Novels – Page 2 – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

AQUABOY: A new English language imprint of the strangest iconic tale to come out of Stalin’s Russia.

What enlivened a grey February afternoon in a bookshop was chancing on a new English version of The Amphibian (1928) by Alexander Belyaev.

The film adaptation of this had already introduced me to the premise of a young man who can live underwater, as it seems to be a permanent fixture on Russian television and is regarded with affection by many East Europeans of a certain age.

Until now though, I had not enjoyed the opportunity to snuggle up with the novel that had inspired the film. Karo Publishers based in St Petersburg – best known for their translated versions of Golden and Silver age greats by Pushkin and Tolstoy et al – have changed all that by bringing out The Amphibian last year.

Blockbuster.

Lenfilm’s Chelovek Amphibia (1962) constitutes a glitzy and exotic boy-meets-girl fantasy romance. The film provides a testimony to the swagger of the Khrushchev era when the Soviet Union was winning the Space Race.

Scene from ““Chelovek Amphibia`.
[polzam.ru]

With its impressive photography and sun-drenched location shots on Baku this film can hold its head up alongside America’s The West Side Story which came out in the same period.

The doomed lovers aspect of the film seems similar too: here an outcast boy with shark gill implants loves a local maiden. In contrast with American Science Fiction films, however, this situation is not a product of nuclear radiation nor science-gone-wrong, but of benign medical intervention.

The original constumes used in `Chelovek Amphibia` on display at Lenfilm studios in St Petersburg.

Soviet Michael Crichton.

The author, Alexander Romanovich Belyaev, had grown up in a religious household in the cathedral town of Smolensk. He became a lawyer before being struck down with tuberculosis which made him dependent on care for about six years.

During this trial Belyaev encountered the writings of Verne and Wells and this fired him up to embark on a career as one of Russia’s first career science fiction authors. He was to churn out seventeen – 17!- tales in this genre.

Belyaev’s life ended in 1941 or 1942 in the town of Pushkin outside St Petersburg from lack of nutrition. He was 58.

Nevertheless he had reached a wide readership in his lifetime. Professor Dowell’s Head (1937) and The Amphibian are the ones most known to the Anglophone world but if you go onto book discussion sites you will find that Belyaev still commands a reading public outside of that, and his other books remain popular too.

An installation commemorating the film `Professor Dowell’s Testament` (Lenfilm Studio, 1984) based on Belyaev’s` “Professor Dowell’s Head`. Also on display at Lenfilm studios in St Petersburg.

Unexpected.

Belyaev had The Amphibian published in a notorious era later seen as being the onset of Stalinism. The Soviet government ended the relaxed New Economic Policy amidst a fall in grain production and a new financial slump. The buzzword of the day was `sabotage` and the first Five Year Plan was being hatched and the show trials began. Hard times.

The Amphibian, in contrast, catapults us to the fishing community of Rio de Plata near Buenos Aires. The focus, furthermore is not on new mechanics but on fantastic medical science.

Water boy.

The pearl divers are thrown into superstitious dread by the appearance of a `sea devil` in their waters. This has created a journalistic splash too.

Icthyander (the amphibian) – for it is he – a young man of about twenty, is able to spend long periods swimming underwater on account of the shark gills implanted into his body. This superpower sets him apart from normal society.

His adoptive father, Doctor Salvatore – who had saved Icthyander’s life with this surgical innovation represents the maverick medical genius ( of the kind that Boris Karloff would later portray). Nevertheless he seems saner than the conniving rabble around him and gifts the poor Mexicans with free medical help. Otherwise he is a recluse, living in a walled laboratory which he shares with his servants and sundry modified animals.

Icthyander, meanwhile is smitten with a local beauty and entangled in a hopeless love tryst. The hard-bitten pearl diving mercenaries are plotting to kidnap him and put him to their own use. It will all end in a sensational court case in which Doctor Salvatore is in the dock – and against the world…

Fable.

The detached narrative is told with spare and simple prose, reminiscent of Paul Gallico, perhaps.It could work as junior fiction, although maybe it is L. Koslenikov’s 1959 translation that makes much of the dialogue seem clunky.

The beating heart of it all is the prolonged underwater sequences where we get Icthyander’s eye on the world. Here Jacques Cousteau is anticipated in fiction.

