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.