect, Ahasuerus Lukich observes that he has long been aware of Manokhin’s listlessness, and mentions a certain “experiment with a woman” [opyt s zhenshchinoi]—a ghost of Faust’s Gretchen—that had been intended to support the astronomer spiritually and physically, but that ended somehow in failure.61 More importantly, Manokhin’s story parallels Faust’s in terms of the supernatural shortcuts that make their scientific careers possible: the Soviet astronomer’s hand in the creation of the “stellar graveyards” recalls German scholar’s desire for demon-assisted knowledge and power. The similarities between Manokhin and Pushkin’s Faust are even more striking, as both are scientists whose boredom derives from being accessory to absolute power. BN says as much in the Interv′iu. In response to a reader’s question as to whether the “stellar graveyards” were actually created—thus fulfilling

59 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2: 383–384. 60 Ibid., 2: 384. 61 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 154.

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Manokhin’s wish—or the astronomical community somehow duped into believing their existence, he writes: That’s neither here nor there [Eto nesushchestvenno]. I think that, working for the Demiurge and having come to understand in general what a titanic question he has happened to confront, Manokhin has simply lost interest in his own (little) questions [prosto poterial interes k sobstvennym problemam (problemkam)].62

BN’s answer can be read as a reformulation of the problem as it was stated above: if the laws of physics can be changed, then there is no point in studying them. That BN states that there is no consequential difference between an actual altering of physics and a kind of mass hypnosis does not alter the issue, as either scenario represents a manifestation of the kind of functional omnipotence that leads to the problem of Faustian boredom. As an aside, it should be noted that here Faust’s znanii lozhnyi svet [false light of knowledge] represents a permutation of the darkness/light binary of the “Vakkhicheskaia pesnia” [The Bacchanalian Song] that was so crucial to the discussion of Za milliard let in Chapter Six. Both composed in 1825, the poems revolve around the problems of knowledge and (the chasing away of) boredom. In Chapter Six, it was shown that, within the cosmology of Za milliard let, the light of the solntse bessmertnoe uma [immortal sun of the mind] is weaker than that of lozhnaia mudrost′ [false wisdom]. In Otiagoshchennye zlom, the combined light of all the stars of the galaxy is insufficient to bring Manokhin wisdom. Moreover, the artificial light of Pushkin’s lamp that shines so brightly in the former work is reflected here in the image, quoted above, of Ahasuerus Lukich bringing Manokhin the fateful issue of Astrophysical Journal while “shining like a dish of red caviar under a bright chandelier.”63 In the problem of Faustian boredom there is an echo of one of the Strugatskiis’ much earlier characters: Kamill, from the novel Dalekaia Raduga [Distant Rainbow, 1962], is an immortal cyborg who, having acquired both functional immortality and superhuman abilities, finds himself crippled by indifference and boredom. In a later novel, Volny gasiat veter [The Waves Still the Wind, 1984], it is mentioned in passing that Kamill has committed suicide, the implication being that bringing about his own death was physically difficult for the “durable” being to accomplish. Kamill can be said to represent the tail of the long Soviet 62 Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 279. 63 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 152.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

exploration of the utopian/dystopian problem of technologically enabled immortality, a dream, that in this work, the Strugatskiis go a great distance towards extinguishing.64 Manokhin is certainly numbered among Kamill’s literary descendants, while the addition of the Demiurge and Ahasuerus Lukich pulls Otiagoshchennye zlom out of the Soviet utopian tradition and into a wider, deeper literary stream. Dalekaia Raduga, having been written during the relatively optimistic years of the Thaw, does not feature a Mephistopheles to Kamill’s putative Faust: in the future as it was then imagined, only humans could be the authors of their immortality. By the late 1980s, however, the Strugatskiis have relegated them to a much more limited role. That the Strugatskiis draw the reader’s attention to Pushkin’s poem certainly suggests that these parallels with the Faustian tradition are intentional. The entire trajectory of Manokhin’s life as presented in Otiagoshchennye zlom seems markedly Faustian, a fact that is readily apparent even without the citing of Pushkin. But the Strugatskiis do not really draw any attention to Manokhin’s damnation, instead foregrounding the boredom that results as the blood drains out of his passion for astronomy. This is why Pushkin’s bored Faust—the noun skuka [boredom] and the verb skuchat' [to be bored] together appear in the poem seven times in one-hundred and eleven lines— must be explicitly named. It can be fairly conclusively inferred, moreover, that Manokhin never recovers from his Faustian boredom—that he never makes another contribution to astrophysics is made explicit in Mytarin’s initial mention of him in the forward of the novel. Here Mytarin is considering different possible authors for the OZ manuscript, and gives a brief biography of the astronomer when his name comes up as the most likely candidate: Sergei Korneevich Manokhin, from whose perspective the story itself is told, must formally be considered the author. S. K. Manokhin is an altogether historical figure, an astronomer, a Doktor Nauk in the physical and mathematical sciences; he really was a researcher at the Steppe Observatory at the end the last century, and for quite long time at that. More importantly, the concept of “stellar graveyards” that is referenced in the manuscript was in fact introduced by him. He predicted this rare and peculiar natural phenomenon, and it, as far as I understand, was revealed in observations during his lifetime. He left no other obvious marks in science [Bol′she 64 A much more detailed discussion of Kamill and the problem of immortality in Soviet culture can be found in: Reese, Immortals are Not Men: Maiakovskii, the Strugatskii Brothers, and the New Soviet Man (PhD diss., UNC Chapel Hill, 2010).

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nikakikh zametnykh sledov v nauke on ne ostavil]; at least I have not been able to find any other material of this kind.65

It is worth considering the implications of Mytarin’s mention of Manokhin working at the Steppe Observatory for “quite a long time,” which indicates that he remained in the field despite having nothing left to contribute. The contempt that the Strugatskiis held for scientists who knowingly coasted through their careers is evident in the fate of such researchers at the NIIChAVO Institute in Ponedel′nik nachinaetsia v subbotu. There, such “backsliders” [otstupniki] will find hair growing on their ears, a sign that can instantly be noted by the collective. Thus, some aspects of Manokhin’s later career might be inferred from a combination of such scientists in Ponedel′nik and the fate of Rosliakov, whose path from brilliant scientist to machine for signing papers Manokhin plainly sees as parallel to his own. That Manokhin is aware of his status as an otstupnik is suggested by his labeling the story of his agreement with Ahasuerus Lukich “the most shameful part” of his narrative. Manokhin’s arrogance and selfishness are literally cosmic in scale, and his decision to have his “graveyards” created artificially is as extreme an example of scientific dishonesty as could be imagined: he allows to Universe to be altered so that he can avoid professional embarrassment. In this he far exceeds the craven careerist and scientific charlatan Vybegallo, who is probably as close to being a villain as any character in Ponedel’nik. Can one imagine Newton, for example, a scientist deeply motivated by grudges and rivalries, somehow learning of Einstein’s Relativity and asking God to change the Universe to correspond only to Newtonian physics? Another, earlier reference to Pushkin is connected to the problem of extrapolating Manokhin’s fate beyond the abrupt end of the OZ manuscript as it is given in the novel. Midway through chapter one, Manokhin is experiencing a crisis as he tries to understand his role in the plans of the Demiurge and Ahasuerus Lukich: I’m sitting now on the plank bed that’s caked in whitewash, in an empty room decorated with cheap wallpaper, completely alone, waiting and apprehensively glancing from time to time at the door into the Office; the door, as always, is flung wide open, and beyond it, as always, is cosmic blackness [kosmicheskii mrak], and, as always, whitish glimmers are reluctantly flaring up and immediately going out again. 65 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 9.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

I’m writing all this because I know no other means of conveying my knowledge even to one other person, I am writing poorly, “darkly and limply,” my writing is all over the place, for much has become confused in my poor memory, which is shocked by what I have seen. I am smashed, diminished, bewildered, and lost.66

The phrase “darkly and limply” [temno i vialo] comes from Evgenii Onegin: it is the the third and fourth feet of the first line of stanza 6.23, in which the narrator describes the poem that Lenskii—both beset by thoughts of his possible death and inspired by his love for Olga—writes on the eve of his duel with Onegin. There is a compelling parallelism in the confusion of Manokhin and Lenskii in their respective moments of contemplation, particularly when considering the following lines (6.21: 5–7) of Lenskii’s poem, which Pushkin’s narrator provides in full: What is the coming day preparing for me? My eye in vain tries to catch it, It is concealed in deep gloom [V glubokoi mgle taitsia on].67

In both texts, the character in question is trying to penetrate impenetrable darkness, which strengthens the parallel and casts Manokhin as a kind of Lenskii in a wider sense. Given that Lenskii is characterized as having a rather limited worldview, it might be appropriate to link him to an astronomer who is in the process of learning that his conception of the Universe is, in a profound sense, “provincial.” Manokhin is also similar to Lenskii in that, having lost a kind of “moral duel” (either with himself or with one of his two supernatural masters), he is utterly forgotten by all, leaving his stellar graveyards as an obscure epitaph— much like Lenskii’s gravestone is forgotten even by his beloved Olga. In fact, it would seem that Manokhin’s fate, based on the trajectory that might be extrapolated, is the second one that Lenskii (in stanzas 6.38–39) might have followed had he lived: he forgets his “poetry” and becomes flaccid and disconnected from beauty. But Manokhin can also be linked to Lenskii in a narrative sense, since both are secondary characters within the larger structure of the works that contain them. As was detailed at the beginning of the chapter, the OZ manuscript is narratively contained inside the larger story of Mytarin’s history of Nosov. Furthermore, as Mytarin makes clear, the only reason the manuscript is included in the work is in the hope that it 66 Ibid., 9: 26. 67 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6: 125.