The theme of human-animal hybrids had been dealt with earlier by Mikhail Bulgakov in Heart of a Dog (1925) but this tends to be viewed as an allegory rather than science fiction.

There also exist indelible rumours claiming that the Stalin regime was attempting to breed human-monkey hybrids for military purposes. So perhaps Belyaev was closer to the truth than he thought!

Belyaev (via Salvatore) seems to mount a defence of medical progress against the prohibitions of religion in this novel. It is not clear, however, that the author had anything more in mind than writing a ripping yarn which could whisk the reader away from the daily grind of Soviet society of that time.

Contemporary echoes.

The novel stands up better than the film which is too Old School for most people’s tastes today.

However,the science fiction geek of our time expects more involved narratives which involves multiple technological twists and turns as opposed to a one premise fable like this. The Amphibian is out of fashion.

Or is it?

Fellow baby boomers may recall an American TV show (1977-1978) called The Man From Atlantis This featured Patrick Duffy as an amphibian man. (It would be churlish to point out that one of Belyaev’s novels from 1926 is titled Posledniy Chelovek iz Atlantidi – The Last Man from Atlantis!)

Then there is Guillermo del Toro’s film The Shape of Water from two years back. The similarities between this and what has been discussed does not need to be spelt out (it even features a Soviet scientist!)

So The Amphibian remains an extraordinary novel – as extraordinary as the sad life of the man who dreamt it all up.

Chelovek Amphibia- Full movie.

Falling Down in Riga: HEADCRUSHER…revisited.

Will a Latvian pulp shocker still be as stimulating sixteen years on?

No matter how hard I tried to fathom the mysterious mechanism of the stunningly, scandalously sudden wealth of the most various and unexpected of my fellow citizens…I couldn’t figure it out. The money seemed to appear from nowhere, in obscene and incomprehensible amounts…I don’t want to be like them. I don’t like them. But if they want everybody to play by their rules, then I can play that game too.And I’ll beat them.Because I’m clever. (Headcrusher, p-15)

When I first made the leap from the U.K. to the Russian Federation in 2006 I had but one companion on the voyage. This came enclosed in a mud – brown cover and went by the name of Headcrusher by Garros-Evdokimov. I checked out the first page in the train station en route to the airport and, by the time I had reached my destination, had already devoured this minor classic. The urgent and confrontational prose told me more about what really awaited me in my New World than any Lonely Planet guide or classic from the Golden Age of Russian literature.

It would not be long before I would find myself passing it on to expat colleagues in Russia. One of them, an American who had studied Creative Writing, just opined that the book contained too many adjectives stuffed together. Another, one of my managers from New Zealand, took issue with the central character’s failing (in what is a crucial sequence) to show his I.D to security at his place of work! I am not sure that either of them got what myself and many other readers -for the novel proved a commercial success – responded to.

Browsing in a Moscow bookstore late last year I chanced upon my mud brown companion once again. How would it shape up now?

I resolved that I would also, once again, share it with someone. This time the recipient would be a fellow expat from California who has feathered his nest with a chain of nursery schools in Moscow.
More on that later.

Bright Young Things.
Limbus Press in Saint Petersburg were the first to print Headcrusher in 2003. It sold well in the Russophone world and proceeded to win the Russian Literary National Bestseller Prize in the same year. The authors – Alexander Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov were both 28-year-old journalists residing in Latvia.
Three years later the London-based Vintage Books produced an English language version courtesy of a seamless and vigorous translation by the ever busy Andrew Bromfield. This in turn received an approving reception from the British press. (`A brilliant piece of writing`: The Daily Telegraph, and so on).

Headcrusher comprises an intense and transgressive Molotov cocktail made up of social satire and polemic. In so doing it channels the aspirations and frustrations of many people – particularly young men – who have lived through the transition to post-Communist societies in Eastern Europe.

This `cyberthriller` exudes a landscape of `permanent unreality` (p-58) composed of `hotels, taverns, underground car parks, casinos, computer game arcades and supermarkets` (p-55). Overseeing it all is the National Conservative Party whose leader exhorts the citizens to be `less lazy` and to `try at least brushing your teeth everyday` (p-62).

