One Billion Years After the End of the World Historical Deadlock, Contemporary Dystopia

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

One Billion Years after the End of the World: Historical Deadlock, Contemporary Dystopia, and the Continuing Legacy of the Strugatskii Brothers Author(s): Sofya Khagi Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (SUMMER 2013), pp. 267-286Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.72.2.0267Accessed: 28-01-2016 12:21 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Thu, 28 Jan 2016 12:21:13 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/publisher/aseees

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.72.2.0267

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp



Slavic Review 72, no. 2 (Summer 2013)

One Billion Years aft er the End of the World: Historical Deadlock, Contemporary Dystopia, and the Continuing Legacy of the Strugatskii Brothers

Sofya Khagi

As Fredric Jameson closes his 1982 treatise, “Progress versus Utopia,” on the impossibility of utopian representation in contemporaneity, he alludes to “a SF-Utopian text from the Second World, one of the most glorious of all contem-porary utopias, the Strugatsky brothers’ astonishing Roadside Picnic.”1 That novel, in Jameson’s reading, cannot be decoded as an expression of Soviet dis-sident protest, nor does it turn on the mixed blessings of technological prog-ress. Rather, what he cherishes in it is “the unexpected emergence, as it were, beyond ‘the nightmare of History’ and from out of the most archaic longings of the human race, of the impossible and inexpressible Utopian impulse here nonetheless briefl y glimpsed: . . . ‘Happiness for everybody, free, and no one will go away unsatisfi ed!’”2

For Jameson, ever insistent that science fi ction “is sending back more reli-able information about the contemporary world than an exhausted realism (or an exhausted modernism),” the Strugatskiis’ work, with its promise of the no-vum, is crucially important in a postmodern present crippled by the inability to conceptualize a diff erent, and viable, future.3 So are the Strugatskiis crucial in the post-Soviet cultural context: with Russia crashing into postmodernity, their works bring home, in an exemplary fashion, postmodernity’s predica-ments. The prime importance of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii in Soviet sci-ence fi ction of the 1960s to the 1980s has been thoroughly examined.4 A less

I would like to thank Sibelan Forrester, Yvonne Howell, Mark D. Steinberg, and Slavic Review’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this article.

1. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York, 2005), 294.

2. Ibid., 295.3. Fredric Jameson, “Fear and Loathing in Globalization,” New Left Review 23 (Sep-

tember–October 2003): 105. “Science fi ction is capable of achieving profound insights into the principal dilemmas of political life: the foundation of new political orders, the endeavor to realize utopia, the exigencies underpinning tyranny, the relationship of a saintly politics to the practice of realpolitik, and the potential and limitations of radical politics in the present age.” See Peter Y. Paik, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (Minneapolis, 2010), 1–2. On the novum, see Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, 1979).

4. The works to which this article is especially indebted include: Darko Suvin, “Criticism of the Strugatsky Brothers’ Work,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 6, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 286–307; Suvin,“The Literary Opus of the Strugatsky Brothers,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 8, no. 3 (Spring 1974): 454–63; Yvonne Howell, Apoca-lyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (New York, 1994); How-ell, “When the Physicians Are Lyricists: Translating the Strugatskys’ Ponedel΄nik nachi-naetsia v subbotu,” in Lenore M. Grenoble and John M. Kopper, eds., Essays in the Art and Theory of Translation (Lewiston, 1997), 165–96; Mark Amusin, Brat΄ia Strugatskie: Ocherk tvorchestva (Jerusalem, 1996); Boris Strugatskii, Kommentarii k proidennomu (St. Peters-



268 Slavic Review

explored but equally signifi cant question is how the Strugatskiis have contin-ued to inspire post-Soviet authors who live in, and muse on, a sociocultural milieu that diff ers drastically from the one that gave rise to their works. To pry open this rich topic, I consider here how prominent contemporary authors—Garros-Evdokimov (Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov), Dmitrii Bykov, and Viktor Pelevin—engage the Strugatskiis to dramatize their own increas-ingly dark visions of modernization, progress, and morality.5

Russian fantastika today mixes science fi ction and fantasy, and it is a vi-brant part of current popular culture. The Strugatskiis represent one branch of the Kulturgut that is being actively recycled and transformed. As is well attested in recent movie treatments of their oeuvre, their infl uence extends beyond science fi ction to post-Soviet culture at large.6 Like the earlier era of Mikhail Bulgakov and Evgenii Zamiatin, Russian literature today has writ-ers who are not science fi ction authors per se producing serious works in the genre.7 Novels by Garros-Evdokimov, Bykov, and Pelevin contain strong ele-ments of the fantastic: Garros-Evdokimov rely on the genres of social science fi ction and cyberpunk; Bykov produces social, historical, and philosophical fantasy; and Pelevin has perfected his own unique sociometaphysical fantasy that blends hilarious parody with black, absurd, supernatural plot twists and incorporates meticulous observations of the everyday with references to the occult and the surreal. At the same time, the works of these authors are not confi ned to the realm of science fi ction but are highly visible as mainstream literature (indeed, in Pelevin’s case, they have attained the status of modern classics).8

This article examines how three works engage the Strugatskiis’ oeuvre: Garros-Evdokimov’s Chuchkhe: Opora na sobstvennye sily russkaia versiia (Juche: The Spirit of Self-Reliance, Russian Version, 2006), Bykov’s Evakua-

burg, 2003); Arkadii and Boris Strugatskie, Ulitka na sklone: Opyt akademicheskogo izda-niia (Moscow, 2006).

5. I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers for suggesting that I give this article more reach and to Mark D. Steinberg for drawing my attention to this interpretive theme in particular.

6. The movie treatments of the Strugatskiis’ works such as Konstantin Lopushan-skii’s Ugly Swans (2006), Fedor Bondarchuk’s Obitaemyi ostrov (The Inhabited Island, 2008–9), and Aleksei German’s not-yet-released Trudno byt΄ bogom / Istoriia arkanarskoi rezni (Hard to Be a God / History of the Arkanar Massacre) are readable as a similar shift into culture at large. On recent fi lm treatments of the Strugatskiis’ plots, see Viacheslav Ivanov, “The Lessons of the Strugatskys,” Russian Studies in Literature 47, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 8.

7. I am indebted to Sibelan Forrester for these insights. On the question of the generic change from Soviet to post-Soviet science fi ction, see Birgit Menzel, “Russian Science Fic-tion and Fantasy Literature,” in Stephen Lowell and Birgit Menzel, eds., Reading for Enter-tainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective (Munich, 2005), 117–50.

8. To look at the same issue from a diff erent angle, many major post-Soviet writers produce works with fantastic elements: Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Vasilii Aksenov, Tat΄iana Tolstaia, Ol ga Slavnikova, Iurii Mamleev, Pavel Krusanov, Vladimir Sharov, and so on. On the interplay between postmodernism and science fi ction, see Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London, 1992), 12: “Like ‘mainstream’ postmodernist writ-ing, it [science fi ction] is self-consciously ‘world-building’ fi ction, laying bare the process of fi ctional world-making itself.”