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will elucidate his examination of his teacher. Thus Manokhin’s entire story is a kind of narrative appendage to the larger issue of Nosov as a modern Christ. Indeed, BN in the Interv′iu refers to Ahasuerus Lukich as a character who is “accessorial, part of an entourage” [vspomogatel′nyi, anturazhnyi], adding Manokhin to this list only parenthetically.68 Such a structure makes Otiagoshchennye zlom unique among the Strugatskiis’ works that feature an astronomer-protagonist, all the rest of whom are the unambiguous narrative foci of their respective works. Given that Manokhin’s cosmological crisis concerns the structure of the whole Universe and that Nosov’s development as a second Christ is a matter of “spiritual cosmology,” then the novel presents a structure of nested infinities, with the physical Universe contained inside the spiritual. So not only are the laws of physics mutable, but the entire question of the nature of the physical Universe is “demoted.” It was argued above that Otiagoshchennye zlom contains the most terrifying of the Strugatskiis’ cosmologies of hell; that this cosmology is narratively marginalized augments this sensation of terror. To present such a huge question as relevant to one character only—whose very presence in the narrative is somewhat probationary—is to suggest that those who control the Universe regard science as a minor concern. Such an attitude is explicitly present in Ahasuerus Lukich’s upbraiding of Manokhin for having reacted to his gift of the issue of Astrophysical Journal with such indifference: Am I aware what sort of and how much effort he, Ahasuerus Lukich, was compelled to waste so as to prompt the distinguished personage to carry out this caprice of scientific research of mine? Am I aware of what sort of unnatural strain it took for the distinguished personage at first to understand the proposed problem, and then to become familiar with all the details of my mechanics, completely alien and uninteresting to him? Was I aware of how many reproaches were rained down, how much displeasure was vented, and generally how much time was wasted, the valuable, irreplaceable time of the distinguished personage? And, finally, am I aware of how closely, on what last thread the distinguished personage was compelled to tread towards the boundary beyond which begins absolute unbeing, and all for what? Only so as to substantiate, to make into a reality the complicated ravings that issued from the end of the mischievous quill of a capricious, spoiled theoretician!…69 68 Strugatskii, Interv′iu dlinoiu v gody, 282. 69 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 153.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

For the Strugatskiis, with their long association with astronomy, this narrative demotion of the science should be read also as a demotion of their astronomer-protagonist writ large. However, it should be recalled that the OZ manuscript in which Manokhin is the protagonist was the first narrative layer of Otiagoshchennye zlom to be conceived and written: the novel began its existence as a more straightforward reworking of the ideas and themes presented in Grad obrechennyi and Za milliard let, with an astronomer serving as their usual bewildered everyman. What conclusions can be drawn from the fact that the Strugatskiis have muffled their astronomernarrative inside a variant of the telling of the Second Coming of Christ? The presence of the Demiurge, Ahasuerus Lukich and the power they represent is really not at all anomalous in the Strugatskiis’ works. Their omnipotence merely represents the giving of a explicit name to the anonymous forces at work in Piknik na obochine and Za milliard let. The Nastavniki of Grad obrechennyi are far less anonymous, but still clothed in mystery, and, more importantly, do not seem to be fully in control of their Experiment. Otiagoshchennye zlom represents a culmination of this trend in giving, for the first time, a palpable fleshiness, however horribly disfigured (the Demiurge) or pointedly ordinary (Ahasuerus Lukich), to those who control the Universe. Nosov fits into this group of “controllers” in that he is the prime shaper of the literary cosmology of the novel: as was detailed above, he is the one who brings the OZ manuscript to Mytarin’s attention, insisting that he read it, and he is the probable destroyer of the missing part of the narrative. He may even be, as Mytarin speculates, the manuscript’s author, making him the potential creator of Manokhin-the-character. In naming the omnipotent, Otiagoshchennye zlom is closely connected to the novel preceding it in the Strugatskiis’ works, their final “Noon” tale, the aforementioned Volny gasiat veter, particularly as concerns the problem of the so-called Stranniki [the Wanderers, the Pilgrims], mentioned briefly in Chapter Six. The potentially malevolent influence of the Stranniki plays a significant role in several works set in the Noon Universe, most notably in Popytka k begstvu [Escape Attempt, 1962], Malysh [The Boy, 1970], and Zhuk v muraveinike [Beetle in the Anthill, 1979]. Volny describes the emergence from within humanity of a superior race of beings who call themselves the Liudeny. The narrative initially suggests not only the possibility that the appearance of the Liudens is a result of direct interference by the Stranniki, but also the interpretation that the Liudens are themselves Stranniki, having become members of this unknowable supercivilization by evolving out of their humanity. BN has written that this novel was originally intended

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as a portrayal of explicit interference in human affairs by the Stranniki, but that the brothers ultimately abandoned this line, leaving it in the novel “in the capacity of a deceptive, distracting device” [v kachestve obmannogo, otvlekaiushchego priema].70 In Volny, the narrator Maksim Kammerer is in a position analogous to that of the Strugatskiis’ astronomer-protagonists—he is the limited human with insufficient information who attempts, with little success, to make sense of forces that exist beyond his understanding. More importantly, the “boredom dilemma” of Manokhin is analogous to that of other characters created by the Strugatskiis who are cursed by omnipotence. These include the cyborg Kamill, as well as the focus of Kammerer’s speculation, the human Toivo Glumov, who over the course of the novel becomes a Liuden. Glumov writes of his struggle in one of his last letters to Kammerer before his “conversion”: It’s extremely unpleasant to feel like a deserter. I wouldn’t hesitate in my decision for even a second, but I’m absolutely certain: as soon as they turn me into a Liuden, nothing (NOTHING!) human will remain in me. Admit it—in the depths of your soul you think the very same thing. […] Turning into a Liuden is my death. It’s far worse than death, since for those who love me I’ll remain alive, but loathsome beyond recognition. An arrogant, self-satisfied, self-confident oddball. And, probably eternal, to boot.71

Glumov’s wife Asia writes to Kammerer following her husband’s transformation: I don’t understand any of it. Lately I understand him rarely, even when we’re talking about what would seem to be the simplest of things. But I do know that he’s unhappy. Like they all are. When he’s with me, he’s tormented by boredom. When he’s there, at home, he misses me, because otherwise he wouldn’t come back. Of course, it’s impossible for him to live this way, and he’ll have to choose one or the other. I know what he’ll choose. Lately he comes back more and more rarely. I know some of his compatriots who have completely stopped coming back. There’s nothing more for them to do on Earth.72

70 Ibid., 8: 722. 71 Ibid., 8: 683. 72 Ibid., 8: 686.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

Asia’s characterization of her husband as an omnipotent being “tormented by boredom” certainly prefigures Manokhin’s own struggles that result from having become accessory to omnipotence. Furthermore, Volny gasiat veter and Otiagoshchennye zlom considered together represent what may be the culmination of the Strugatskiis’ careerlong examination of the problem of cosmology, as these are the first and only works in which those who make the laws of cosmology—or are at least capable of doing so—are depicted directly. While this lifting of the curtain may seem at first to show the Strugatskiis stepping away from their otkaz, they still leave most questions unanswered. After all, in Otiagoshchennye zlom the seemingly great powers of the Demiurge are never shown “on stage.” In this respect, these works seem thematically linked. In Volny, a recorded meeting between Logovenko, a prominent Liuden, and Gorbovskii and Komov, two of the most important characters in the Noon Universe, is found upon review to be interrupted by several lacunae, ranging in length from two minutes to half an hour. This detail—recalling the redacting of both manuscripts in Otiagoshchennye zlom—is in keeping both with the secrecy of the Liudeny and the Strugatskiis’ otkaz. Furthermore, in the initial description of the Demiurge in Otiagoshchennye zlom, the being’s clothing is depicted in terms both cosmological and deliberately obscure. After describing a black chlamys that either resembles a Caucasian burka or seems to conceal wings, the narrator (Manokhin) comments: And this clothing was no more strange and unfamiliar than the material itself, with moiré shadows looming over it: on the uncanny chlamys not a single fold could be guessed at, not a single wrinkle, so that it seemed at times this wasn’t clothing at all, but a gloomy spot in space [mrachnoe mesto v prostranstve] where there was nothing, not even light.73

This trope of darkness repeats over the course of the novel in references to the above-mentioned gloom that fills the doorway of the Demiurge’s Office (always capitalized). There are five instances of this darkness, varying among “cosmic gloom” [kosmicheskii mrak], “bottomless darkness” [bezdonnaia t′ma], and simply “darkness” [t′ma]. Thus, while the Strugatskiis depict omnipotent beings in these final two novels, they do not allow them to come fully into focus.

73 Ibid., 9: 17.

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The Demiurge himself rebuffs one minor character’s attempt to bring him into a sharper relief. In chapter eleven of the OZ manuscript, Manokhin’s friend, Mikhail Smirnov, a KGB officer, attempts to question the deity, receiving only vague answers. For instance, to Smirnov’s question as to whether the Demiurge is human, he receives the reply, “Of course! Among other things, I am also human” [Konechno! V tom chisle i chelovek].74 But when Smirnov asks pointedly where the Demiurge has come from, the reply is impatient and dismissive: Look here, major. I want to forewarn you. If I begin to answer your questions that touch on space and time, then I assure you: you will receive neither enjoyment nor gratification.75

This short speech might just as well be directed at Manokhin, who, as an astronomer, poses questions about space and time, questions that, when “answered” by the Demiurge, strip the protagonist of both enjoyment and gratification. The Demiurge’s warning recalls another moment from Volny gasiat veter, mentioned in passing in Chapter Three: when Komov floats the idea of some sort of cooperation between humans and the Liudens, Logovenko replies: I am afraid that we cannot be useful to you. But as concerns us… You know, there’s an old joke. In our circumstances it sounds relatively cruel, but I’ll bring it out: “A bear can be trained to ride a bicycle, but will the bear get any use or enjoyment out of it?” Forgive me, for heaven’s sake, but you said it yourself: at no point do our interests intersect.76

The compelling overlap between Otiagoshchennye zlom and Volny gasiat veter is not confined only to the problem of what lies beyond human knowledge. While the work itself is not sufficiently relevant to this discussion to warrant separate consideration, there is a moment towards the beginning that may by the best direct example in the Strugatskiis’ works of cosmological disorientation. Before revelations come to light about his connections to the Liudens, Glumov is researching for Kammerer potential instances of the interference of the Stranniki in human affairs. One such instance involves the so-called “Penguin Syndrome,” a sub-type of cosmophobia. 74 Ibid., 9: 90. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 8: 672.