Latvian Psycho.
Garros-Evdokinov’s alter ego is the twenty-six year old Vadim Appletaev, who consists of a sort of little guy/ everyman when we first encounter him. However, during one typical, slushy January holiday period Vadim’s banal dog-eat-dog world will push him over the edge.

Like Victor Pelevin’s protagonist in Homo Zapiens (2002) Vadim worked as a writer in Soviet times and was feted for his brilliance. All that changed in the new era of post-Soviet economic shock therapy and he ended up churning out P.R copy for a major bank in Riga.

So Vadim spends his days adding to a secret hate-filled grumble sheet which is saved on the bank’s computer. He has his way with vacuous young women who are awed by his connections with International Finance but his only real friend runs a computer gaming arcade. It is this that introduces him to the violent combat game – `Headcrusher`.

One day, entering his closed workplace to add some choice rants to his hidden blog, he runs into his pompous manager who seems delighted to have caught him in the act. As the man dresses him down, all of Vadim’s dammed up rage spills out as he smashes the manager over the head with a bronze dinosaur which is a part of the office decoration. Then he has to dispose of the body….
Thus begins Vadim’s descent into a Macbeth like vortex of slaughter. We follow him as he executes a string of George Grosz-like cartoon irritants including a meatheaded security guard, street hoods, sleazy cops, spiritual fakirs (`the Church of Unified Energies`), right-wing trendies and even the head of the government itself!

The action tale is animated with scornful disgust all the way through. It is just as raw as Arslan Khasavov’s Sense (reviewed below). Nevertheless, Garros-Evdokimov entertain us with their fresh and vivacious descriptions and philosophical soliloquies.

Riga night life, coitus, a first taste of single malt whisky, and computer games are all brought to life. The sequence in which Vadim has to dispose of his first corpse before his workmates find him is a satisfying example of horror-supense writing too.

The duo wrote some more novels but these have not been translated. A story by Alexei Evdokimov turns up in Moscow Noir – an anthology of crime stories produced by Akashic books in 2010. Then, sad to say, Alexander Garros died of cancer in 2017.

Meeting with a critic.
Edward makes his way on the metro to the Akademicheskaya area of Moscow where his acquaintance lives in a gated community. He has a long canvas bag slung over his shoulders.
Security lets him in and he goes along the hall and enters the plush white and chrome apartment. He is greeted by a portrait of Trump shaking hands with Putin and a collection of numerous gold Russian icons laid out on the walls.
The critic is portly and bald and seen sitting on a bean bag with a copy of `Headcrusher` in front of him. He shakes his head from side to side.
`It’s a confusing piece of bull crap`, he begins in a braying voice. ` Any sympathy I’d had for the hero I’d lost by the end of the first chapter. I mean it’s all so adolescent and preachy!`
He offers Edward some imported coffee from the Andes but the man just asks him to continue.
`It’s so obvious that these guys are just settling old scores with real people – people they’re too much pussies to sort out in real life! Anyway, my countryman Chuck Palanhiuck already did this sort of thing so much better!`
CLICK-CLICK!
`And it’s all so unbelievable. I mean as if anybody would get away with going round and…hey, whasat!?`
The report sounds like a Siberian avalanche. The icons are now golden red. There is beef stroganoff served on the floor.A shadow moves over the torso to retrieve the book.
`Now if you’d read the novel with more care, you might have seen that coming`, says the shooter.

`Headcrusher` by Garros Evdokimov (translated by Andrew Bromfield) London: Vimtage Books, 2006 (All quotations are from this text).

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (ZAVODNOI APPELSIN) at the Theatre of Nations, Moscow November 20th

O my brothers! I viddied a bezoomny horrorshow about a malenky bit of the old ultraviolence!