One Billion Years aft er the End of the World 269

tor (The Evacuator, 2005), and Pelevin’s Empire V / Ampir V. Povest΄ o na-stoiashchem sverkhcheloveke (Empire V / A Novella about a Real Superman, 2006).9 Like the literature of any era, these works point to their ancestors and indicate the formative importance of the earlier texts. The nature of the inter-textual play is diff erent in each case: Garros-Evdokimov directly argue with the Strugatskiis’ vision of the Man of the Future; Bykov presents an homage cum gentle parody of their progressorism; and Pelevin’s is a more oblique engagement and imaginative reworking of the theme of the individual caught in a grotesque social and historical process. In the charged space between the Strugatskiis’ original concepts and their recent transpositions we can locate both the Soviet classics’ uncanny feel for “the future surer than a pledge” and their post-Soviet interlocutors’ conceptualization of this future as no longer “around the bend.”10

Invariably, Garros-Evdokimov, Bykov, and Pelevin continue the Strugat-skiis’ tradition of science fi ction as social critique—in this case, a critique of society aft er the collapse of socialist ideology with its modernizing projects of historical progress, technological development, and social improvement. These contemporary authors provide a discouraging reality check; they re-cast, to draw on Tzvetan Todorov’s well-known defi nition of the fantastic, the Strugatskiis’ worlds that gravitate toward the marvelous in the direction of the uncanny.11 As they demonstrate in their parables a contrario to the Stru-gatskiis’ fi ctions, the dreams of modernity embodied by the classics of Soviet fantastika have been shattered but not replaced by a viable alternative social scenario. Rather, to borrow from Jean Baudrillard’s The Illusion of the End, a provocative (and clearly science fi ction–inspired) assessment of the contem-porary condition, “history, meaning and progress are no longer able to reach their escape velocity.”12

Garros-Evdokimov: Homo Novus under Social Darwinism

Congratulating Boris Strugatskii on his seventy-fi ft h birthday in 2008, Garros notes: “Try to fi nd burning relevance in Trifonov or Rasputin, Aksenov or Go-

9. Although this later generation of Russian fantasy and science fi ction writers stands out for their greater familiarity with the Anglo-American science fi ction tradition (includ-ing works by Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, and William Gibson), this article’s main focus is the Strugatskiis; authors beyond the Russian context will of necessity be treated sparingly. Likewise, I am purposefully selective as far as contemporary works are con-cerned. For a list of remakes of the Strugatskiis in science fi ction, see Strugatskie, Ulitka na sklone, 547–66.

10. Arkadii and Boris Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh (Do-netsk, 2000–2003), 4:288. All translations are my own, with borrowings from extant En-glish editions.

11. If the reader “decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explana-tion of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to . . . the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter . . . the marvelous.” See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, 1973), 41.

12. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Stanford, 1994), 4. For Baudrillard, the present, bereft of visionary ideas, revolves around repetition, simulation, and sanitization of the past; it entertains a death wish while endlessly deferring the end.



270 Slavic Review

renshtein. As to the Strugatskiis, one does not even have to search. . . . They had a remarkable social prescience, one that would prove adequate for a long time to come.”13

Garros-Evdokimov burst onto the literary scene with their debut novel [Golovo]lomka (Headcrusher, 2002), which won the National Bestseller award for 2003. The story of a young clerk in the public relations department of the Latvian bank Rex, who enjoys violent computer games and subsequently em-barks on a killing spree around Riga, Headcrusher captured readers’ imagina-tions with its dramatization of the trauma of transition to a post-totalitarian world in the Baltics as well as by its deft handling of the conventions of cy-berpunk. Since their debut, Garros-Evdokimov have gone on to publish pro-lifi cally, composing Seraia sliz΄ (Gray Goo, 2005), Faktor fury (Factor of the Wagon, 2006), and Juche.14 Their works positioned them as eff ective practitio-ners of the cyberthriller genre, permeated by social satire. The duo consider the sociopsychological consequences of the electronic age in the tradition of Pelevin, Philip K. Dick, Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk, and Frederick Beigbeder and are indebted to cyberpunk science fi ction in the vein of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and the Wachowski brothers’ movie The Matrix (1999). Yet it is neither their western counterparts nor their compatriot Pe-levin that Garros-Evdokimov most persistently reference, but the Strugatskii brothers.

Two aspects of Garros-Evdokimov’s work relevant to this discussion have been emphasized by the authors from Headcrusher onward: their conver-sation with the Strugatskiis and the realistic component of their fantastic, something the ABS Award (Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii Memorial Award) indeed endorses—“a realistic trend of the fantastic, its coupling with reality, with the past and future of real humanity on this earth.”15 The Authors’ Note to Headcrusher proclaims: “The majority of the characters in this novel have real prototypes. The majority of the settings in which the events of the novel take place are real. The fragments of business texts quoted in the novel or composed by the central character on his hard drive are not fi gments of the authors’ imagination, they are all taken from life.”16 That the subject of Head-crusher is a realized techno-consumer dystopia is made explicit by the pro-nouncement that “The Matrix was not the fantastic anti-utopia of the critics’ reviews but perfectly straightforward realism.”17 At the same time, the novel fi rmly engages the genre of the fantastic, a point reinforced by recurrent refer-

13. Aleksandr Garros, “Ulitka na slome,” Ekspert, 28 April 2008, 84. See also Aleks-andr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov, “Fantasticheskaia interventsiia,” Ekspert, 8 March 2004, 76.

14. They stopped writing together when Garros left Latvia for Russia. Evdokimov’s recent works include Tik (St. Petersburg, 2007) and Nol -nol΄ (Moscow, 2008).

15. “ABS-premiia,” at archivsf.narod.ru/1999/abc_award/ (last accessed 1 March 2013).

16. Garros-Evdokimov, [Golovo]lomka (St. Petersburg, 2003), 1. In their interviews, the authors emphasized their reliance on real events. See, e.g., Ol ga Bychkova, “Zachem pishutsia romany,” 15 May 2006, at razgovorchiki.ru/arkhiv/evdokimovandgarros.html (accessed 7 March 2010; no longer available).

17. Garros-Evdokimov, [Golovo]lomka, 77.




ences to the classic authors of Soviet nauchnaia fantastika, the Strugatskiis. As early as chapter 2, the main character describes himself as “raped by a Slimy” (iznasilovan mokretsom), referring to his boss.18 He later characterizes the consumer realm around him as a “homeostatic universe” (gomeostati-cheskoe mirozdanie), acknowledging that “we’ve read something about it somewhere, of course.”19

Both the Slimies from the Strugatskiis’ Gadkie lebedi (The Ugly Swans, written in the early 1970s, published in 1972/1987) and the homeostatic uni-verse from Za milliard let do kontsa sveta (One Billion Years before the End of the World, 1976) reemerge in Gray Goo. The novel references Engines of Cre-ation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, the 1986 book by K. Eric Drexler that envisions a world transformed by nanotechnology manipulating matter on the atomic level. It depicts an apocalyptic scenario in which Riga turns into “gray goo,” a cemetery of nanobots replicating uncontrollably and turn-ing everything into matter that lacks any individuating qualities. Contempo-rary technological civilization is seen as self-contained and short-circuited because the universe needs to maintain its structure (the “homeostatic uni-verse”), and the Homo novus of The Ugly Swans (superintellectual mokretsy) is reimagined as humans turned into character-less sludge (sliz΄) under the stu-pefying infl uence of television, the Internet, and corporate culture. Humanity is rapidly devolving and will soon disappear “if not physically, then as the subject of collective reason.”20

But it is Juche that off ers Garros-Evdokimov’s most sustained engagement with the Strugatskiis’ oeuvre.21 The Authors’ Note presents the book as a direct response to the Strugatskiis: “Why was this story written—as a pamphlet-like pronouncement on painful topics? As a polemic with the Strugatskii brothers and their key concept of bringing up the New Man [kraeugol΄noi kontseptsiei vospitaniia Novogo Cheloveka]? To demonstrate that (at least in Russia) eff ec-tiveness becomes God, and the principles ‘each one for himself’ and ‘every-one against everyone else’ are His commandments? This is for you, Reader, to decide.”22 In Juche the oligarch Gorbovskii has created an experimental boarding school for exceptional children. This institution is aimed at bring-ing up people of the new generation to be perfect managers of the future, with all connections to the Soviet context severed. As the oligarch falls out of favor, the school is ransacked and closed. Seven years later the former students of this elite institution, now prosperous young members of Russian business, political, and pop-cultural circles, are being assassinated one aft er another.