Chronic Bewilderment and Astronomical “Fact”: Those Burdened by Evil

The syndrome is so named because the doctor who first described it mistakenly thought that it was caused by some unidentified feature of the new “Penguin” class of Prizrak [Specter] starships, as most of the sufferers experience symptoms while traveling on such a vessel. Glumov describes the what sufferers experience: This phobia is a benign psychological aberration that is manifested in intrusive nightmares that overwhelm the patient during sleep. The moment the patient begins to nod off, he finds himself hanging in airless space, absolutely helpless and powerless, alone and forgotten by all, given over to the will of soulless and unconquerable powers. He physically senses the torturous suffocation, feels destructive hard radiation burning through his body, his bones growing thin and melting away, his brain boiling up and beginning to vaporize; a desperation unimaginable, improbable in its intensity takes hold of him, and he wakes up.77

There is at least one example of an “inversion” of the Penguin Syndrome in which the individual, in precisely the same dream-environment, experiences a feeling of euphoria: […] for many months already [he] had been having dreams unusually similar in subject-matter to the nightmares of those suffering from the “Penguin Syndrome”: he senses that he is hanging in airless space, far from planets and stars, he cannot feel his body, but he sees it, along with innumerable objects in space, both real and fantastic. However, in contrast to those suffering from the “Penguin Syndrome,” he does not experience any negative emotions. On the contrary, what is happening seems interesting and pleasant to him. It appears to him that he is an independent heavenly body moving along a trajectory that he has selected. The movement itself brings him pleasure, for he is moving towards some certain goal, promising a mass of interesting things. Even the sight of stellar clusters glimmering in the abyss summons in him a sensation of inexplicable elation and so on.78

The trope of space-as-heaven, as a place in which one experiences euphoria, is not uncommon in pre-WWII science fiction. The enigmatic and disturbing transmissions of the engineer Kreitskopf as he approaches the Moon in Platonov’s 1926 story “Lunnye izyskaniia” [Lunar Surveys], first published 77 Ibid., 8: 555. 78 Ibid., 8: 558–59.

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as “Lunnaia bomba” [The Lunar Bomb], are concerned with “stellar symphonies” and an “electromagnetic ocean.”79 In C. S. Lewis’s 1938 Out of the Silent Planet, the unwitting explorer Ransom finds himself overwhelmed by the “sweet influence” of space during his journey to Mars, and thinks of his surroundings as an “empyrean ocean of radiance.”80 The Strugatskiis draw on this tradition in their mention of the inverse of the Penguin Syndrome, but, given all that has been discussed in this book, it should come as no surprise that the most common response of those who find themselves face-to-face with the Universe is one of stark terror. These sufferers are akin to Manokhin staring into the “cosmic gloom” of the doorway into the Demiurge’s Office. At the very least, these two passages from Volnyi gasiat veter demonstrate that the Strugatskiis’ problem of cosmological disorientation bleeds out into later works in which it is not a primary focus. The compositional history of Otiagoshchennye zlom suggests that the brothers tried to compress this problem of personal and professional relevance into a supporting role. But they did not succeed in this effort. The nested infinity of Manokhin’s cosmological crisis strains at the margins of the OZ manuscript and spills out into the rest of the work; it was the first to be written, and forms the heart of the novel. At any rate, it is fitting that the Strugatskiis’ cosmological concerns are so central to their final novelistic statement. As will be seen in the “coda” that follows this chapter, these concerns are also crucial to their very last work.

79 Platonov, Sobranie, 1: 135. 80 C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Collier, 1965), 31, 32.

“Day and night my Man in Black gives me no peace…”: The Yids of the City of Peter Любви, надежды, тихой славы Недолго нежил нас обман, Исчезли юные забавы, Как сон, как утренний туман… Not for long did the deceit Of love, of hope, of quiet glory pamper us, Our youthful amusements have disappeared Like a dream, like morning fog… Pushkin, “K Chaadaevu” [To Chaadaev, 1818]

The Strugatskiis’ final work, Zhidy goroda Pitera, ili neveselye besedy pri svechakh, [The Yids of the City of Peter, or Cheerless Conversations by Candlelight] is a play, the only one among their works, though they wrote numerous film scripts. This “comedy in two acts” takes place in the Leningrad apartment of Stanislav and Zoia Kirsanov on January 12, stated to be New Year’s Eve by the pre-Revolutionary calendar.1 The apartment is the gathering-place for the Kirsanovs’ friends Oleg Bazarin and Aleksandr Pinskii, as well as for their sons Aleksandr and Sergei, all of whom live in the building. What is at first a normal—albeit late—night is interrupted first by a power outage, and then by the arrival of the Man in Black [Chernyi 1 Between 1901 and 2099, the “Old” New Year falls on January 14. This significant inconsistency will be addressed later in the present discussion.

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Chelovek]—dressed in a long, black, wet raincoat with a hood, sporting a miner’s lamp on his forehead—with a summons for Kirsanov addressed to “The Rich Men of Peter’s City” [Bogachi goroda Pitera], requiring him to appear at eight in the morning in front of the Lenin Sports Complex with his documents, bankbook, and one change of underwear. Over the course of the play most of the characters receive similar summonses with varying salutations—Zhidy goroda Pitera!, Darmoedy goroda Pitera!, Mzdoimtsy goroda Pitera! [Yids, Spongers, Bribe-takers of Peter’s City]—specifying varying gathering locations, from the “Lokomotiv” soccer stadium to the municipal crematorium. The characters notice the parallels with the Purges right away, and much of their conversation revolves around the repeating waves of repression that characterize much of Russian history. As Kirsanov puts it late in the play: “One half of the people drives the other half of the people to dig a canal. That’s how it’s always been with us, and that’s how it’ll be with us.”2 The dread that permeates the play is driven also by the threat of repression from an outside, occupying force: the title is adapted from orders that were posted on September 28, 1941, addressed to the Jewish citizens of Kiev during the Nazi occupation of that city. These orders instructed all zhidy goroda Kieva to gather their valuables for apparent resettlement, when in fact they were to be executed at Babi Yar, the site of what would be the single largest mass killing by the Nazis in the Soviet Union. The text of each summons in the play closely mimics the structure of this historical notice.3 At the end of the play, the Man in Black returns with another summons for Kirsanov, but is pushed down and beaten and kicked by Sergei and his friend Artur before he can present it. His briefcase falls to the floor, spilling its contents: reversals of all the summonses. The electricity suddenly comes back on. As the characters attempt to make sense of these new developments and the Man in Black moans on the floor, the phone begins to ring. In an echo of the tableau that concludes Gogol’s Revizor, all stand “in complete stupefaction” [v polnom ostolbenenii], no one daring to pick up the phone, as the curtain falls.4

2 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 234. 3 An eyewitness account of these notices in Kiev can be found in A. V. Kuznetsov’s 1966 Babii iar: roman-document, translated in 1970 by David Floyd as Babi Yar: A document in the form of a novel. See A. Anatolii (Kuznetsov), Babii iar: roman-document (Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, 1970), 90–91. 4 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 242.

“Day and night my Man in Black gives me no peace…”: The Yids of the City of Peter

There are immediately apparent parallels between Zhidy goroda Pitera and some of the key works discussed in previous chapters. The problem of humans subject to forces beyond their control or understanding is central to Grad obrechennyi, Za milliard let, and Otiagoshchennye zlom. The play is close to both Grad obrechennyi and Otiagoshchennye zlom in its portrayal of humans as experimental subjects; in the case of the former, the “unplanned” extinguishing of the artificial sun finds a reflection in the power outage. The “bottle episode” set-up of a Leningrad apartment in which characters argue and debate a seemingly hopeless situation closely recalls Za milliard let. These parallels, however, would seem insufficient to warrant the inclusion of Zhidy in the discussion that has spanned this book: in the play there are no astronomers, no baffling cosmologies, at least not in the direct sense which they are present in the works already covered. But consider the following lines in which Pinskii (recently labeled one of the zhidy goroda Pitera) sarcastically responds to Bazarin having accused Kirsanov of making Russophobic comments: Well of course it’s Russophobia. It must be. There’s Russophobia everywhere! Only now do I understand why they didn’t accept me into the physics department in nineteen fifty. They were Russophobes. They sniffed out, the villains, that my grandmother was Russian…5

Pinskii’s rejection by the fizfak is taken directly from Boris Natanovich’s life: as is detailed in Chapter One, in 1950 BN was one of only two silver-medalists—both Jewish—rejected by the Leningrad University physics department. This biographical detail establishes a tenuous link with the autobiographical astronomer-protagonists of the works listed above, and allows us conditionally to place Pinskii among them: though he is an inventor and the head of a laboratory, with no apparent connection to astronomy, his “origin story” links him to this group, and, by extension, links the play to the works considered up to now. Indeed, if the axiom is adopted that, within the confines of the play, Leningrad is a universe, then the issuing of the summonses can be interpreted as an act that alters this universe’s cosmology. This fundamental change is complicated by the fact that, like Manokhin in Otiagoshchennye zlom, the protagonists of the play are not passive victims. There are strong indications that the actions of the older generation have created the very environment that has made the issuing of the summonses 5 Ibid., 9: 221.

