The non-fiction exhibition presents a book of fantastic stories “A World Without the Strugatskys”

On Saturday, at the non-fiction exhibition in Gostiny Dvor, a book of fantastic stories “A World Without the Strugatskys” was presented. Alexei Salnikov, Eduard Verkin, Sergei Kuznetsov, Vladimir Berezin and other authors of the collection compiled by Vasily Vladimirsky tried to depict a world in which Arkady and Boris Strugatsky did not become writers and their mission as the main Soviet science fiction writers had to be fulfilled by others.

Those who undertake to list significant Soviet writers of the 1960–1990s will definitely mention Fazil Iskander, Vasily Shukshin, Andrei Bitov, Vasily Aksenov. Some will remember Mikhail Ancharov, others – Varlam Shalamov. There will be fans of Viktor Konetsky and Vladimir Orlov. And among all these people, most likely, there will be no one who has not read Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. But how many will name them next to Shukshin and Shalamov? This is not a matter of neglect – try neglecting the writers who were filmed by Herman and Tarkovsky. The point is in the strange position of science fiction as a genre – on the one hand, food for intellectuals, on the other, mass literature. Whether bending over or jumping, it is difficult to see in the normal position of the body.

The compiler of the collection “The World Without the Strugatskys” Vasily Vladimirsky, one of the founders of the “New Horizons” prize, decided to fill this gap. The terms of reference received by the authors of the collection sounded something like this: There were no Strugatskys, but modern Russian science fiction arose. Which Soviet non-fiction writer could act as its founders? Come up with and write a fantastic text for this author.

Such a task, with all its certainty, left the authors with a choice between honest stylization and an attempt to compose “Strugatsk” fiction, relegating both themselves and the conventional Shukshin and Iskander to the background. Most of them did not take the second path. Partly, probably because the task of “making it like the Strugatskys” was already set in the “Time of Students” project, which started about 30 years ago – five anthologies were published, the last collection of the series was published in 2015, by the way, two of the authors took part in it “A world without the Strugatskys”, Nika Batchen and Elena Kleshchenko. And of course, because confronting a writer who had never touched these topics closely with “Strugatsk” themes was new, funny and created a challenge that was interesting to answer.

What happened in the end? Of the dozen stories in the collection, ten are more or less successful stylizations, where the figures of “bollitra” (as science fiction writers call “normal” literature among themselves) are primary, and fantasy is secondary. Let’s say the same Nicky Bathen the result was a completely recognizable Shalamov, but the fact that uranium mines are not on Earth, but on Uranus itself – it’s hard to say whether this is science fiction or just a convention. Viktor Konetsky in interpretation Ina Goldin, telling space stories instead of sea stories, he also remained true to himself, and no Centauri with Sirians on board became an obstacle to him.

And here Nikolai Karaev, who undertook to “scold” Vasily Aksenov was hindered by the bright and assertive style of the imitated author, which first inspired the imitator to write a seven-page alternative biography, and then lured him into the lexical jungle. As for the pseudo-biography of Aksenov the science fiction writer, other authors of the collection also did something in this spirit for their charges, it’s just that Karaev’s turn of events turned out to be particularly verbose and serious, if not total. “It turns out that while the adults were reading the Zelazny family chronicles… while the hippies were savoring the freedom of Tolkien’s Lords of the Road… – at the same time, teenagers, armed with a flashlight, eagerly leafed through under the blanket nondescript volumes with soft, tasteless covers: Hemingway’s space operas, Nabokov’s alternatives , including the scandalous “Lolita, Warrior Princess” … the multi-volume and terrible “Sorcerer of the Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn … and in the USSR – stories about the magical Moscow of Trifonov, the historical fantasies of Pikul, Brodsky’s “New Jules Verne” … and, of course, on both sides of the curtain, books by Vasily Aksenov.”

After such a promising preface, you expect to read something in the spirit of early Aksenov, simple and cheerful. But no, the space opera did not keep itself waiting, but the style literally went into a tailspin: “…the expected moment came when Her Majesty’s space brig “Petrovsky”, a sturdy rusty-red pillar, plunged into the bosom of the Martian atmosphere, greeted by playful yons and a cooling solar breeze . From such caresses, the local air shone at first like a copper coin, then like Newton’s pear, and in the end even like a stupefied adamant…” No, it’s not bad in its own way, but it’s not clear why teenagers would be frightened to read such a dense text under a blanket with flashlights.

Perhaps I felt most free on the stylization path Asya Mikheeva. Here, of course, we must say thanks to Mikhail Ancharov, who inspired her, with his attraction to clarity, restraint, short phrases (in general, everything that Karaev’s story lacked), but it is unlikely that his only merit is that “Montanay-69” turned out to be one of the best things in the collection – funny and kind. And besides, when describing Crimea with its intertwining of tribes, to which were also added intelligent bees the size of two people each, Asya Mikheeva did an excellent job without allusions to current problems. The main thing is that the characters have reached an agreement, and they will somehow be able to sort things out with governments, even alien ones.

As for attempts to write just good old science fiction under the guise of an iconic Soviet author, there were two of them in the entire collection. But very different. Eduard Verkin, the only one of the twelve who chose a science fiction writer as his co-author: he rewrote “The Day of Wrath” by Sever Gansovsky, while simultaneously continuing his cycle “Jung’s Flow” – the story of the long and painful path of the inhabitants of the Earth to the technology of ultra-long-distance flights. It turned out no less scary than Gansovsky’s, and quite in line with the “Strugatsky” problematic: the brothers, as you know, were extremely concerned about the question of the price that humanity and individuals would have to pay for scientific progress.

Sergey Kuznetsov acted even more original, forcing him to write fiction not from a prose writer, but from a playwright and a bard. It turned out quite voluminous (“Right to rest” – the largest piece in the collection) a declaration of love to Alexander Galich. But this recognition lacked the same thing that an inexperienced director usually lacks when taking on the film adaptation of a favorite book – the audacity to stand not even next to, but a little higher and turn the source material into his own work. As we remember from the film adaptations of the Strugatskys themselves, only those attempts in which this condition is met remain in history. But Sergei Kuznetsov preferred to retell it.

And not scripts and plays, but the most famous thing – songs. The basis of the plot was “The Queen of the Mainland,” and inside the text, in the form of either dreams, visions, or inserted short stories, “Night Watch,” and “The Ballad of Surplus Value,” and “How to Drink for Three,” and “More about damn” – only a lack of time and space in the collection can explain the fact that the song about the White Pillars, which bears the same name as the title of Kuznetsov’s composition, was left behind the scenes.

The result, unfortunately, turned out to be predictable: retelling jokes in the language of prose, whether they are in a line or in a column, is already on the verge of failure, while retelling long and sad ballads requires at least no less tact. Kuznetsov’s six short lines from “The Queen of the Continent” about the fact that bosses are not smart turn into fourteen full-fledged, full of epithets and other beauties of style.

In general, the collection helps to understand two things more clearly: in the last century we had very good literature and it is sometimes nice to re-read something from it. Well, we already guessed that a world without the Strugatskys is not even science fiction, but simply absurd.

Mikhail Prorokov