The notion of a “homeostatic universe” is employed again, with one

18. Ibid., 25.19. Ibid., 214. For more on Headcrusher, see Sofya Khagi, “Garros-Evdokimov and

Commodifi cation of the Baltics,” Journal of Baltic Studies 41, no. 1 (March 2010): 119–37.20. Garros-Evdokimov, Seraia sliz΄ (St. Petersburg, 2005), 214.21. Reviews of Garros-Evdokimov’s works have noted their interest in the Strugatskiis.

See Aleksandr Chantsev, “Vita Nova gadkikh lebedei,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 82, no. 2 (April 2006): 425–26, and Dmitrii Bykov, “Iukost , ili vozvrashchenie gospodina X,” Ogonek, 28 August–3 September 2006, 51–52.

22. Garros-Evdokimov, Chuchkhe (Moscow, 2006), 10. The book consists of a movie script and two novelettes. I focus on the former, the longest in the volume.



272 Slavic Review

important diff erence from One Billion Years before the End of the World: no super civilization is involved to prevent humans from learning too much, and no scientists who might seek to fi ght the forces of stasis are present in the world of Juche. Instead, since Homo sapiens, by virtue of the gift of reason, have a mass of physical and emotional energy not used up in the process of survival, the universe maintains its structure by forcing humans to invent in-nocuous goals (obsessive consumption) to keep themselves occupied. In the global techno-consumer village, technological progress, paradoxically, stops humans from making a civilizational breakthrough. Hence the abandoned expansion into space, while the World Wide Web, potentially a unique source of knowledge, is drowning people in pornography, vacuous blogging, and ad-vertising. Life, on both the micro and macro level, has lost acceleration. It has become ahistorical.

While Garros-Evdokimov engage the idea of a “homeostatic universe,” their more immediate objective is to polemicize with the Strugatskiis’ vision of Homo novus. As imagined in the Strugatskiis’ Mir poldnia (Nooniverse) nov-els, examples of Homo novus are friendly, inquisitive, and selfl ess young peo-ple brought up in a just society, eager to teach its humanistic lessons to people living under less advanced regimes.23 In Garros-Evdokimov’s bleak reimag-ining of the Strugatskiis’ future history series (Gorbovskii is the name of a character from the series), Russia’s managers of the future are “self- suffi cient combat units,” the very opposite of the altruistic kommunary of the future.24 The Juche idea (the North Korean version of Marxism), “man is the master of everything and decides everything,” is sarcastically recast as “the spirit of self-reliance, Russian version”—self-reliance not on the level of the nation (as in Juche ideology) but on the level of the individual. The society is character-ized not by progress but by scientifi c and cultural degradation and savage competition among its members.

Not only does Juche problematize the “key concept of bringing up the New Man” as expressed in the Strugatskiis’ utopias of the 1960s, it also takes on the more troubling Homo novus of The Ugly Swans. Like the mysterious lep-rosarium in which mutant Slimies wean the town’s children from the corrupt ways of their parents, Gorbovskii’s elite school is segregated from the rest of society by “a two-meter-high fence erected to hold off the excrement outside, a little hothouse with its own microclimate.”25 Mysterious rumors circulate about the school. If this institution is sponsored by the oligarch Gorbovskii, why is it supervised by an award-winning Soviet pedagogue? If governmental power structures are connected to the school, what is the exact nature of the confl ict between them and Gorbovskii?26 And why should a mere children’s school be destroyed aft er Gorbovskii falls out of favor?

The school’s headmaster, a liberal-minded member of the thaw genera-

23. See, e.g., the Strugatskiis’ Polden : 22 vek (Noon: 22nd Century, 1962). This theme is also reminiscent of Iain Banks’s later Culture series.

24. Garros-Evdokimov, Chuchkhe, 79.25. Ibid., 110–11.26. Cf. rumors circulating around the leprosarium in The Ugly Swans that it may be

under the wing of the military.




tion, with the suggestive name Nenashev (not ours), hopes to raise civilized people of the future, diff erent from their “less developed” Soviet parents:

I belong to the generation that is conventionally called shestidesiatniki. . . . This is the last generation born in our common country that held various social illusions in earnest. Read the Strugatskiis, nearly the same age as my-self. . . . You will surely notice that in completely diff erent books, which they wrote at diff erent times, there is one common thought. Namely, that man is an objective carrier of reason, and if something prevents him from being so, it is possible and necessary to remedy this. The foremost and in general the only means to accomplish this goal is through upbringing. They even have this term—a well-brought-up person [Chelovek Vospitannyi]. . . . And you guys . . . are the fi rst generation formed completely outside the Soviet experience. . . . One of my main illusions, one I am not prepared to give up, is that you will make this country diff erent.27

Nenashev’s plans fail and he commits suicide as the school is dissolved.Given that Gorbovskii’s boarding school is consciously modeled aft er the

leprosarium of The Ugly Swans, the crucial diff erence between the Strugatskiis’ and Garros-Evdokimov’s works is that, while in the former the Slimies teach the town’s children to become more rational and even more virtuous, albeit less human in their cold rationality than their parents, in the latter children are trained in nothing but ruthless effi ciency. Nenashev’s professed goal is “to raise new people who will not think like Homo sovieticus, and who will not live according to Darwin . . . with a normal, civilized ethics in their blood.”28 But, as one of his students comes to realize, Nenashev “has inoculated them with a fi ghting spirit. To win at any cost . . . to achieve success and comfort, to satisfy one’s vanity. This is what we’d been trained to do.”29 Ironically, these youngsters live and die precisely according to the Darwinian law of the sur-vival of the fi ttest.

If the dilemma of The Ugly Swans is between the allure of a new superior society and a fear that this society will need no humans as we know them (hence the book’s ambivalent conclusion, with the protagonist recognizing the promise of the postapocalyptic realm but determined to return to the cor-rupt yet human present), Juche’s response is that the advent of a superciviliza-tion should be neither welcomed nor feared.30 Instead, post-Soviet society is devolving into “nature, red in tooth and claw,” with its managers of the future merely redder in tooth and claw than the general populace. Effi ciency under

27. Garros-Evdokimov, Chuchkhe, 112–14.28. Ibid., 20.29. Ibid., 76, 86. Cf. Lyotard on effi ciency: technical devices follow “the principle of

optimal performance, maximizing output (the information or modifi cations obtained) and minimizing input (the energy expended in the process). Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just, or the beautiful, etc., but to effi ciency.” See Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition; a Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1984), 44. On the equation of the subject with his function in advanced industrial society, see Frankfurt School theorists, e.g., Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, 1968), 84.

30. See the ending of The Ugly Swans: “All this is beautiful, but there’s one thing—I’d better not forget to go back.” See Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 8:529.



274 Slavic Review

post-Soviet conditions means infi nite adaptability. The social success of the former students of Gorbovskii’s school is due to their virtuosic mimicry, the ability to adapt to the dominant behavioral stereotypes and promptings of mass culture. In the struggle for existence, social malleability leads to the pro-liferation of aggressiveness, callousness, mendacity, superfi ciality, and other behavioral patterns that allow one to prosper. The value of morals is trumped by the value of survival. Any behavior that does not foster the survival and the reproduction of the biological unit—for instance, the altruistic ideal of the intelligentsia—is evolutionarily discarded.

In a narrative twist, Russia’s New Men prove too eff ective for their own good. Relying on one’s own strength means mutual destruction. It turns out that no external force is responsible for the killings. Rather, the series of mur-ders are instigated by a rumor planted by one of the school’s students that someone is hunting them. In response to this provocation, suspicious of ev-eryone around them, these young people quickly exterminate each other. As one of them remarks aft er several murders have been committed, “They were killed because each one was on his own. Our only chance is to act together.”31 Regrettably for them, this advice is not taken.

