Definitely Maybe: A Manuscript Discovered Under Strange Circumstances

A NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are Russia’s best-known science fiction writers. Intellectually invigorating, full of adventure, and set in fantasy worlds, their work was powerful social criticism that could be expressed only indirectly under Soviet censorship. Even so, they had to deal with censors for every publication. The brothers lived in different cities, Arkady in Moscow, Boris in Leningrad, and in those pre-Internet days, they met in person to work on their books, see publishers, and try to persuade editors to leave in concepts, phrases, even individual “suspect” words.

The collapse of the USSR brought an end to state censorship, and many new editions of the Strugatskys’ previously expurgated works appeared. The canonic texts, edited and annotated by Boris Strugatsky, were published in 2000–2001. This edition of Definitely Maybe is based on those publications, and it is the first time the complete text has been available in English.

In this afterword, Strugatsky tells the backstory to Definitely Maybe (which was called A Billion Years Before the End of the World in Russian), and discusses the writing process from proposal to text, the delay caused by a political-literary case in which Boris was a witness, and the book’s eventual publication. Boris refers to Arkady as AN and himself as BN; the “N” stands for Natanovich, their patronymic.

The case that delayed the writing of the book was that of Mikhail Kheifets, who was arrested for “spreading anti-Soviet propaganda” in 1974. Kheifets was charged with writing the introduction to a collection of poems by Joseph Brodsky and editing a collection of essays by Andrei Amalrik, both of which were samizdat editions. Samizdat, which literally means “self-published,” was the method by which banned works were circulated in the Soviet Union: people typed manuscripts with as many carbon copies as possible and passed them around, and the recipients retyped more copies. Boris was called as a witness, and denied ever having seen the books. Kheifets was given four years in the labor camps.

After the death of his brother in 1991, Boris wrote under the pen name S. Vititsky, and Search for Predestination, or the Twenty-Seventh Theorem of Ethics (1995) deals with the KGB and the Kheifets case. Boris died in 2012.