The play calling itself `A Clockwork Orange` (`Zavodnoi Appelsin`) seems to have become a permanent fixture in the schedules of Moscow’s Theatre of Nations. My previous attempts to get tickets for it had failed and this evening, courtesy of a whole load of thirty-somethings, was a full house.
I need to say at the outset that what I saw was very much a conceptual spin-off from Anthony Burgess’s sensational novel of 1962 and by no means an adaptation of it, or even of Stanley Kubrick’s much vaunted 1971 screen rendering of the same. Instead this functioned as an original idea by the writers Yuriy Klavdiev and Ilia Kukharenko with the director Fillip Grigoryan. After all, the novel is unstageable (as I can testify having sat through a lame attempt to do do by drama students many years ago). The drama really concerns the genesis of the novel A Clockwork Orange and in that it resembles Ken Russel’s film Gothic (1986) which tells of how Frankenstein came to be written.
As much as this fact disconcerted me, I never got bored throughout this 1 hour 50 minute (without intermissions) production, and that is despite my less than perfect Russian language skills. Rather, I left the theatre feeling perplexed and remain so now. My only disappointment lay in not being shown the sinister glitter of a brave new world that the novel offers. The play glances back to the past.

The Moscow Connection.
Still, if you live in Moscow you already inhabit the world of A Clockwork Orange: the blocks of flats whose windows are illuminated by the flickering light of TV sets, the bars with names like `The Duke of New York`, the superannuated murals glorifying labour, the vast public video screens – not all of these are in Burgess’s story, but might as well have been.
There exists a deeper link to Russia’s capital too. Malcolm McDowell (the iconic Alex in Kubrick’s film) told of how Burgess, before writing the novel, had been on an exchange visit to Moscow. He was sitting in a coffee bar one warm evening when a group of learing thugs pressed their faces against the window (Newspunch.com, February 4th 2016). This vignette provided a catalyst for Burgess’s story and also its telling via `nadstat`, the teenage slang full of Russian loan words.

Burgess’s demon.
There was another inspiration to the novel however, and this play zooms in on it. What happened was that Burgess’s wife was assaulted, in Burgess’s absence, by American G.I’s. Many critics have hypothesised that A Clockwork Orange represented Burgess’s attempt to come to terms with the trauma that this terrible event wrought on him.
The main protagonist of the play is a Burgess-like `writer` (characterised as a beret wearing member of the intelligentsia). The incident is represented – borrowing a sequence from the novel -by the rape of his wife in a country house setting.
It is an ordinary miscreant who ends up behind bars who conjures up the demon of the `imaginary Alex` by throwing the writer into helpless introspective guilt.
Otherwise the play features the stand-off between Youth and Age (but fails to explore this in the sociological way that Burgess attempted) and there is a bit of rumination on popular culture (sixties pop music plays a big role in this production).
As for the nadstat: I had been eager to see how a Russian language production would deal with this but drew a blank. In the stage notes to the play there is an intriguing suggestion that the script used Google translate to create the feel of an artificial language, but this was lost on this Russian learner.
Sixties retro.

The set comprises a moderne country house, the inside of which we view from the garden, courtesy of a wall length sliding window. There is some attention to the detail of sixties Britain with the wife, for example, being clad in one of the flowing skirts of the period (I was reminded of the recent British play Home, I’m Darling where a couple try to recreate late fifties domesticity). We also encounter a Britishism in the form of a garden gnome. How stunned we are when this comes to life and begins to address the audience!
You would expect a bit of the old ultraviolence to get a look in too. It does. The rape sequence is prolonged and distasteful, but not cheapened with any attempt at eroticism. The most disturbing scene, however, is the grievous bodily harm committed on Alex by his elders. (It appears that theatre censorship in Russia is not as stringent as all that).

Fresh take.
There is little point in trying to give you the `plot` of this play. This is an expressionistic trip through vaudevillian sequences held together by a Strindbergian dream logic. Or to put it another way it is a bit like what you might have got if Andrei Tarkovsky rather than Kubrick had directed a film version of the novel.
In fact, the only Kubrick influence in the play comes via his film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) in the use of a Ligeti like score as the plays opening. The only iconic reference to the film occurs when Alex is given a drink of moloko (milk) by his parents.
Also we get an extended dumb show in which the writer’s wife, masked by sinister facial bandages, mimes to a sixties ballad and a surreal scene where the `imaginary Alex` turns up to the house in the form of a cyborg Black Knight – only to morph into the couple’s querulous teenage son. Later there is also a home video where Alex’s parents torture him.
Throughout there is a determination not to feel predictable or to fall into clichés. Even when Beethoven gets an airing, it is the gentler Beethoven of `The Moonlight Sonata` and not the more rousing works associated with the Kubrick film. (As I often bewail the derivative or stodgy nature of much modern Russian culture I cannot really complain about this!)
In any case, this play may be iconoclastic but it is not at all irreverent. The writers have demonstrated much concern here for the life and times of Anthony Burgess. Nor have they made the theme of violence a titillating one.
You might even see this play as something of a black comedy, although the fact that the audience did not so much as titter might owe to the fact that, like me, they would need some time to mull the whole thing over.
If you imagine that modern Russian theatre is all revivals of The Cherry Orchard then wake up and nyuhakh the kofye!