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possible, or even inevitable. Towards the end of the play, Sergei reproaches his father and his friends for assuming that they are not complicit in their plight: “people make their choice before the summons, and not after” [vybor svoi liudi delaiut DO povestki, a ne POSLE].6 The sole member of the older generation who does not receive a summons is Zoia Sergeevna, the only character whose biography contains a specific instance of having resisted the formation of the cosmology that defines the play. As Sergei recounts: I mean, they haven’t brought mama a summons. Why? Because she doesn’t give a damn about them. Because when they tried to recruit her into the security forces in fifty-five, she said no to them! Do you know how she answered them? Looking them in the eye! “I love to go into the pail, to put it under my tail…”7 And that was the end of that recruitment! And when they tried to drive her into the Party in sixty-eight, she told them no once again! “But why on earth not, Zoia Sergeenva? What’s more dear to you in the end—your Homeland or your family? And she said to them, not thinking about it for a second, “Well my family, of course.” And that was that.8

It follows that the capitulation-resistance binary of Za milliard let applies here as well, though it is reversed: Zoia Sergeevna is not explicitly punished for having pushed back against the “universe.” The Strugatskiis have been rightly criticized for failing to create fully realized female protagonists, and Zoia Sergeevna might be characterized as one of the more significant exceptions to this trend. And while she is largely defined by stereotypical nurturing femininity (packing warm clothes for her husband, feeding her son and his friend Artur when they arrive home drunk, tending to the beaten Man in Black), Zoia Sergeevna is also, resembling Vecherovskii, the first to understand the seriousness of the situation after the initial summonses arrive and the only character who remains calm as the pressure builds. She loses this calm only at the end of the play as Sergei and Artur are savagely kicking the Man in Black, screaming “as if she is the one they are beating” [kak budto b′iut ee samoe] and slapping each of the young men 6 Ibid., 9: 238. 7 At the beginning of the second act, Zoia Sergeevna recalls having been exiled to Karabutak (in present-day Kazakhstan) in 1949 along with her mother and her aunt Iulia. They lived in a mud hut and had to use a bucket in lieu of a bathroom. Her aunt would recite, upon returning to the hut: “I love to go into the pail, to put it under my tail, to piss, to shit, and then to return into the warm house” [Ia liubliu khodit′ v vedro, zanosit′ nad nim bedro, pisat′, kakat′, a potom vozvrashchat′sia v teplyi dom]. Ibid., 9: 225. 8 Ibid., 9: 238.

“Day and night my Man in Black gives me no peace…”: The Yids of the City of Peter

in turn.9 When she falls to her knees next to the injured man and demands light, the electricity comes back on, a coincidence that edges towards suggesting that she has some direct control over the gloomy universe in which the play is confined. Zoia Sergeevna’s ability to influence certain aspects of this universe is reinforced by the other characters’ reactions to her requests and demands: they do what she says, whereas every command and request issued by every other character is met by arguments. Thus, she participates in shaping the cosmology of the play, albeit by a different path than the other characters, whose choices, according to Sergei, have essentially written their summonses. This, together with Pinskii’s biographical overlap with BN and the evenly distributed terror brought by the summonses, suggests that a version of the Strugatskiis’ astronomer-protagonist is present in this play, albeit as a decentralized, fractured figure. The cosmological disorientation experienced by this collective protagonist is enhanced by the play’s place within the tradition of the Petersburg Myth. Like the flood in Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik, the summonses are an event that is both catastrophic and entirely typical (given Soviet history) of the universe in which they occur. The discussions that make up the bulk of the play represent the characters’ attempts to reorient themselves according to the rules of their new cosmology, and the work as a whole can be seen as resting on the foundation of the Strugatskiis’ earlier cosmologies of hell, using them as a kind of shorthand. The end tableau, in fact, recalls to some degree the final pages of Grad obrechennyi, in which the position of Vega in the sky makes it clear that Andrei has not escaped from the universe of the City. In Zhidy, the end of the blackout and Bazarin’s discovery of the reversals of all earlier summonses would seem to indicate that the nightmare has passed, but the conclusion of the play contains not a hint of relief, and the fear and confusion of the characters as they stare at the ringing phone, together with the moaning of the badly beaten Man in Black, suggest that, as Andrei’s Nastavnik tells him, there are many “circles” yet to cross. This disorientation is amplified by the inconsistency in the placement of the “Old” New Year, mentioned above. There is some confusion among the characters about when, according to the pre-Revolutionary calendar, the New Year falls: Bazarin claims that it is the day on which the play takes place, January 12. It is known that the action of the play takes place on this date because all the summonses require the recipient to appear “today, on January twelfth” at the appointed location; the play begins not long after midnight on the twelfth. As they are discussing Kirsanov’s summons, 9 Ibid., 9: 241.

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Bazarin insists that the whole thing is a joke meant to coincide with the Old New Year, but Zoia Sergeevna corrects him, saying that the Old New Year falls on the next day, the thirteenth. The Old New Year fell on January 13 of between 1800 and 1899, and on the twelfth between 1700 and 1799. In the putative time in which the play is set, it falls on January 14. It is unlikely that the Strugatskiis, who, as was detailed at the beginning of Chapter One, once calculated the Julian “birthday of the Strugatskii brothers,” would simply get this detail wrong. It is more likely that they are deliberately muddling the temporal placement of the play: as the references to both Soviet and Nazi mid-century atrocities convey, the action is both “contemporary” and placed in the past. Adding to the temporal disorientation of the play is the fact that radio, in the one moment when it is turned on, plays not music or news, but the “dry, dead knocking” of a metronome, which causes Kirsanov to recall the Blockade, during which the tempo of the taps was used to convey information about German bombing runs.10 Adding to the collection of references to twentieth-century tragedies is the revelation that Pinskii had once worked in the camps, apparently as a free laborer. There may also be an element of literary-temporal distortion in the names of the characters, which can only be referencing Turgenev’s Ottsy i deti [Fathers and Children, 1862]: Kirsanov is the last name of one of the families central to the novel, and Bazarin is a mildly altered version of Bazarov, another character from Turgenev’s work. In his novel Chto delat′?, written a year after Ottsy i deti as a reaction to Turgenev’s novel, Chernyshevskii reappropriates the name “Kirsanov” for one of the “new people,” and so the Strugatskiis, in reusing this name, could be referencing not only Turgenev’s novel, but the entire literary polemic that culminated in Dostoevskii’s Zapiski iz podpol′ia [Notes from Underground, 1864]. Zhidy even contains a permutation of the generational conflict at the heart of Turgenev’s novel, as the older characters react to the summonses with anger and weary resignation, while the youngest Kirsanov and his friend Artur react with indifference and violence. The music of the younger generation serves as a kind of soundtrack to the play, with selections from the groups Akvarium, Kino, and DDT emanating from Sergei’s tape player throughout the second act. Bazarin even calls the two young men the “Nihilists of Peter’s City,”11 using a term that Turgenev, more than any other single figure, imported into Russian culture. As suggested by Howell, the Strugatskiis’ Chernyi Chelovek is related to the figure of the same name in Pushkin’s Motsart i Sal′eri, in which an 10 Ibid., 9: 204. 11 Ibid., 9: 237.

“Day and night my Man in Black gives me no peace…”: The Yids of the City of Peter

unnamed person in black appears at Mozart’s house to request that the composer write what will become his 1791 Requiem.12 In both plays, the Chernyi Chelovek appears in moment of domestic safety: in Zhidy, the main characters are dressed in their home clothes, enjoying tea; in Pushkin’s play, the composer is playing with his son: On the third day I was playing on the floor With my little boy. They called me; I went out. A man dressed in black, Bowing courteously, ordered A Requiem from me and disappeared.13

These two men in black are connected in the sense that both arrive to impose a deadline, at the end of which is death or something similarly final. And, just as Mozart describes to Salieri before the latter poisons his drink, the Strugatskiis’ Man in Black is a menacing presence for the whole of the play even though he is onstage only at the beginning and the end: Day and night my man in black Gives me no peace. He chases after me everywhere Like a shadow. Even now It seems to me that he himself is the third one Sitting with us.14

Whereas Pushkin’s Chernyi Chelovek is the harbinger of Mozart’s death, the Strugatskiis’—whose looming figure hangs over every single conversation that takes place on stage—summons the end of the Soviet “universe.” BN, in fact, mentions in his comments to Zhidy that many have speculated about whether the play predicts the August Coup of 1991, an interpretation which he characterizes as “both valid and invalid” [i verno, i neverno].15 Ultimately, this is unimportant, as science fiction writers are not in the business of predicting the future. What is key to the present discussion is that Zhidy goroda Pitera, in building on a foundation of the alien and helllike cosmologies of previous works a cosmology that initially seems not at all alien, might be called the most narratively taut example of this thematic

12 Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 3. 13 Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii, 7: 131. 14 Ibid., 7: 131. 15 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 641.

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trend in the Strugatskiis’ works. In this sense, it is a fitting coda to their body of work. Towards the end of the first act of Zhidy, Kirsanov paraphrases Pushkin’s “K Chaadaevu” [To Chaadaev, 1818], hollowing the hope out of the poet’s words and leaving empty Soviet newspeak: I’m going to tell you, as well, and tomorrow I’m going to tell them all of it! I expected something like this, after all. We all expected it. “Know, comrades, it will pass, the epoch of unchecked openness [glasnost′], and the KGB will recall our names!…”16

His promise of the punishment that the State will deploy once Glasnost has passed is a direct reversal of Pushkin’s promise to Chaadaev that the State will be destroyed: Comrade, believe: it will rise, The star of captivating happiness, Russia will shake off its sleepiness, And on the ruins of autocracy They will write our names!17

Kirsanov’s speech recalls for the reader this fundamentally political poem in a play concerned with the personal impacts of political upheavals. Additionally, it also presents another variant of the parents-and-children dynamic that is central to the play (Pushkin wrote the poem in his late adolescence, while Kirsanov is fifty-eight). Finally, Kirsanov’s speech serves as yet another example of the Strugatskiis tarnishing the stars—Pushkin’s astronomical image of triumph is twisted into base politics. Though Pushkin’s star is not present in Kirsanov’s paraphrasing, the astute reader or viewer will insert it. The marked absence of stars that should be present recalls a moment earlier in the act when the characters watch the lights go out in a neighboring building. The stage directions read: And then outside the window, in the building across the way, all the windows that had remained lit go out at once. And right away the streetlights go out. Only the luminous, low sky is left above the rooftops. In the room it becomes noticeably darker.18 16 Ibid., 9: 221. 17 Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2: 68. 18 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9: 213.