Garros-Evdokimov off er their story as a present-day corrective to the Strugatskiis’ vision of Homo novus and the future. Juche works at the junc-ture of realism and fantasy. The narrative is set in the present, abounds with real people, and treats concrete social problems of the time. Gorbovskii is transparently based on Mikhail Khodorkovskii, and the elite school refers to Khodorkovskii’s experimental lyceums.32 The series of murders is made up, but otherwise the story contains relatively few fantastic elements. Reality proves both simpler and darker than the Strugatskiis’ fantasies. As Nenashev himself concludes, his latest group of pupils are indeed New Men, unique not in their intellect (the Slimies, Ludens, Wanderers of the Strugatskiis) but in their ability “to know where all things are located in this world, and exactly how many bodily movements are required to grab what one wants.” He “sees some supermen before him, who are therefore not entirely men.”33

Dmitrii Bykov: This Game Is Called Progressorism

A three-time winner of the ABS Award (in 2004, 2006, and 2007), for his novels Orfografi ia (Orthography, 2003), The Evacuator, and ZhD (Living Souls, 2006), Bykov shares in Garros-Evdokimov’s admiration for the Strugatskiis’ social prescience. He reads their oeuvre as transcending its late Soviet political pre-occupations: “A fashion for the Strugatskii brothers has swept over the planet. Everyone had thought that Russian science fi ction predicted perestroika in

31. Garros-Evdokimov, Chuchkhe, 66.32. The name Gorbovskii also has a phonetic connection to Gorbachev.33. Ibid., 136. The other two novelettes in the volume, Novaia zhizn΄ (New Life) and

Liuft (Clearance) examine the issue of the New Man from additional perspectives. New Life is the story of another virtuoso of mimicry—a man who changes his professional and personal life every year. Clearance, one more take on Khodorkovskii, has him bringing up his successor Sachkov. Having attained a high position in the presidential administration, Sachkov, another “self-suffi cient combat unit,” sets out to destroy his teacher.




the USSR, but it turns out that it outlined our very own contemporaneity, on a world scale. . . . The diff erence between the rather limited authorial task and its dazzling result is especially noticeable.”34

In his own art, Bykov seeks to go beyond immediate political concerns to explore larger historical patterns. Thus, Orthography, which takes place in St. Petersburg and the Crimea in 1918, draws parallels between the predica-ment of the intelligentsia aft er the October revolution and post-Soviet cultural degradation. The forces of darkness (temnye)—murderers, rapists, sadists who go back to the “black ones who always come to power aft er grayness triumphs” in Trudno byt΄ bogom (Hard to Be a God, 1964)—fl ood the streets of Petersburg circa 1918 just as they fl ood post-Soviet Russia.35 Spisannye (The Written Off , 2008) is the story of a young screenwriter entered into a list of 180 men, the purpose of which is unknown. It again portrays, in Bykov’s own formulation, “the phenomenon depicted by the Strugatskiis forty years ago: the grays are always followed by the blacks. First everyone became gray, because every-thing had been taken from life that is worth living for. This took place in the 1990s. The rest is a mere technicality.”36

Hard to Be a God is a particularly relevant work for Bykov, since it poses early on the problem of what a member of the intelligentsia is supposed to do under conditions of social degradation, and with the understanding that violent interference will only change things for the worse. This becomes the problematics of The Evacuator, a novel that relies on the Strugatskiis’ notion of progressorism (progressorstvo) and specifi cally on the Arkanar story.

The Evacuator takes place in Moscow in the present. It relates the love aff air between a young married woman, Katia, and a programmer, Igor . As their relations blossom, Moscow is plagued by a series of terrorist attacks ap-parently carried out by Islamic radicals, with an alternative explanation that Russia has lost its historical momentum and is “self-destructing.” A state of emergency is declared, and Muscovites attempt to leave the city in panic. It turns out that Igor΄ is an alien sent to Earth from a galaxy called Alpha Capri-corn in order to evacuate a few people. Initially Katia takes his story for a joke, but when everything around her falls into chaos, she accepts Igor ’s proposal to leave Earth for his native planet.37

The narrative commences as Igor΄ suggests to Katia that they “play pro-gressorism.” He pretends to be from a superior extraterrestrial civilization, and she will be his earthly lover. Their initial exchanges are humorous, with Igor΄ using deformed Russian to imitate an alien’s speech:

“Here an evil man can have very, very much. To be diff erent with us. With us a good man to have practically everything, while a bad one, a spite-ful snout, to lose his last. It’s set like that. We to have little animals. . . . If you to pamper one, brush his hair, he to grow, procreate. . . . But if you to forget

34. Dmitrii Bykov, “Strugatskie i drugie,” Ogonek, 18–24 September 2006, 46.35. Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 3:378.36. Aleksandr Garros, “Plius nullifi katsiia vsei strany,” Ekspert, 9–16 June 2008, 90.37. For a review of The Evacuator, see Aleksandr Chantsev, “Fabrika antiutopii: Disto-

picheskii diskurs v rossiiskoi literature serediny 2000kh,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 86, no. 4 (August 2007): 276–79.



276 Slavic Review

about him, not brush, pet, feed him, not change his bedding, he to wither, dry up, and die. And then you not to exchange him for food. . . .”

“And to be cases when a lazy animal-owner to suck his paw, die hunger?”“Like that cannot. . . . To be humanism, to value each member of society.

. . . We to think about people, not boast before each other like you to do. If not for you, I’d go mad here.”38

As more explosions ravage Moscow, however, Igor΄ insists in earnest that he is an undercover agent (an evacuator) from a distant civilization. He is caught between the principle of noninterference (printsip nevmeshatel stva) and a desire to help people:

“Perhaps you can stop this?”“Nothing can be stopped,” he said gloomily. “Otherwise everything

would have stopped on its own a long time ago. The little ball has started rolling whether you want it or not. Do not be angry with me, Katia. I really cannot do everything. In general we avoid interference, you know. Any kind of evil is copied very easily, easier than you think. One step, and you are involved. And we cannot allow this to happen.”

“But you can take people away from here?”“Yes, we can. I do not take everyone. It’s senseless, you see.”39

Igor ’s role as an evacuator struggling to save Earthlings, with Katia as his indigenous beloved, a woman morally superior to most of her kind, playfully replicates Anton/Rumata—Kira’s situation in Hard to Be a God. Like the pro-gressor Anton, Igor΄ comes from an advanced (morally and technologically) society, and, like Anton, he is tortured by his inability to eff ect substantive change on Earth because (a lesson learned from the Strugatskiis’ classic) vio-lent interference can bring only further violence and degradation. All Igor΄ can do is evacuate half a dozen people to Alpha Capricorn. Why, Katia chal-lenges him, can this all-powerful civilization not send in a landing party to at least save all the children? Will he not feel guilty for not assisting the others? Igor΄ admits that he will indeed hold himself responsible, but he cannot help it. Katia comes to think of him as “her very own little and weak God,” full of mercy but impotent.40

The Strugatskiis’ vision of progressorism evolves from early sunny stories to Hard to Be a God where the Earthling Anton, despite his best intentions, fails to help the medieval Arkanar as it is falling into the hands of a Nazi-like dictatorship. In later works like Zhuk v muraveinike (The Beetle in the Anthill, 1979) and Volny gasiat veter (The Waves Still the Wind, 1985), Earth is por-trayed as a backward civilization, and, unlike Anton and his friends, the su-perior race of the Wanderers pursues no humanistic objectives on the planet.41

38. Dmitrii Bykov, Opravdanie. Evakuator: Romany (Moscow, 2008), 241–43.39. Ibid., 302–3. Cf. Hard to Be a God: “‘I know only one thing: man is an objective

carrier of reason, everything that prevents man from developing his reason is evil, and evil should be eradicated as fast as possible and by any means.’ ‘Any means? Truly?’” See Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 3:314.