Theatre of Nations site (English).

Roaring Boy: the personal and political in Arslan Khasavov’s `Sense`.

Did a Central Asian immigrant write a Catcher in the Rye for the Moscow millenial generation?

I hate cheesy boys and pert, pretty girls who smell of expensive perfumes and drive around in large cars with tainted windows. With wads of money in their designer label bags to satisfy every whim, they have all they need: money, girls, shooters, nice gear…In their world everything matters except your heart.

I once had the acquaintance of a precocious fifteen year old student (now studying Literature at Moscow State University) who had some literary aspirations. He would tell me of the Golden and Silver Ages of Russian writing but never about anything current, until one day I said to him: `You need to get into something a bit more up to the minute, something with people like you in`.

I urged him to read Sense by Arslan Khasavov, a representative tirade from which is given above (pages 44 to 43).

Sense is the first novel (and a calling card) by Arslan Khasavov who is now just reaching thirty. When he authored this mini-masterpiece he was just twenty and, in it, he set down the Moscow of `here-and-now`, at least as it was in 2008. Whilst Khasavov is a Kumyk by birth –an ethnic group found for the most part in Dagestan-he resides in, and has undertaken his studies in the capital of Russia.

Dream come true.

Sense was shortlisted from one of the 50,000 works sent in to the Debut Prize (which gives annual awards to new Russian writers). Arch Tait PEN literature awarded translator (best known for making Anna Politkovskaya’s journalism available in English), took note of the novel and translated it into English. As he is also the UK editor of the Glas new Writing series, this lead to Sense being published by Glas in 2012. Thus it took its place alongside the other 170 authors who have been published by Glas since 1991.

True to life.

Sense is not so much a story as a slice-of-life as seen through the eyes of Artur Kara, a club-footed twenty-year old student who is the first in his family to study at a university. A self-described `day-dreaming slob` he belongs to the post-Soviet Muscovite tribe. Disdainful of the banal lives of his factory working father and mother, he derives inspiration from literature, information from the internet and TV, and his student life allows him the time to mull over it all.

He feels himself to be ranged against those born in the 60’s and 70’s who have presided over the `death of idealism` (p-151). To vault himself above the kind of people he thinks are `unaware that a stupid life has no value` (p-20) he goes in search of greatness. To this end he turns up to meetings, and gets to know the supporters and, in particular the writers, of the youth movements of his time. So we get a journalistic roll call of many of the (real life) hopeful reformers, would-be revolutionaries and militant Islamists who were around in 2008. Kara, however, finds that none of these outfits answer to his need for romance. Then, prompted by some feverish visions that come to him, he creates his own movement which forms the title of the novel – Sense.

Even when cruel reality intervenes in the form of the death of his father, he is only put off his stride for a short while before teetering on the brink of madness….

Intimate.

To read the novel – and I did so in one sitting – is a bit like being collared by a voluble twenty-year old who insists on pouring his heart out to you. This effect gets achieved through intense and sometimes florid prose which is, nevertheless, conversational. Some passages are didactic, but Khasavov has enough distance from his anti-hero to be able to present him in a satirical way (rather as Thomas Mann does with Felix Krull in Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man).

So we are treated to an edgy, but not too hard edged confessional: and it is refreshing to find that it does not concern the Second World War, rural life, or Soviet dissidents and the tone is upbeat. The events all occur in the radius of the Tverskaya area.

In the Moscow of 2008 the economy was still doing quite well and there were more political opposition activities than there are now. Even so, Artur cannot see how he can improve his position within society. His place is at the opposite end of the spectrum as that depicted in Minaev’s bestseller Soulless (2006). Well he knows this too:

I was handsome, strong and talented, and nobody wanted to know. Nobody cared. Was it my fault I wasn’t born into a wealthy family but instead was the son of an ordinary mechanic? Did I stand condemned for that? (P-127).