“Day and night my Man in Black gives me no peace…”: The Yids of the City of Peter

This low, light sky (it has been snowing) recalls the cloud-cover of Saraksh in Obitaemyi ostrov, but also serves as a quiet rejection of Andrei’s promise of a starry sky in Grad obrechennyi—even when all the lights go out, the stars do not emerge. At the end of the act, the sky itself is extinguished: “The bright sky outside the window goes out [Osveshchennoe nebo za oknom gasnet]. The city is plunged into impenetrable darkness.”19 In the play, the sky appears only in moments of despair, and stars are prevented from being symbols of hope. The Strugatskiis, as has been shown over the course of this book, are remarkably consistent in preventing stars from serving in this traditional, bolstering role. Even the moment in Dalekaia Raduga in which Tania Turchina points out for her boyfriend Robert Skliarov the distant sun around which Earth orbits, initially touching in its intimacy, turns out in retrospect to be terrifying: the planet Raduga on which they live is being overrun by experimentally generated waves of energy, and, with no spaceships nearby, Earth is impossibly distant.20 Looking to the stars for hope is the default setting in literature, well exemplified by Levin’s star-vigils, discussed at the end of Chapter Seven. It could be argued that the Strugatskiis’ sustained reversal of this tendency, particularly given their personal connections to astronomy, is one of their greatest contributions to Russian literature. They are not alone in casting heavenly bodies in an unusual light: Maiakovskii, for instance, counterbalances his famous lyric 1914 “Poslushaite!” [Listen Up!] in which a world without stars is characterized as torture with “Eshche Peterburg” [Petersburg Still], written the same year, in which the Moon in the sky is called “some sort of filth” [kakaia-to drian′] that is staring down “majestically, like Lev Tolstoi” [velichestvenno, kak Lev Tolstoi], and later tortures the poetic protagonist of Fleita-pozvonochnik [The Backbone Flute, 1915] by having God tie him to the tails of comets so that he can be ripped apart on “the teeth of stars” [o zvezdnye zub′ia].21 But the Strugatskiis are without peer in having built a such a sustained, multi-work cosmology. Their 19 Ibid., 9: 223. 20 Even this novel has a significant Pushkinian substructure, one built around the poet’s 1826 lyric “Niane” [To [My] Nanny], which is quoted by two characters at widely separated moments in the narrative. The poem’s dominant mood of weary expectation is used to reflect the grim vigil of the planet’s inhabitants as they wait for the Wave to sweep them out of existence. Significant, too, is a geographical feature that has been named “Pushkin’s Shore” [Bereg Pushkina]. This shore is mentioned three times over the course of the novel, its state being a microcosm of the planet as the Wave rages over its surface from pole to pole. 21 Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh, 1: 88; 252.

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laboratory of cosmologies of hell is one of the most significant achievements of their art, and in the terror it inspires is a kind of beauty. In one of the epigraphs of this book, taken from Pushkin’s Istoriia Pugacheva, is depicted the murder of the German astronomer Georg Lowitz (1722–1774) at the hands of Pugachev and his rebels. It was chosen because it viscerally reflects the danger and instability that the Strugatskiis inject into the lives of their astronomer protagonists. But, here at the end of this book, another angle emerges. Much of this discussion has been concerned with how the Strugatskiis force their characters to face cosmologies of hell, and how the result is some of the most compelling literature of the Soviet period. There is a moment in Piknik na obochine that was not addressed in Chapter Five and will prove relevant here. In chapter two of the novel, just before Red enters the hotel to fence the items he has brought back from the Zone, he experiences a kind of bewildering hallucination in which the air seems to solidify into strange polyhedral shapes. The narrator specifies that Red has not glimpsed some parallel plane: It was not another world: it was that the former, familiar world had turned another, unknown side to him, that that side had opened to him for a moment and one again closed up tight before he had had a chance to get his bearings…22

The disorientation that Red experiences can be seen as a succinct description of the Strugatskiis’ protagonists’ exposures to cosmologies of hell: they see a horrible aspect of this world. If we take literally Pugachev’s order to hang Lowitz “as close to the stars as they could pull him,” then we might imagine the astronomer, in the moments before his death, glimpsing an “unknown side” of this world, seeing the stars in a new, terrible context. The Strugatskiis’ singular accomplishment is to sustain Lowitz’s terror, in all its beauty, over an entire lifetime of writing.

22 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 6: 413.

Afterword On July 2, 1985, the minor planet1 3054 was given the name “Strugatskia.” The press release reads: Discovered 1977 Sept. 11 by N. S. Chernykh at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory. Named in honor of the brothers Arkadij Natanovich and Boris Natanovich Strugatskij, well-known Soviet writers of science fiction.2

Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh was a prolific discoverer of minor planets, naming hundreds of such bodies over more than forty years of work at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory. Many of the minor planets he discovered are named for Russian writers and poets, such as Pushkin (2208), Lermontov (2222), Chekhov (2369), Lev Tolstoi (2810), and Mandelshtam (3461). Others are named for prominent Soviet astronomers, such as (Gavriil Adrianovich) Tikhov (2251) and (Vsevolod Vasilievich) Sharonov (2416). Recalling AN’s essay “My Jules Verne” and his youthful dreams “of learning to calculate an orbit from three observations,” it seems a fitting capstone to the Strugatskiis’ career to have their name stamped on one of the heavenly bodies that they dreamed of discovering as children.

1

A “minor planet,” also called as asteroid, is “a small Solar System body in an independent orbit around the Sun. The majority move between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.” Ridpath and Woodruff, Cambridge Astronomy Dictionary, 17. 2 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 11: 734.

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Appendix: The Altitude of Vega1

In order to verify that Vega would not be visible to Andrei from the courtyard-facing window of his mother’s Leningrad apartment, it was necessary to calculate the altitude (the angular distance in degrees above the horizon) of the star across a range of dates covering the spring of 1937. The only variable was the (Julian) date; the time of day was fixed at 19:00, this being a kind of consensus dinnertime. The resulting values, however, are approximately valid for at least an hour in either direction, as during this time Vega would cover only about three degrees of altitude. It should be stated that, while the choice of the approximate year 1937 is justified by the text, the position of a given star at a given time and place of observation is quite consistent even over a range of many years, at least when we are not concerned with measuring minutes and seconds of arc. So it should not be assumed that, were this question considered for some other range of dates in the 1930s, 1940s or even across the twentieth century, the conclusions would be different to any significant degree. As the graph shows, in the spring (between March 21 and June 21), Vega’s spring altitude at 19:00 takes values between just above 9° (late March and early April) and just above 28° (late June). Long before humans could measure the sky with finely tuned instruments, the hand held at arm’s length was the tool of choice for estimating angular distance. Thus, a finger measures about 1°, a palm about 10°, and a splayed hand about 20°.2 According to this system, Vega’s angular distance from the horizon at its lowest point in the graph (March 31, 8° 44 minutes, 3.7 seconds) is spanned by the first 1 I would like to thank my former student Patrick Wise for arranging a visual check of these conclusions at UNC’s Morehead Planetarium on June 4, 2017. 2 Burns, First Steps in Astronomy, 57.

Appendix: The Altitude of Vega

and fourth knuckles. Adding to this a splayed hand gives Vega’s angular distance from the horizon towards the end of the period in question. However, in light of the description of the evening at the end of the novel, the period in question must be narrowed: Andrei sees Vega in a completely darkened sky, presumably after the end of astronomical twilight. In St. Petersburg, at a latitude of almost 60° North, the period of lengthening civil twilight that will culminate in the White Nights of late June and early July begins in March, by the end of which the Sun is setting past 19:30, meaning that the prospect of seeing Vega in a completely darkened sky at any point close to the dinner-hour while at the same time smelling a wind of thaw is flatly impossible. We have, in fact, a triple impossibility for Andrei’s viewing of Vega. We require: (1) Vega high overhead; (2) early spring weather; (3) a completely darkened sky. The values for Vega’s altitude exclude the first requirement, and the second and third are mutually at odds: even in early March, the Sun is setting at or after dinner-time, and moving into times when the Sun sets earlier puts us firmly inside winter. Even considering only two requirements shows this impossibility. Given “the damp wind of snowbreak,” we cannot reasonably assert that the scene takes place earlier than the first days of spring. This confines the discussion approximately to

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Appendix: The Altitude of Vega

one month’s span, about March 21 to April 21, when Vega’s altitude dips just below 9° and rises just above 10°—its lowest ebb of the year, far too low in the sky to be seen from the window of an apartment that opens into the interior courtyard of an apartment building. In the graph, this range is inticated by the bar parallel to the y-axis. BN has stated repeatedly that the building to which Andrei returns (and the one in which he lives in City) is a precise copy of the one in which they lived before and after the War. Andrei sees windows above and below him (“The black well of the yard, weakly illuminated by yellow rectangles of windows, was below him and above him […]”3), a detail that should make it possible to find the dimensions of the interior courtyard, and then to use trigonometry to show that Vega would be occulted by the other wings of the building. Such an approach is not, however, necessary, given that Andrei sees Vega “far overhead,” in other words, close to the zenith, the imaginary point in the sky so crucial to the last portions of the novel leading up to this scene. Vega’s declination (its angular distance from the celestial equator, the analog of altitude within the equatorial coordinate system) is +38° 47 minutes 1.3 seconds, which means that, at the latitude of Saint Petersburg, it cannot come closer than within about 20° of the zenith. This, however, is close enough to “feel” far overhead. At the time and place in question, Vega reaches its maximum altitude of just below 69° near the end of September. The bar parallel to the y-axis in the graph delineates the values of the altitude of Vega (from 60° to 68°) for which the star will seem close to the zenith or at least quite high in the sky. These values are clustered in the late summer and early fall, on the other side of the year from the time period in which Andrei observes Vega from the window. The place where these two bars meet shows a rectangle containing no data points, indicating that the intersection of these two essential parameters—the time of year and Vega’s “zenith” altitude—is the empty set. Once again, Andrei’s observation of Vega is an astronomical impossibility, at least in this world. Now it could be argued that this mathematical analysis of the final scene of the novel reflects a misapplied quantitative approach, that it recalls Andrei’s misplaced confidence in having used logic and elementary geometry to tear apart Eino Saari’s description of the Red Building. But Andrei’s mistake lies in using the mathematical laws of his home universe to describe that of the City, a universe to which these laws do not apply. If Andrei, as appearances initially suggest, has in fact returned to the “outer” universe at the end of the novel, then such laws should apply once again, but do not. 3 Strugatskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 5: 517.