40. Bykov, Opravdanie. Evakuator, 367.41. “In the evolution of the Strugatskys’ poetics, the stature of the hero-as-humanist

enlightener (e.g., Don Rumata in Hard to Be a God) gradually diminishes, while the promi-nence of the alien super-human increases. The principle of characterization shift s from




Like the later Strugatskiis, Bykov reverses the positions of the retrograde and the advanced civilization (Earth is the former, the alien planet is the latter). In spite of this reversal, The Evacuator orients itself to the 1964 story Hard to Be a God. Igor΄ is not an all-powerful alien but a very human “divinity,” an ami-able member of the technical intelligentsia rather like the junior scientists for whom the Strugatskiis used to compose their fables. The problem is not that a superpower, with its unfathomable aims, interferes in the people’s lives, but that, as in the Arkanar story, conscientious and merciful human beings (Igor΄ and Katia) can save a few people but not a whole civilization.

The climax of The Evacuator comes when Igor΄ returns to Alpha Capricorn with a small group of salvaged Earthlings. In a marked reversal from the con-clusion of Hard to Be a God, where Anton’s friends seek to help him recover in the idyllic surroundings of their childhood, Igor΄ returns only to discover that his own beautiful world had fallen prey to an apocalypse analogous to the one that occurred on Earth. The cities lie in ruins, and the planet’s popu-lace has fl ed elsewhere. Lamenting the destruction of his native utopia, Igor΄ blames noninterference for what happened: “Oh God, what gardens! What forests! What mountains! And if only just the mountains—how much was made by our own hands! What houses, what cinemas, what a railway station! Libraries, galleries! . . . God, how everyone loved each other, how everyone took care of everyone else, how helpless we turned out to be! And all this is noninterference!”42 As the despairing evacuator confesses, this is not the fi rst time his people had to run away:

There exists an irrational evil, which is its own reason, and at last it came out of the ground, broke loose because it had ripened. . . . This is evil beyond any explanations or motivations, an evil so contemptuous of everything human that it does not even need a tribute from you. . . . All our lives we run from absolute evil, and every time we start from scratch. If not for these escapes, who would have made up the profession of an evacuator? You have to agree that it could have been created only by a civilization that had evacuated many times.43

The idea of irrational evil again invokes the Strugatskiis’ “homeostatic uni-verse,” but, as in Garros-Evdokimov, the agency of malevolence is not speci-fi ed but located outside the realm of human comprehension. The progressor/evacuator has no home to return to because sooner or later evil will triumph everywhere.

The novel’s closing sections portray apocalypses throughout the galaxy. As the other Earthlings settle to colonize the ruined Alpha Capricorn, Igor΄ and Katia are ostracized and forced to fl ee to a neighboring planet. They visit several planets, but their attempts to fi nd a place of refuge prove futile since all the worlds they go to are being destroyed. In the last chapter the plot closes in upon itself, with the couple back in the suburbs of Moscow as the city is rav-aged by explosions. Space travel and cosmic apocalypse are rationalized as a

the defeat and disillusionment of the enlightener to the power of the Fyodorovian super-human.” See Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 116.

42. Bykov, Opravdanie. Evakuator, 442.43. Ibid., 449.



278 Slavic Review

science fi ction game Igor΄ and Katia have been playing as part of their court-ship. Yet despite this postmodern playfulness, the book concludes on a seri-ous note. The lovers part ways. Igor΄ decides that “it is senseless to transform the world, one can only get evacuated”; Katia marches back to Moscow “like a small sad soldier” because “something might still be saved.”44

The problematics of Hard to Be a God, the obligations of an enlightened and moral human being surrounded by a society sliding into bestiality, is an-swered in The Evacuator as follows: to save as much (or, rather, as little) as one can. The criteria for selecting those to be salvaged diff er: in the Strugatskiis’ work, the progressors aimed their eff orts at learned men since the forces of progress depended on them; in Bykov’s novel the most vulnerable and merci-ful (the most humane) humans are chosen: one “guarded and hid only those who, having been thrown out of all places, tied with bonds, exiled into hellish regions, were still capable of laughing at a simple joke, cheering up a neigh-bor, and making up a story for a scared child.”45 Hence Katia is chosen twice: by Igor΄ and by an alien who looks like a child with Down syndrome and who selects those who can take pity on him in his condition. Her return to Moscow can be read with guarded optimism if we see her as representative of the good traits valued by the aliens (if not humans), and yet she alone cannot make much diff erence there.

Victor Pelevin: The Bat on the Top

Pelevin’s position in post-Soviet Russia is analogous to that of the Strugatskiis during the twilight years of the USSR: he became a spokesman for the genera-tion that came of age in the 1990s, just as the Strugatskiis were spokesmen for the late Soviet intelligentsia.46 His sociometaphysical fantasies are rich and multifaceted works that overfl ow with subtext but tend to defy easy in-tertextual analogies.47 Unlike Juche, which directly posits itself as a polemic with the Strugatskiis, and The Evacuator, which off ers a playful yet easily rec-ognizable version of the progressor motif, Pelevin’s works engage the Stru-gatskiis’ paradigms in a more subtle manner. As Pelevin explores the theme of the individual caught in a social deadlock—a theme of interest to Garros- Evdokimov and Bykov as well—he plants less obvious “Strugatskyisms” and reworks them in ways that enrich his own vision.

Even in his youthful works, Pelevin engaged in what would become a run-ning argument with the Strugatskiis’ oeuvre. Omon Ra (1992) tramples on the

44. Ibid., 494, 498. The choice between escape and futile struggle and the closing of the plot in upon itself recall Escape Attempt, where Saul returns back in time, to die fi ght-ing the Nazis. Cf. also the Strugatskiis’ Grad obrechennyi (The Doomed City, 1988).

45. Bykov, Opravdanie. Evakuator, 367.46. On the theme of the intelligentsia in Pelevin, see Lyudmila Parts, “Degradation of

the Word or the Adventures of an Intelligent in Viktor Pelevin’s Generation ‘П,’” Canadian Slavonic Papers 46, no. 3–4 (September–December 2004): 435–49.

47. Pelevin’s parables are oft en compared to those of Bulgakov and Franz Kafk a. On Pelevin and the Anglo-American science fi ction tradition, especially Dick, see, e.g., Ken Kalfus, “Chicken Kiev,” New York Times, 7 December 1997, at www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/07/reviews/971207.07kalfust.html (last accessed 1 March 2013).




sanctity of space travel, a staple of Soviet mythology, as well as the thaw, and the Strugatskiis’ utopias. Zhizn΄ nasekomykh (The Life of Insects, 1993) con-tains subversive references to Ulitka na sklone (The Snail on the Slope, 1966) and The Beetle in the Anthill. The degradation of the individual in a commodi-fi ed society, the theme of the Strugatskiis’ Khishchnye veshchi veka (The Final Circle of Paradise, 1965) is Pelevin’s focus in Generation “П” (Babylon/Homo Zapiens, 1999); this focus emerges again and again across Pelevin’s oeuvre, with his markedly darker proposition that no “intels” (intellectuals) seek to disturb the consumer feeding frenzy.48

Generation “П” sets up a confl ict that recurs in Pelevin’s later novels.49 A young man, trapped in a grotesque social system, starts at the bottom of the ladder and, in the course of the narrative, manages to rise to the top of the power structure. Vavilen Tatarskii, a former student of the Moscow Lit-erary Institute, comes of age as the Soviet Union is disintegrating. With the collapse of the country, he becomes a copywriter who produces Russian ad-vertisements patterned on American advertising techniques. As the narrative unfolds, Tatarskii works his way up through the media system to become the ruler of Russian virtual reality and the symbolic husband of the golden god-dess Ishtar. Tatarskii is co-opted by the establishment, but he becomes com-plicit as he attains a commanding position in it. The hero views his work as a kind of prostitution, discerns the spurious nature of the new way of life, and yet applies all his energies to gaining a better position in the race to power.50

For Pelevin the Strugatskiis embody the naively idealistic values of the 1960s—the generation that, in his scathing formulation, “ejaculated [kon-chili] the fi rst Sputnik—that four-tailed spermatozoon of a future that never arrived—into the black emptiness of space.”51 The pun of konchili, as both “fi n-ished” and “ejaculated,” off ers a closure on the idealism-of-space promise. The launch of the Sputnik is presented as the Soviet body politic’s last vital deed, followed by a descent into impotence. From the perspective of generation П, hardened under the duress of a disintegrating country, Soviet shestidesiatniki are but infantile dreamers who “imagined a faithful disciple of Lenin grate-fully learning from Aksenov’s liberated page that Marxism originally stood for free love.”52 These were people who sought in vain to reconcile communist ideals and liberal values.