Critical reader.

My millennial friend came back having read the novel. He shrugged his shoulders.

`I got the bit about him rowing with his parents and all, but it’s not original, is it? And, anyway, it’s written by an immigrant`.

That was his verdict. Perhaps, I wondered to myself that, being still in his teens he was a little too young to really relate to it. What about you though?

If you are in your twenties then I can guarantee that this will contain some words that will speak to you, even if not for you. For those of you who are older it will remind you of what it felt like to be that age.

Sense (translated by Arch Tait) is published by Glas Publishers, Moscow, 2012.

My interview with Khasavov for Moskvaer.

Featured image from Fenbook.ml (Cover picture courtesy Sever Publishing House).

The Scary Fairy Tales of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

The Grand Old Lady of Russian letters has some weird tales to tell.

Nina had always been a disorganised person who let things go; thus her leave from the newspaper to go `freelance` and the apparent total unravelling of her life…. She ate, she drank…and they didn’t need any money, since every day the young fisherman would bring the fruits of the sea home to them.

`Who is he? ` I asked, and Nina, without any hesitation answered that he was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, that he could breathe underwater, that he brought home literally everything from there….

For all the reputation for `chauvinism` that still sticks to Russian society, the fact remains that one of its most revered authors is a woman, an elderly woman at that. Moreover, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is neither a veteran critic of Soviet repression like a Solhenitzyn, nor someone exulting in the shiny new capitalism like a Sergey Minaev. As such, this writer, playwright and novelist can offer the Western reader a fresh take on how a great many Russians really think and feel.

Amongst the nation’s best-known contemporary writers, Petrushevskaya cuts a figure of a sort of literary godmother. From her thirties this Muscovite has been producing stories and plays and following a long period of being disregarded came to prominence in the 1980s when her dramas – compared by some to Harold Pinter’s -were seen as fit to be performed. Then as she reached fifty her first book of short stories saw print in Russia.

Now these tales have been translated into English by two Americans, Ann Summers – a Slavic literature academic – and the Moscow born Keith Gessen, founder of `n+1` magazine. Penguin Modern classics have collected them under the title There Once Was A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby which hit the shelves in 2009.

This collection is made up of 19 short tales grouped into four categories: Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems and Fairy Tales. They defy easy categorisation but the tag `magical realism` is a hard one to avoid. Readers who have encountered Vladimir Sorokin might also be reminded of him, but her work relies less on shock tactics.

To a British reader they offer not such a great challenge as similar developments occurred in British fiction in the same general period. I am thinking of The Cement Garden period Ian Mc Ewan (or `Ian Macabre` as he was then sometimes dubbed) as well as the Gothic fantasias of Angela Carter.

Petrushevskaya tells us of women, married couples and families who undergo strange life and death situations. Some of these invoke the supernatural, others can be accounted for in terms of psychology but in all cases individual experience is paramount. Whilst Petrushevskaya avoids local and historical references it is clear that it is the seedy apartments of the Russia of the Eighties to the present day that she is showing us.

Two of her stories – `Hygiene` and the infamous `The New Robinson Crusoes: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century` function as sketches of dystopian catastrophe. In the former, for example, a man who has recovered from a mystery plague knocks on the door of a family apartment to warn them of the coming social collapse. This does indeed occur but the family survives through robbery, although end up having to quarantine their own daughter.

Others such as `The God Poseidon` (quoted from above) and `The Black Coat` can be enjoyed as supernatural chillers. It would not be difficult to imagine them being anthologised in the more thoughtful type of Horror collection sandwiched between Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. (Indeed Petrushevskaya won a World Fantasy award for this book in 2009).

`There is Someone in the House` however, suggests a study in morbid psychology whereas `Marllena`s Secret` is a bold fantasia and `My Love` an extended exercise in tragic pathos.

Her prose is spare but with enough observant detail to bring some reality to her fables. The fast paced narrative is told by an earthy and unsentimental voice, which is matter-of-fact, and without overt humour. The resulting effect – pithy and sensational- resonates in the West as much as it does in Russia. She has been on the New York Times bestseller list.