Appendix: The Altitude of Vega

Thus we have something akin to positional-astronomy proof by contradiction: we assume that Andrei is “home,” and, operating on this assumption, force a contradiction using the position of Vega. That Vega is not where it should be is a strong indication that Andrei remains in the universe from which he had seemingly exited, or at least that he is not in his universe of origin. Such tools of mathematics and logic do apply in our Universe, and the inconsistency that has been uncovered compels this conclusion.

245

Index

Abastumani Astrophysical Observatory, 7 “Aesopian” technique, xx discourse, 63 Afanasˊev, A. N., 129n81, 130n87 Agranovich, Evgenii, 163-164 “Evrei-sviashchennik” [The Jew-Priest, 1962], 163-164 Akhmadulina, Bella, 111n38 Aksenov, Vasilii, 63, 155 Zvezdnyi bilet [The Starry Ticket], 63, 155 Akvarium, 230 Almaty Observatory, 7, 17 Amalthea, xvii-xviii, xxi, 24 Ambartsumian, Viktor A., 13-15 Anti-intellectual, 29-30 Anti-Semitism, 6, 163-165 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 133-134, 136 “Il me revient quelquefois…,” 134, 136 Archimedes, 108-109, 111 Aristotle, 41-42 De Caelo [On the Heavens], 41-42 Ashmarin, Igor′, xix Astronomy altitude, 151, 155, 156, 242-45 Auriga, 156-7 Haedi (the Kids), 156 Cygnus, 78 dark energy, 199 Deneb, 78 double star, 9, 10 ecliptic, 68 epicycle, 70, 100-101 field star, 9

Fuor, 200 geocentrism, 70, 101 globular cluster, 10, 197 heliocentrism, 42, 69 Lyra, 79, 154 lyrid (meteor shower), 79 Mira, 2 Nadir, 124 Orion, 200 Phlogiston, 117-118 radiant, 78-79 spherical (positional) astronomy, 3, 4, 39 stellar atmosphere, 16 supernovae, 74, 199 thermodynamics, 80-82, 97, 101 twilight, 63, 139, 155, 243 zenith, 124, 151, 153, 155, 156, 166, 189, 244 Astrophysicist, xviiin2, 7n25, 13-15, 17-19, 100n7, 118 Astrophysics, 7, 17-19, 45, 60, 199, 201, 215 Astrophysical Journal, 9n34, 20, 198, 202-203, 211, 214, 218 August Coup of 1991, 231 Babi Yar, 226 Bay of Finland, 173 Beliaev, 23, 36 Prodavets vozdukha [The Air Seller], 36 Belyi, Andrei, 179-180 Peterburg [1913], 179-180 Big Bang, 72 Black hole, 79 Blockade of Leningrad, ix, xviii-xxii, 2-3, 8, 37, 46, 174-176, 230

Index

Blok, Aleksandr, 179 Vozmezdie [Retribution, 1911], 179 Bolyai, János, 56 Bormashenko, Olena, 77 Born, Max, 201 Brezhnev, L. I., 103 Brodskii, Iosif, 98, 135, 163, 180n103 Bronze Horseman, 181 Bruno, Giordano, 40, 57, 109n32 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 161n59, 191-194, 207 Master i Margarita [The Master and Margarita, 1940], 191n1, 207 Teatral′nyi roman [The Theatrical Novel, 1936], 192n6 Bulgarin, Faddei, 111 Burns, P. F., 44, 242n2 First Steps in Astronomy without a Telescope [1942], 44, 242n2 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 43, 206, 209

ancient, 32n24, 39 Christian, 40 cultural, literary, 108, 128, 138, 161, 166, 206-210, 219 Dante’s, 156 fairy-tale, 130 ideological, 70 of Hell, Hadean, infernal, xxi-xxii, 28, 33, 63, 94, 99, 101, 103, 135, 190, 210, 218, 231, 234 physical, 139-158 Pushkinian, xv-xvi, 32, 96, 138, 169-190 Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, 15, 18, 235, see also Semeiz Observatory Curie, Pierre, 109n30

Dante Alighieri, 27-28, 154, 156, 172 Divine Comedy, The, 28, 172 D’Anthès, George, 111 Dark matter, 199 Chaadaev, Petr Ia., 225, 232 Darwin, Charles, 57 Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan 9, 19-20, Davidson, Pamela, 169 203 Davydov, Denis Vasilˊevich, 141 Introduction to the Study of Stellar DDT, 230 Structure, An, 20 delo vrachei, 6 Stochastic Problems in Physics and Derham, William, 169 Astronomy, 20 Dom uchenykh [the House of Scholars], 5n10 Principles of Stellar Dynamics, 20 Dom zanimatelˊnoi nauki [The Entertaining Chernykh, Nikolai Stepanovich, 235 Science Building], 5n10 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 165-166, 230 Dostoevskii, F. M., 35, 92, 100, 117, 129, Chto delat′? [What Is to Be Done?, 1863], 159, 166-167, 170, 230 165n70 Brat′ia Karamazovy [The Brothers Chistiakov, Iurii Nikolaevich, 11 Karamazov, 1880], 35, 92, 129 Christ, 191-195, 207-209, 212, 218-219 Prestuplenie i nakazanie [Crime and Christian, 207 Punishment, 1866], 100, 117, 170 cosmologies, 40 Zapiski iz podpol′ia [Notes from texts, 193 Underground, 1864], 230 Christie, Agatha, 168-169 Drozd, Anton D., 13-14 And Then There Were None, [1939], 168 Dudin, Mikhail, 111n38 Clarke, Arthur C., 96-97 Profiles of the Future, 97n37 Eddington, Arthur, 81 Clement, Hal, 63n13 Einstein, Albert, 6, 183, 201, 216 “Cold Front,” (1946), 64n13 Eisenstein, Sergei, 209 Cycle of Fire (1957), 64n13 Eratosthenes, 29, 149 Mission of Gravity (1953), 63n13 Eremeeva, A. I., xviiin2, 12-17 Collinson, Peter, 109n31 Eropkin, Dmitrii I., 13-14 Copernicus, 41, 65 Etot fantasticheskii mir [This Fantastic cosmological disorientation, xxii-xxiv, 27, 33, World], 23 53, 68, 73, 151, 157, 204, 222, 224, 229 Euclid, 56 cosmology, cosmologies, Euclidian geometry, 56-57 alien, 12, 58, 96-97, 144 Exodus, 157

247

248

Index

Fizfak, see also Leningrad University physics department Flammarion, Camille, 36, 39, 62 L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire [The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology, 1888], 39 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 40-41, 69 Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes [Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds], 40, 69 Fonvizin, Denis, 49 Forder, Henry, 56-57 Forrester, Sibelan, 200n27 Franklin, Benjamin, 109n31 futurism, 139 Galich, Aleksandr, 168-169 Poema o Staline [The Poem About Stalin], 168-169 Galileo, xvi Gates, Joseph, 84n16 Gauss, Johann Carl Friedrich, 56 Genesis, 73 Gerasimovich, Boris Petrovich, 13-17 German, Aleksei, 107 Trudno byt′ bogom, 107 German bombardment of Leningrad, 25, 37, 230 glasnost, 232 Gnevshev, M. N., 13 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 204, 212 Faust, 204, 212 Gogol, N. V., xvi, 45, 55-56, 165, 202, 226 Mertvye dushi [Dead Souls, 1841], 55, 202 “Nevskii Prospekt,” 165n70 “Notes of a Madman” [Zapiski sumasshedshego], 45 Revizor [The Inspector General, 1836], 56, 226 Gospel(s), 207-208 Gould, Benjamin Apthorp, 17 Graham, Loren, Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union, The, 12 Grechko, Georgii, 23 Greenwich Royal Observatory, 124 gravity, xix, xxi, 42, 63, 65, 79, 101 Grinberg, Marat, 155n46, Grossman, Vasilii, 137 Zhizn′ i sud′ba [Life and Fate, 1959], 137

Halley’s comet, 36-37 Harvard College Observatory, 13 Heat Death of the Universe, 72, 82 Heinlein, Robert, 21-22, 86n19 Tunnel in the Sky, 22 “Waldo,” 86n19 Hitler, Adolf, 54 Homeostatic Cosmos, 99-125, 128, 131-135, 158 Homeostatic Universe, 116, 126, 131, 136 Horace, 183 Exegi monumentum, 183 Howell, Yvonne, xxiv, 28, 84-85, 103, 121n63, 156, 158n51, 173, 180, 192, 194n11, 208, 231 Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, xxiv, 192 Hubble, Edwin, 145-147 Realm of the Nebulae, The [1936], 145 Hubble Constant, 145-146 Iaroslavtsev, S., xiii, see also Strugatskii, Arkadii Natanovih Jacobs, William, 197 “Monkey’s Paw, The,” [1902], 197 Jakobson, Roman, 138, 183, 187-189 Jeans, James, H., ix, 60-61, 65, 70, 72 Stars in their Courses, The (1931), ix, 60, 70, 72 John the Apostle, 192, 194, 204, Jupiter, xvii-xxii, 17, 24-25, 59-60, 101, 235n1 Kahn, Andrew, 85 Kansk, 3 Kant, Immanuil, 145-146 Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels [Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven, 1755], 146 Karpeliuk, Adelaida (Ada) Andreevna, 11 Kazantsev, Aleksandr P., 23 KGB, 98, 222, 232 Kheifets, Mikhail, 98-99, 135 Kiev, 226 Kino, 230 King, David, 200 Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, 200 Kipling, Rudyard, 78, 203, 206, 209 Jungle Book, The, 206n45 Stalky & Co., 78