Using the Strugatskiis’ tropes and plot situations, Pelevin demonstrates how their projects are embodied, but in a cynical, perverted manner. Thus Tatarskii, a member of generation П, a child of the idealistic shestidesiatniki,

48. I give just a few examples since there is no room to do justice to the theme of Pelevin versus the Strugatskiis in general. Omon Ra won Boris Strugatskii’s Bronze Snail award in 1993. For Boris Strugatskii on Pelevin, see Boris Strugatskii, “Na randevu,” at www.rusf.ru/abs/int/bns_chat.htm (last accessed 1 March 2013).

49. The novel was nominated for the ABS Award in 2000 but lost to Sergei Siniakin’s Monakh na kraiu zemli (A Monk on the Edge of Earth, 1999).

50. On Generation “П” as a consumer dystopia, see Sofya Khagi, “From Homo So-vieticus to Homo Zapiens: Viktor Pelevin’s Consumer Dystopia,” Russian Review 67, no. 4 (October 2008): 559–79.

51. Viktor Pelevin, Generation “П” (Moscow, 1999), 12.52. Ibid.



280 Slavic Review

commences his reign as the ruler of Russian virtual reality by issuing a mean-ingless directive to swap Pepsi for Coca-Cola—a fi ttingly degraded version of a similar directive in The Snail on the Slope—Pepper’s fi rst order as Director “to the members of the Eradication Group to self-eradicate as soon as possible.”53 In a more encompassing sense, Generation “П” lays out a scenario that sar-donically subverts the aspirations of the Strugatskiis’ progressors. As Mark Lipovetskii points out in his comments on the novel, technologies “aimed at manipulations with mass consciousness are here the foundations of the tech-nologist’s nearly absolute power,” a power that is “based on deception and self-deception, on illusions, dreams, and, most importantly, a total, blinding and hypnotizing desire for money.”54

Empire V (again set in the present) to a certain extent reprises the con-fl ict of Generation “П.” 55 Roma Shtorkin, a young Muscovite, is initiated into the workings of an anonymous vampire dictatorship. The goddess Ishtar with whom Tatarskii united at the conclusion of Generation “П” reappears as the goddess of vampires who govern the world. The rulers of the world milk hu-mans for bablos, a concentrate of the energy Homo sapiens expend in their pursuit of material bliss. Vampires disseminate deception and prey upon the populace’s vital energies in the furtherance of their own biological interests. Human livestock in urban settings are raised at high-stock density, with the objective of producing the highest output at the lowest cost by exchanging simulacra of goods for genuine bioresources. Indeed, people are bred by vam-pires expressly for the purpose of producing money, for they are the only spe-cies incapable of distinguishing between real goods (food, drink, land) and fantasies (simulacra of fashion and prestige). Degraded humans are caught in

53. Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 4:484. One may consider Pepper in opposition to Kandid as someone who is assimilated by the powers that be. Yet his fi rst order can still be seen as a gesture of defi ance.

54. Mark Lipovetskii, “Traektorii ITR-diskursa: Razroznennye zametki,” Neprikosno-vennyi zapas 74, no. 6 (December 2010): 216. On the Strugatskiis and the Soviet scientifi c-technical intelligentsia, see also Il΄ia Kukulin, “Al ternativnoe sotsial΄noe proektirovanie v sovetskom obshchestve 1960kh–1970kh godov, ili Pochemu v sovremennoi Rossii ne prizhilis΄ levye politicheskie praktiki,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 88, no. 6 (December 2007): 169–201, and Kukulin, “Sentimental΄naia tekhnologiia: Pamiat΄ o 1960-kh v dis-kussiiakh o modernizatsii 2009–2010 godov,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 74, no. 6 (Decem-ber 2010): 277–301.

55. On Empire V as a conspiracy novel, see Keith Livers, “The Tower or the Laby-rinth: Conspiracy, Occult, and Empire-Nostalgia in the Work of Viktor Pelevin and Aleks-andr Prokhanov,” Russian Review 69, no. 3 (July 2010): 495–503. On the novel see also Natal΄ia Kochetkova, “Pisatel΄ Viktor Pelevin: ‘Vampir v Rossii bol she chem vampir,’” Izvestiia, 3 November 2006, at www.izvestia.ru/news/318686 (last accessed 1 March 2013); Pavel Basinskii, “Ampir na krovi,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, 22 November 2006, at www.rg.ru/2006/11/22/ampir.html (last accessed 1 March 2013); Aleksandr Balod, “Ironicheskii slovar΄ Empire V,” Novyi mir, no. 9 (September 2007): 139–57; Sander Brouwer, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat-Author? Viktor Pelevin’s Empire V,” in Sander Brouwer, ed., Dutch Contri-butions to the Fourteenth International Congress of Slavists: Ohrid, September 10–16, 2008 (Amsterdam, 2008), 243–56; Mark Lipovetskii and Aleksandr Etkind, “Vozvrashchenie tritona: Sovetskaia katastrofa i postsovetskii roman,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 94, no. 6 (December 2008): 181–84; and Alexander Etkind, “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction,” Slavic Review 68, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 646.




the process of propagating the money supply regardless of their need, will, or understanding.56

Granting that Pelevin subverts the Strugatskiis’ heritage at large, his spe-cifi c transformation of the enigmatic and brilliant Snail on the Slope in Em-pire V conveys a vivid sense of how he goes about reworking the classics of Soviet fantastika. In the second chapter of Empire V, having failed his fi rst exam to enroll at the physics department of Moscow State University, Roma pays a good-bye visit to the examination committee. He sees the drawing of a snail on the door of the offi ce and a poem by an ancient Japanese poet writ-ten underneath it: “Oh snail! Crawling toward the top of Fuji, you should not rush . . .”57 The poet is Kobayashi Issa, and his haiku about the snail climbing Mount Fuji (in a slightly diff erent translation) is used by the Strugatskiis as their second epigraph to Snail on the Slope:

Slowly, slowly crawl,O snail, up the slope of Fuji,To its highest summits!58

In The Snail on the Slope, the Administration and the Forest stand for the pres-ent and the future, respectively, and the snail on the slope comes to symbol-ize the Strugatskiis’ vision of the human vis-à-vis the historical process: one crawls in a laborious present from a distant past into a future that is unpre-dictable and menacing and that will likely not be reached anyway.

The snail’s, that is, the human action under pressure, in a hostile and alienating world, is the problem not only of The Snail on the Slope but also of works from Popytka k begstvu (Escape Attempt, 1962) and Hard to Be a God to The Ugly Swans, One Billion Years before the End of the World, Grad obrechen-nyi (The Doomed City, 1988), and so on. As the art of the Strugatskiis evolves, and as social reality changes, the world portrayed becomes not only threat-ening but also incomprehensible in a somewhat Kafk aesque manner, and the powers of evil acquire a metaphysical (in addition to social) dimension. The right kind of human strives to stay defi ant even when the odds are against him, and so someone like Kandid on the last page of The Snail on the Slope strides off to fi ght off deadlings, even though he knows he cannot win against the overpowering forces of the Forest.