Petrushevskaya casts a flamboyant figure, dressing like a grand dame and singing cabaret. From not being able to get published in her own country at all she has become its national treasure, an icon of survival.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers is published by the Penguin Group (London: 2009)

(The above quotation is from p-85, `The God Poseidon`).

Mad Metropolis: In exhuming `The Doomed City` by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Gollancz have rediscovered a difficult masterpiece that still has something to say about our own times.

Supernovas in the science fiction galaxy, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a St Petersburg writing duo, were feted in their time and their novels have been treated to numerous cinema adaptations, from the somewhat weighty `Stalker` (1979) to the more popcorn friendly `Inhabited Island` (2008).

As much as some of their visions – such as the autocratic regime in `Hard to be a God` (1964) – contain metaphorical critiques of their own government, the Strugatsky brothers have not really been viewed as dissident writers as such. That may be about to change. As a part of an S.F Masterworks series, which has been re-issuing classics of the genre since 1999, Andrew Bromfield introduced the Anglophone world to `The Doomed City` last year.

The brothers, following many years of secret gestation, completed this novel in 1972. However it only saw print, courtesy of `Neva press` between 1988 and 1989. This delay owes to the fact that the novel comprised – as Dmitry Glukhovsky (`Metro`2033 and 2034`) says in his indispensable Foreword -`…an allusion to the Soviet Union…so transparent that there was a reason to fear not only for the Strugatskys but also for the censors who allowed the book to see print` (p-xi).

Human zoo.

I am required by law to describe this whopping 453-page dystopia as `Kafkaesque` and indeed it is. The protagonist, Andrei Voronin is a conventional young man from Fifties period Soviet Russia. Somehow he has found himself in the world of The Experiment. In this a group of humans, some volunteers and others conscripts, are put together in a nameless City with no known location or time. Their artificial sun is switched on and off and their living space `was clearly divided into two equal halves. Looking to the west there was a boundless, blue green void – not sea and not even sky…To the east…was an unbounded expanse of solid yellow…Infinite Void to the west and infinite Solidity to the east`. (Pages 266-267).

The inhabitants undergo what seem to be meaningless trials but there are wraithlike Mentors who seem to appear out of nowhere to dispense gnomic wisdom, and to remind Voronin that `The Experiment is the Experiment`.

The Experiment means The Experiment.

The plot appears quite formless but follows the episodic career of Voronin. First he works as a garbage collector, then an investigator, then as a newspaper editor and after that a counsellor – job rotation being a feature of the Experiment. Then, however, there is a fascistic uprising in which he lands on top of the heap. Later he leads an expedition outside the city to see if the rumours of gathering anti-city forces are true.

Throughout this, and all told with the Strugatsky’s trademark attention to detail, we see riotous kitchen parties, an invasion of baboons, and the City bedevilled by a sinister unidentified Red Building which manifests itself in different parts of the City, swallowing up its citizens.

Most of all the novel concerns itself with people. This feels like a man’s world where there is a lot of camaraderie between men as they jostle and scheme and dream amongst themselves and much of the writing consisting of intense dialogue. In fact a philosophical Jew, Izya Katzman, functions as the nearest thing the novel to a hero.

Worth it in the end.

Boris Strugatsky himself, in an Afterword, refers to the novel’s ` stubborn reluctance to glorify or acclaim anything` (p-461). Indeed, this is not comfort reading!

It was with a sense of duty that I turned the pages. Sometimes I leant in closer with a sense of intrigue. I chuckled once or twice at the slapstick humour and my pulse quickened here and there at the adventures and I knew that the creepy Red Building and the presence of Katzman would continue to haunt me. I was pleased to finish the last page and put the book to one side though.

As a science fiction `The Doomed City` falls flat. The cosmography is too meagre and the science background too thin for this to be a world that one can escape into. (Compare and contrast it with Philip Jose Farmer’s `Riverworld Saga` from 1971 to 1983. This dealt with a somewhat similar premise but constructed a much more credible alternate world in so doing).

As a novel about hypereality, however `The Doomed City` resonates more than ever, and not just in the Russian Federation. Also its in influence on many contemporary Russian writers, such as Dmitry Bykov, is clear to see.

Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris: The Doomed City (Translated by Andrew Bromfield) (Great Britian: Gollancz, 2017) All quotations are from this text.