Index

Kitt Peak National Observatory, 19 Kliuch bez prava peredachi [The Nontransferable Key], 111n38 Kliueva, Bella, 165 Kopylov, Aleksandr Ivanovich, 11 Korepanov, Vladimir Semenovich, 11 Kozuskanich, Nathan R., 109n31 “Kozyrev Effect”, xviii, Kozyrev, Nikolai, xviiin2, 13-14, 17-18, 45, 79n5 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 139 Pobeda nad Solntsem [Victory over the Sun, 1913], 139 Kudinov, M. P., 133n97, 134n100 Kuibyshev, 3 Kursk, 3 Kutta-Joukowski Theorem, 105

heat-ray, 49-50, 53 invasion, xxii, 34-58, 110 wildlife, 26 Martians, 38, 43-53 Maiakovskii, Vladimir, xiii, 131-133, 140, 233-234 “Dva maia” [Two Mays, 1925], 140 “Eshche Peterburg” [Petersburg Still, 1914], 233 Fleita-pozvonochnik [The Backbone Flute, 1915], 233-234 Klop [The Bedbug, 1929], 140 “Poslushaite!” [Listen Up! 1914], 233 Vo ves′ golos [At the Top of My Voice, 1929-1930], 132 McCutcheon, Robert, 12-19, 152 meteor shower, 51, 78, 78-79, 82 meteorite, 54 Ladoga lake, xix, 25 meteorological, 63, 73 Leibniz, Gottfried, 108n28 conditions, 46 Lem, Stanisław, 95 observations, 46-47 Solaris (1960), 95 station, 26, 47 Lemaître, Georges, 14, 72 meteorologist, 34, 36 Leningrad, xix, xxi, 3, 7-8, 14, 16, 19, 25, mezhplanetnoe soobshchenie (space explora30, 47, 62-63, 98-99, 103, 137, 153-156, tion), 22n3 167-169, 174, 198, 225, 227, 242 Michie, Richard W., 19 Leningrad University, 19 Mikhailov, Vladimir, xiii, xiv physics department, 227 Milky Way, 72, 145-146 Leningradskaia Pravda, 14, 153 Mirer, Aleksandr, xx Lermontov, Mikhail, 111, 127, 133, 235 Mirovedenie [Knowing the World], 16-17, 152 “Spor” [An Argument, 1841], 127 Moon, 18, 42n20, 73-75, 106, 140, 170, 185, Geroi nashego vrememi [A Hero of Our 223, 233 Time, 1841], 127 of Jupiter, xvii-xviii, “Smert′ poeta” [The Poet’s Death, 1837], far side of the, 149 111 Moskovskii Prospect, 11, 103, 124 Lewis, C. S., 224, Mount Elbrus, 127 Out of the Silent Planet, [1938], 224 Mount Kazbek, 127 Lobachevskii, Nikolai, 56 Moyka River, 111n38 Lowell, Percival, 43 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 231 Lowitz, Georg, хи, 29, 234 Requiem, 231 L′vov, V. E., 14-15 Muir, Jane, 108n28 Mandel′shtam, Osip, 200, 235 Markova, Vera, 107n26, 110n36 Mars, 101, 26-27, 38, 41, 43-44, 49, 51, 57, 101, 224 Mars Mariner 4, 43 Marsh, Rosalind, 169 Martian, astronomers, 26 canals, 43 civilization, 43 government, 35

Nabokov, Vladimir, 56 Nikolai Gogol, 56 Napoleon Bonaparte, 54, 141 Nazi(s), xix, 162, 226, 230 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 165 “Kogda iz mraka zabluzhden′ia” [When from the murk of error…, 1846], 165n70 Neva, 87-89, 94, 173, 177-178 Newcomb, Simon, 17 Reminiscences of an Astronomer, 17

249

250

Index

Newton, Isaac, 41, 108, 111, 118n56, 216 Principia, The, 41, 108n28 Nezabyvaemyi 1919-i [The Unforgettable Year of 1919, 1951], 208 Nezavisimaia gazeta, 135 Nicholas I, 85 Noon Universe, 24, 102n11, 160n55, 190, 219, 221 Numerov, Boris V., 13

Platonov, Andrei, 139, 158, 223 Kotlovan (The Pit), 158 “Lunnye izyskaniia” [Lunar Surveys, 1926], 223 Vprok [For Future Use, 1931], 139-140 “plurality of worlds,” 39-40, 57, 62, 69, 72, 101, 109 Plutarch, 108n29, Pluto, 27n12 Pod znamenem marksizma [Under the Occam’s razor, 42 Banner of Marxism], 14 Ogorodnikov, K. F., 8, 19-20, 32n23, Poincaré, Henri, 59-62, 65, 69, 71, 73, 76 Dinamika zvezdnykh sistem [Dynamics La valeur de la science [The Value of of Stellar Systems, 1958], 19-20 Science], 59 Na chem Zemlia derzhitsia [On What Polak, I. F., ix, 3, 39n14 the Earth Rests, 1953], 19n86, Prashkevich, Gennadii, xx, 46-47 32n24 Ptolemy, 41, 65 Skolˊko zvezd na nebe [How Many Pugachev, xi, 234 Stars There are in the Sky, 1954], rebellion, 29, 234 19n86 Pulkovo Observatory, xviiin2, 8-20, 26, Okudzhava, Bulat, 110-111, 133 29-30, 40n14, 45, 124, 152, 200, 203 “Schastlivchik Pushkin” [That Lucky purge, xviiin2, 12, 15-20, 28-29, 40n14, 46, Pushkin, 1967], 111, 128, 133 200, 226 Osipov, Valentin, 165 Pushkin, viii, xv-xvi, 6, 28-29, 83-89, 105, Ostrovskii, Aleksandr, 209 110-118, 121-122, 125, 128-132, Ostrovskii, Nikolai, 6, 62n8 168-169, 173-180, 182-190, 209-211, Kak zakalialas′ stal′ [How the Steel was 214-215, 231-235 Tempered, 1934], 62n8 “19 oktiabria” [October 19], 122 otkaz, xxiii, 64, 72, 80, 205, 221 Boris Godunov (1825), 105, 114-121 “Brozhu li ia…” [Whether I wander…, Pal′chinskii, Petr, 12 1829], 144 Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia, 16 “Chto v imeni tebe…” [What’s there in Dyer’s Hand, The, 16 my name…], xv Perestroika, 1, 135, 137, 141 Evgenii Onegin, 112-113, 137, 217 Peter the Great, 84-85, 88, 95, 174, 180, 196 “I dale my poshli…” [And we went on statue of, 94, 181 further …, 1832], xvii Petersburg Myth, 84n16, 85, 138, 174-175, “Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig 179, 189, 196, 229 nerukotvornyi…” [I erected a Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, 3 monument to myself not made physical by human hands…, 1836], law(s), 31, 77, 79, 101, 152, 120, 201, 183-185 214, 218 Istoriia Pugacheva (History of Pugachev, reality, 79 The), xi, 29, 234 physics, physicist, 5-11, 24, 60, 65, 78, 81-82, “K Chaadaevu” [To Chaadaev, 1818], 97, 99, 108n28, 112, 126-127, 151, 201, 225, 232 227 Kamennyi gost′, [The Stone Guest, 1830], Pioneer (mission), xviii 59, 187 Pionerskaia Pravda, 4 Kapitanskaia dochka [The Captain’s Piskarev Memorial Cemetery (Piskarevka), Daughter, 1836], 32 176 “K moei chernil′nitse” [To My Inkwell], Piter, 165, 225, see also Leningrad, 112n41 St. Petersburg “K Zhukovskomu” [To Zhukovskii, Plague of Darkness, 157 1816], 34

Index

Mednyi vsadnik [The Bronze Horseman, 1833], 77, 83-89, 92-96, 173-180, 182-183, 187, 189, 196, 229 Motsart i Sal′eri, 231 “Niane” [To [My] Nanny, 1826], 233 “Osen′” [Fall, 1833], 136 “Pikovaia dama” [Queen of Spades], 118-119, 124n69 “Podrazhaniia Koranu” [Imitations of the Koran], xi, 21 “Redeet oblakov…” [The fleeting bank of clouds…, 1820], 98 Rusalka [Mermaid, 1832], 129 Ruslan i Liudmila [1820], 32 Skazka o rybake i rybke [The Tale of the Fisherman and the Little Fish, 1833], 129 Skazka o zolotom petushke [The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, 1834], 187-188 “Stsena iz Fausta” [A Scene from Faust, 1825], 191, 212-216 “Vakkhicheskaia pesnia” [The Bacchanalian Song, 1825], 121-122, 125-128, 214 “Vystrel” [The Shot], 28 “Zoriu bˊiut…” [They’re ringing dusk …, 1829], 1 Pushkinian cosmology see cosmology, Pushkinian Rastrelli, Carlo Bartolomeo, 180 RATAN-600 radio telescope, 11 Rattner Gelbart, Nina, 40 Red Army Military Institute of Foreign Languages [Voennyi institut inostrannykh iazykov Krasnoi armii, VIIIa KA], 3 Review of Modern Physics, 20 “Road of Life,” 25 Rublev, Andrei, 7 Russian literature, xv-xvi, 87, 139, 169, 179, 190, 233 Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. E., 202 samizdat, 75, 137, 166, 192н6 Samoilov, David, 111n38 Saturn, 31, 101 Savchenko, Vladimir, 32n23,115n49 Dolzhnostˊ vo Vselennoi [One’s Job in the Universe, 1993], 32n23 Otkrytie sebia [Discovering Oneself], 115n49

