Long ago, I was commissioned and paid to review three books by the Strugatsky brothers. Roadside Picnic I looked at in April, Snail in May, but I only got around to The City in August. Traditionally, I am not going to recount the plot; you can check the wiki, or better yet, read the book itself.
It is clear that after reading, many want to immediately start figuring out the physics of the strange place described. Here, space is rolled into a tube, there are folds here, some potent grass is packed here, and it’s scorching over there. But if you view the book at such a level, it’s no longer the Strugatskys, but Pelevin.
The book was written for the drawer, so it cannot complain that its content is the product of compromises with Soviet censorship—there was no attempt to publish it as long as censorship existed. Boris Strugatsky asserted that this was their favorite book, and its main character, accordingly, their favorite character. However, for some reason, I am not particularly interested in the characters of the Strugatskys; it is far more intriguing to see what is going on regarding society.
And the society there is quite modern; you wouldn’t say it was described in 1972. Globalism, with a single language and the collision of atomized representatives of various cultures. The triumph of equality and inclusivity (but for all the inclusivity, women in the City, as everywhere with the Strugatskys, are completely flat characters serving a purely decorative purpose—except, perhaps, for the entirely episodic Madame Matilda Gusakova—she is not flat, but also rather decorative). Constant sudden calamities—global warming, the sun switching off, COVID, water turning into bile, BLM, an invasion of baboons. The reaction of the people and the reaction of the authorities to these calamities.
And, you know, for some reason I get the feeling that the Strugatskys are convinced: humanity cannot be handled any other way. It must absolutely be put into a state of artificial stress and deficiency; otherwise, some people turn into Doctors Opirov, and others begin to organize some mysterious “sated riots.” The Strugatskys like to frighten people with sated riots. The idea is that when a person is gastrically satisfied, they aren’t very concerned about further self-development, and they unite with others like them for the sake of self-destruction (Fight Club was probably also inspired by the Strugatskys).
Unlike the Strugatskys, I have been fortunate enough to live in a relatively sated time, and I have seen sated riots in practice, not just in theory. Well-dressed, polite people go out to get hit on the head with batons, and then sigh that it seems they won’t be able to obtain political rights here, and emigrate to peaceful Montenegro, which is practically the model for the city from The Predatory Things of the Century (only this morning returned from a drozhka, that was a strong touch). In short, sated riots are quite inspiring for a very short time, and then, of course, there are abysses of frustration. The Strugatskys clearly imagined something far more disgusting.
It is presumed that through all these endless experiments on humans, some “new man” is being forged, who is the only one capable of building a new world. However, through the example of the novella’s protagonist, we see that the only thing the experiment succeeds in is knocking the ground from under a person’s feet, destroying any ideological supports, and ultimately driving them to suicide, instead of building anything at all. Although, of course, there is hope that after returning to Leningrad in 1951, Voronin will start writing interesting science fiction and become an idol for the entire Soviet intelligentsia.