The situation of a hero trapped in an evil and inexplicable reality aptly describes many of Pelevin’s own parables, but with an important change: his protagonists either escape their prison-like existence through spiritual en-lightenment (works like Chapaev i pustota [Buddha’s Little Finger, 1996]) or are assimilated by the establishment (Generation “П” and several subsequent narratives). In either case, fi ghting off deadlings no longer obtains. This is

56. On biopolitics in Empire V, see Sofya Khagi, “The Monstrous Aggregate of the Social: Toward Biopolitics in Victor Pelevin’s Work,” Slavic and East European Journal 55, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 452–54.

57. Viktor Pelevin, Empire V / Ampir V; povest΄ o nastoiashchem sverkhcheloveke (Moscow, 2006), 22.

58. Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 4:288. Their fi rst epigraph is taken from Boris Pasternak’s “Za povorotom” (Around the Bend, 1946), about a future that cannot be “drawn into arguments or petted away.” Ibid., 4:288.



282 Slavic Review

exactly what happens in Empire V: failure to understand the system (the prob-lem of Pepper and Kandid in The Snail on the Slope) is replaced in Roma’s case by the failure to resist it. He rises to the heights of power and is fully co-opted by the status quo.

Pelevin ironically recasts “the snail on the slope” motif (the Strugatskiis’ allegory of the human in the historical process) as the story of a personal social ascent. Pelevin’s subversive move is initiated with Roma taking out a pen and fi nishing the poem he reads in the examination committee area: “There, at the top of Fuji, are already plenty of snails.”59 What he means is that one should not bother climbing up the social ladder since the positions of power have already been taken, and, besides, these heights hold no exalting promises—the same petty “snails” that crawl at the bottom occupy the top. This way Pelevin parodically lowers the Strugatskiis’ sphinxlike, troubling, and inhuman future. The proverbial Mount Fuji is as trivial as its slopes, and, moreover, humans have always been living in an inhuman reality (governed by vampires).

Roma’s initial stance is nonconformist. As a child, he dreamt of “becom-ing a space hero, discovering a new planet or writing one of those great novels that make the human heart tremble” (that is, “antiquated” Soviet values).60 As he is turned into a vampire, he has a feeling that he has lost his soul and continues believing that people are better than vampires because they help each other. To attain his exalted status as “a real superman” (nastoiashchii sverkhchelovek), he must study various skills necessary for a vampire to rule over humans. Roma is childishly inquisitive, pestering his teachers about the workings of the fi ft h empire, rather like Pepper with his attempts to under-stand the absurd functioning of the Administration. He is concerned with abstract questions about good and evil, and for a while is not content to do what his mentors push him toward—to simply suck bablos and be grateful that chance has placed him at the top of the food chain. Slowly, however, he starts “feeling ashamed that he does not conform to this high ideal [of the superman] and asks questions at every step like a fi rst grader.”61

In the course of the novel, Roma moves from a lowly position in the social hierarchy (a loader at a supermarket) to becoming the most powerful vampire in Russia, a divinity and close friend of Ishtar. At the conclusion of Empire V he enjoys his superhuman fl ight over a sleeping Moscow, having rejected his infantile questioning of reality and settled on appreciating his place in the order of things:

I look at our stately rigs, sucking black liquid from the vessels of the planet and understand that I have found my place in the ranks. . . . And with each movement of my wings I am closer and closer to my strange girlfriend and, it must be owned, to bablos as well. Which is now all ours. All ours. All ours. All ours. All ours. . . . The mountain climber Rama the Second reports on the subjugation of Fuji. Nevertheless, there is one serious nuance. . . . A while ago the stars in the sky seemed to me to be the other worlds to which the spaceships from the Sunny city would fl y. Now I know that their sharp points

59. Pelevin, Empire V, 22.60. Ibid., 38.61. Ibid., 213.




are holes in the armor that closes us off from the ocean of cruel light. On the top of Fuji you sense the force with which this light presses down on our world. And thoughts about ancient people for some reason enter one’s head. “What you do, do faster . . .”62

Roma leaves aside “accursed questions” and conforms to the fi ft h empire. This “bat on the top” accepts something the “snail on the slope” would not reconcile itself to: the universe is unmitigatedly evil, and one is either crushed by evil or takes advantage of it and becomes “the god of money with oak wings.”63 The stars and ships again evoke space exploration, a staple of Soviet utopia. For Roma, however, the space dream transforms itself into an ominous presentiment of an external force waiting to destroy one. His conclusion (the opposite of the Strugatskiis’ call for resistance and solidarity in the face of evil) is to climb as high as he can while there is time. The book ends on this seemingly earnest note. The problem, of course, is that Pelevin, trickster that he always is, here quotes the words Christ addressed to Judas.

Conclusion: A Future with Pimples

Based on the examples above, can one generalize about the way contempo-rary writers conduct their dialogues with the Strugatskiis’ oeuvre? Garros-Evdokimov, Bykov, and Pelevin address the Strugatskiis in divergent ways, and yet some common patterns do emerge.

For one thing, insofar as their narratives are all set in the present and blend fantastic elements with post-Soviet realities depicted with journalis-tic precision, these contemporary authors frame their works as a corrective confrontation between reality and the Strugatskiis’ fi ctions. The classics of Soviet nauchnaia fantastika are a familiar reference point they employ to sug-gest that life has proved more discouraging than even the Strugatskiis’ more alarming fantasies. The Strugatskii brothers presented a more persuasive vi-sion than the bright communist future promised by offi cial literature of that time; that their version of the future has to be dismantled, and that the future is dismantling it, conveys the bleakness of the new vision.

Second, certain of the Strugatskiis’ works are especially pertinent for con-temporary writers. Besides One Billion Years before the End of the World, the most important are The Ugly Swans (Garros-Evdokimov), Hard to Be a God (Bykov), and The Snail on the Slope (Pelevin). These represent the “high Stru-gatskyism” of the 1960s and 1970s, but not the late Strugatskiis of the per-estroika era. Hard to Be a God still places hope in historical progress; The Ugly Swans and The Snail on the Slope, while more pessimistic with respect to history, at least “convey the sense that man cannot win but can preserve his dignity [ne poteriat΄ litsa].”64

62. Ibid., 406–8.63. Ibid., 408. Compare “The top of Fuji, time winter,” the last line of Pelevin’s novel,

and the Strugatskiis’ title, Noon: 22nd Century.64. See Hard to Be a God: “They were nevertheless humans, carriers of the spark of

reason. And constantly, sometimes here, sometimes there, the little fi res of an incred-ibly distant but inevitable future would fl are up in their midst.” See Strugatskie, Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh, 3:358. For Bykov “today the Strugatskiis’ intonation is



284 Slavic Review

No matter whether the reader’s expectations are based on a relatively hopeful work or a relatively bleak one, those expectations are sure to be upset as later authors provide an ever more discouraging diagnosis of the present. Faith in the power of reason and education is denied (Garros-Evdokimov), the progressor has nowhere to return to (Bykov), and the hero gains bablos but loses everything else (Pelevin). The Strugatskiis’ oeuvre, for all its skepticism, still holds something of a nostalgic humanistic value for these authors and is employed to off set their own darker stories.