Schiaparelli, Giovanni, 43 Schilt, Jan, 148, 148n22 Semeiz Observatory, 15, also see Crimean Astrophysical Observatory Siddiqi, Asif A., 22n3 Shain, Grigorii, A., 15, 18 Shakespeare, William, 83 Measure for Measure, 83 Shalamov, Varlam, 18, 200 “Vykhodnoi den′” [a Day Off], 18 “Sherri-brendi,” 200 Shapley, Harlow, 13 Shklovskii, Viktor, 209-211 Ikh nastoiashchee [Their Present, 1927], 209-210 Skalandis, Ant, xiii, 6, 8, 10, 63n13, 107, 133n95, 135, 164, 193 Skłodowska Curie, Marie, 109n30 Sky & Telescope, 19 Slutskii, Boris, 163 Sokurov, Aleksandr, 128 Solar system, xxi, xxiin12, 25, 69 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 18, 42n20, 154 Arkhipelag GULag [The Gulag Archipelago, 1973], 18 Odin den′ Ivana Denisovicha [One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962], 42n20 Soviet Union, xx, 5n15, 12, 14-15, 62, 108, 135, 141, 153, 161, 199, 226 Soviet, anti-Semitism, 163 Apartment, 63, 103, 130, 145 existence/life/reality, xx, 12, 62-63, 135, 153, 192 government/political figures, 19, 200 history, xx, 159, 208, 229 reader, 46, 161, 166, 208 science/scientist, 31, 70 Sputnik, 10 St. Cyril, 90 St. Petersburg, 84, 87-89, 95-96, 124, 170, 173, 177, 243 Stahl, Georg Ernst, 117n55 Stalin, Iosif, 6, 16, 29, 103, 153-154, 168-169, 208 S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, 77 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 28n15 Stranniki [the Wanderers, the Pilgrims], 219 Strugatskii, Arkadii Natanovich, ix, xiii, xvii-xxi, 1-6, 8-9, 11, 16-17, 25, 37, 60, 63n13, 103-107, 133n95, 152, 164-165, 168

251

252

Index

Dˊiavol sredi liudei [The Devil among Humans], xiii Ekspeditsiia v preispodniuiu [The Expedition to Hades, 1988], xiii “Moi Zhiulˊ Vern” [My Jules Vern], 4, 60, 152, 235 Podrobnosti zhizni Nikity Vorontsova [The Particulars of Nikita Vorontsov’s Life, 1984], xiii “Strashnaia bolˊshaia planeta” [The Terrible Big Planet], xxi, 25 Strugatskii, Boris Natanovich, xii-xviii, 1-2, 5-10, 16-17, 19-20, 29-30, 35, 45-47, 80, 82, 98-100, 103-107, 117, 135, 137-139, 147-148, 152, 157, 163, 175, 191n1, 192, 195n13, 203, 207, 213-214, 218-219, 227, 229, 231, 244 Bessilˊnye mira sego [The Powerless of this World, 2002], xiii Intervˊiu dlinoiu v gody [Offline Interview], 9-10, 35, 104-105, 117, 192 Poisk prednaznacheniia [A Search for Purpose, 1995], xiii, xx, 175 Strugatskii brothers (ABS) Dalekaia Raduga [Distant Rainbow, 1962], 143n11, 214-215, 233 Den′ zatmenia [The Day of the Eclipse], 128 “Fantastika — literatura” [Science Fiction is Literature], 21 Gadkie lebedi [The Ugly Swans, 1967], 75, 121n63, 192n6 Grad obrechennyi [The Doomed City, 1975], xvi, xx, xxii, 31, 47, 75-76, 96-97, 103-104, 135, 137-190, 193, 195-196, 201, 204, 207, 210, 219, 227, 229, 233 Khishchnye veshchi veka [The Predatory Things of Our Age, 1964], 48 Khromaia sudˊba [A Lame Fate, 1982], xx, 161n59, 192 Malysh [The Boy, 1970], 219 Moi brat i ia [My Brother and I], see also Grad obrechennyi “Nasha biografiia” [Our Biography], 1 Obitaemyi ostrov [The Inhabited Island, 1967], xxii, 59-76, 96, 101, 147, 149, 160n55, 233 Otiagoshchennye zlom, ili Sorok let spustia [Those Burdened by Evil, or Forty Years Later, 1988], xvi, xxii, 73, 97, 104, 161n59, 190-224, 227

Piknik na obochine [Roadside Picnic, 1971], xvi, xxii, 53, 75, 77-97, 101-102, 129, 206n43, 219, 234 Ponedelˊnik nachinaetsia v subbotu [Monday Begins on Saturday], 30-32, 142, 149-150, 216 Popytka k begstvu [Escape Attempt, 1962], xxiii, 165, 219 Putˊ na Amalˊteiu [The Way to Amalthea], xvii-xxi, 24-26, 48, 148-149, 205 Stazhery [Apprentices, 1961], 25-26, 29, 73 Strana bagrovykh tuch [The Land of Crimson Clouds, 1957], 22-24, 27-28, 46, 156 Trudno bytˊ bogom [Hard to Be a God, 1963], 28-30, 107, 202n32, Volny gasiat veter [The Waves Still the Wind, 1984], 58, 61n7, 160n55, 207, 214, 219, 221-222 “Voprosy bez otvetov, ili ‘Kuda zh nam plyt′?..’” [Questions without Answers, or “Whither Should We Sail? …,” 1991], 135 Vtoroe nashestvie marsian [The Second Martian Invasion, 1966], xxii, 30, 34-58, 101, 104, 113, 141 “Zabytyi eksperiment” [The Forgotten Experiment], 18n79, 79 Za milliard let do kontsa sveta [A Billion Years until the End of the World, 1974], xvi, xxii, 4, 72-73, 82, 97-136, 193, 201, 205-207, 210, 214, 219, 227-228 Zhidy goroda Pitera, ili neveselye besedy pri svechakh [The Yids of the City of Peter, or Cheerless Conversations by Candlelight, 1990], xxii, 6n17, 165, 225-231 Zhuk v muraveinike [Beetle in the Anthill, 1979], 61n7, 219 Strugatskii, Natan Zalmanovich, xviii, 3, 6-8 Struve, Otto, 15 Sun, xvii-xviii, xxii, 24, 40, 66, 69, 72-75, 79, 100-101, 109n32, 121-126, 129, 146, 176, 233, 243-244 artificial, 139-144,149-158, 227 Supercivilization, 102-103, 114, 118, 219 Sventsitskaia, Natal’ia Aleksandrovna, 11 Tarkovskii, Andrei, 77, 95 Stalker (1979), 77, 95

Index

Tashkent Astronomical Observatory, 14 Ter-Oganezov, Vartan T., 16 Tikhov, Gavriil Adrianovich, 7, 17, 235 Tolkien, J. R. R., 99n3, 190 Tolstoi, Aleksei, 23 Tolstoi, Lev, 141, 156-157, 159, 202, 233, 235 Anna Karenina, 156-157, 202 “Ispoved′” [Confession, 1883], 157n49 Voina i mir [War and Peace, 1869], 141 Tombaugh, Clyde, 27n12 Tower of Babel, 138 Tret′iakov, Sergei, 209 Turgenev, Ivan, 165-166, 230 Ottsy i deti [Fathers and Children, 1862], 230 Universe, xxi, xxiii, 24-26, 40, 57, 65, 71-72, 75-76, 82-84, 94-97, 100-101, 104, 115, 130, 133, 199, 201-206, 210, 216-219, 224, 228, 244-245 expanding, 14, 72, 146 homeostatic, see also Homeostatic Universe, island, 138-190 of the City, 229, 244 see also Island universe above Ural Mountains, 173 Varshavskii, Il′ia, 210 Neediaki [Non-eaters, 1963], 210 Vega, ix, 154, 229, 242-245 Venus, 22, 24, 27-28, 60, 106 Verne, Jules, 4, Hector Servadac [Off on a Comet, 1877], 4 Virgil, 28, 139 Vishnevskii, Boris, xiii, 5-6, 9, 107 Vititskii, S., see also Strugatskii, Boris Natanovich Voinovich, Vladimir, 49

Volodikhin, Dmitrii, xx, 47 Voronov, Nikolai, 14, 17, 152 Voyager mission, xviii Vyshinskii, A. Ia., 15 Vysotskii, Vladimir, 132 “Proshchanie s gorami” [Farewell to the Mountains, 1966], 132 War of 1812, 141 Wells, Herbert, 23, 35-36, 46-54, 57, 110 War of the Worlds, The [1898], 35, 46-54, 110 Forecast of the World’s Affairs, A, 49n39 Whitman, Walt, 106, 133-134 Leaves of Grass (1892), 106 “We Two, How Long Were We Fool’d,” 133-134 “When I heard the learn’d astronomer …,” 106 Window to the West, 173 Wolf numbers, 4-5, 104 World War I, 133n96 World War II (WWII), 46, 141, 200, 223 Writers’ Union, 7n28, 9, 164-165 Yosano, Akiko, 110, 133-134 “Sea of Death,” 134-135 zastoi [stagnation], 103 Zeh, H. D., 81 Physical Basis of the Direction of Time, The, 81-82 Zerkalov, Aleksandr, see also Mirer, Aleksandr Zhikharevo, xix Zhukovskii, V. I., 34, 105 Zone(s), 75, 77-80, 83-86, 89-97, 101-103, 2106n43, 234 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 49

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