Third, just what makes the post-Soviet real-life corrective worse than the Strugatskiis’ imaginary apocalypses? The Strugatskiis’ vision of Homo novus and future society evolves from the brighter pictures of the early 1960s, with an enlightened humanity united under communism exploring outer space, to more problematic stories of the later 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. As Yvonne Howell points out, “The Slimies in The Ugly Swans represent the same type of super civilization as the Wanderers (in the future history cycle) or the ludens (in The Waves Still the Wind). They dismiss their lesser developed human broth-ers as one dismisses small children from a meaningful discussion, but they do not concern themselves with destruction or vengeance. They simply select the most promising human specimens to inhabit their utopian space.”65 The Strugatskiis’ premonition of a cryptic, perhaps posthuman, but radically dif-ferent future has been ousted in recent fi ction by the vision of an existence at once thoroughly evil and banal: New Men as virtuosos of adaptability (Garros- Evdokimov); Russia disintegrating into a heap of garbage because its histori-cal potential has been exhausted (Bykov); a Mount Fuji that is not worth climb-ing unless one is really keen on bablos (Pelevin). This degraded perception of history is unredeemed by seeds of rebellion, a state of fl ux (and possibility), or any millenarian promise—a situation that can be appositely contrasted to the early twentieth-century experience of modernity as a time of wreckage and crisis that even so held some potential for heroic opposition and change.66

In this respect, the “homeostatic universe,” which reimagines the steady-state theory (matter is continuously created to allow the density of the uni-verse to remain constant as it expands) in terms of social stasis, provides a convenient way to read stagnation, not just in post-Soviet Russia, but in global, postmodern, commodifi ed reality. Whether divorced from a specifi c agency of malice (Garros-Evdokimov, Bykov), or using agency relegated to a dark supernatural source (Pelevin) that faces no combative intelligentsia, the “homeostatic universe” is a handy metaphor for political disempowerment and disillusion with the social structures of a menacing and incomprehen-sible world.67

important—an intonation that is courageous and joyful. The sense that man cannot win but can preserve his dignity.” See Bykov, “Strugatskie i drugie,” 47.

65. Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 111.66. On the fi n-de-siècle feeling of catastrophe that still bodied forth “a heroic stance

at the ‘edge of an abyss’” and could be viewed through a Benjaminian “prism of revolu-tionary and redemptive dialectics,” see Mark D. Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle (New Haven, 2011), 9, 271.

67. In the Strugatskiis, by contrast, “the more ingenious and the more senseless the obstacles put up by the unpredictable Homeostatic Universe, the more meaning is ac-




Writers like Garros-Evdokimov, Bykov, and Pelevin, then, take issue with the Strugatskiis’ formerly infl uential vision of social improvement through the progressorism of the intelligentsia, the education of a free-minded elite, and personal development toward ultimate rationality coupled with virtue and power—that is, the Enlightenment-based principles of modernity reactivated by the Soviet scientifi c-technical nauchno-technicheskaia) intelligentsia of the 1960s and embodied by the classics of Soviet science fi ction.68 In this sense, it is hardly accidental that, as Pelevin demonstrates, no correlation obtains be-tween understanding and moral behavior: the vampire dictatorship is based on sophisticated insights into the mechanisms of the social, and knowledge, if any is to be gained, only serves to perpetuate the status quo. Not only that, but in Pelevin’s parody of the Bildungsroman (mediated by socialist realism and inverted by the Strugatskiis), the “real superman” is a nonhuman—a fact that refl ects “the crisis of the ideology of the Enlightenment, brought on by the catastrophe of humanism in the twentieth century and ‘the betrayal of intellectuals,’ disappointment in the theory of progress, scientifi c objectivity and scientifi c rationalism.”69

The Strugatskiis are thus subverted, but—and this is worth emphasizing—these post-Soviet authors direct their sharpest mockery and frustration, not at the Strugatskiis (however quaint their belief in rationalism or progress), but at themselves as the generation that betrayed the humanistic ideals shaped in no small measure by the Strugatskiis’ works. In other words, as they engage the Strugatskiis to highlight their own dark assessment of modernization, so-cial development, and morals, they advance not a postmodern critique of En-lightenment/modernity but an enlightened critique of postmodernity.70 They portray an age of entropy and reversal when “history is cooling,” the masses

corded to heroic attempts to work [by the scientists].” See Irina Kaspe, “The Meaning of (Private) Life, or Why Do We Read the Strugatskys?” Russian Studies in Literature 47, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 48.

68. I am grateful to my second anonymous reviewer for suggesting this extension of the argument.

69. Dina Khapaeva, “Vampir—geroi nashego vremeni,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 109, no. 3 (June 2011): 50, 51. A “consistent disclosure of contemporary culture’s gothic themes leads inescapably to the negation of the human and civilization as the highest value.” See Khapaeva, Koshmar: Literatura i zhizn΄ (Moscow, 2010), 293. On the degrada-tion of the intellectuals in a society under the sway of the technological imperative, see Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 48: “The transmission of knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfi lling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions.” On the intelligentsia’s false consciousness in a society domi-nated by instrumental rationality, see Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Min-neapolis, 1988).

70. The writers under consideration display the humanist’s fears more than the postmodernist’s skepticism. As I see it, remaining within the humanistic paradigm is a deliberate ethical and ideological choice, rather than something done out of naiveté. These writers are familiar with the poststructuralist critique of the Enlightenment initi-ated by Friedrich Nietzsche and exemplifi ed by Michel Foucault (asserting the historic-ity of human experience, questioning the universality of knowledge and moral action, exposing the linkage between metaphysics and violence and between education and power).



286 Slavic Review

“have no meaning, consciousness, or desire,” and “the perception and imagi-nation of the future are beyond us.”71

The Strugatskiis’ discourse as rethought by their successors thus acquires new currency, not only as part of the ongoing debate about Russian modern-ization, but, perhaps more importantly beyond the Russian context, as part of the debates around the quandaries of global postmodernity. As Baudrillard, an astute interrogator of the contemporary condition, formulates it: “Nothing ever really takes place, since everything is already calculated, audited, and realized in advance.” He observes, “Whether the universe is expanding to infi nity or retracting toward an infi nitely dense, infi nitely small nucleus de-pends on its critical mass” that “defeats the initial energy and takes us down an inexorable path of contraction and inertia.”72 The former pronouncement is amusingly Dostoevskian (though without acknowledging it), and the latter example of theory waxing poetic can be engagingly contrasted to Pelevin’s poetry at its most cogent: “We are hanging in an expanding emptiness that, some say, has started shrinking.”73 With works like Pelevin’s (in Jameson’s view) cutting far deeper into the sources of commodifi cation and spectacle society than Dick’s or Ursula Le Guin’s, the Strugatskiis’ children provide fresh—if anything but guileless—perspectives on the world we live in.74 It is therefore fi tting to conclude with Bykov’s eulogy for Russian fantastika. “It outlined our very own contemporaneity, on a world scale. . . . The diff erence between the rather limited authorial task and its dazzling result is especially noticeable.”

71. Baudrillard, Illusion of the End, 4–5. For a select list of western criticism of the postmodern age, see Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man; Theodor Adorno, Prisms (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1981); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capi-talism (Durham, 1991); Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989); Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York, 1983), and Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London, 1998).

72. Jean Baudrillard, The Jean Baudrillard Reader, ed. Steve Redhead (New York, 2008), 156–57, and Baudrillard, Illusion of the End, 5.

73. Pelevin, Empire V, 323. “Everything will be so accurately calculated and desig-nated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world.” See Fyodor Dos-toevsky, Notes from Underground and The Gambler (Oxford, 1991), 26. In Mark Amusin’s opinion, “today Christianity (as Dostoevsky understood it) and socialism in its humanist variant both confront powerful entropic forces and tendencies.” See Amusin, “A Selec-tive Similarity: Dostoevsky in the Worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers,” Russian Studies in Literature 47, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 83.

74. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 82.



Documents

One Billion Years After the End of the World Historical Deadlock, Contemporary Dystopia