Hard to Be a God

Afterword by Boris Strugatsky

Can this novel be considered a work about a “bright future”? To some extent, definitely. But only to a very small extent.

As a matter of fact, while my brother and I worked on it, it underwent substantial changes. It began in the planning stages as a fun adventure story in the spirit of The Three Musketeers, as indicated in this excerpt from one of my brother’s letters:

The actual idea of “our spy on an alien planet” had emerged back when we were writing Escape Attempt. That book briefly mentions a certain Benny Durov, who was exactly such a spy on the planet Tagora. The idea flashed across our minds; we didn’t have the time for it, but it didn’t vanish without a trace. Now it was its turn, although we still didn’t fully understand all the opportunities and perspectives that would arise here.

The title Seventh Heaven had been taken away from an unwritten novel about wizards that eventually became Monday Starts on Saturday. Why it was given to a similarly unwritten novel about “our spy” becomes clear from Arkady’s letter. I can’t resist reproducing a long excerpt from it here, so that the reader can see through concrete example how much the authors’ initial plans and outlines can differ from an idea’s final realization.

That’s almost it, isn’t it? But at the same time it’s not quite it—and in a certain sense it’s definitely not it. We used to call these kinds of plans “sturdy substantial skeletons.” The existence of such a skeleton was a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for beginning real work. At least in those times. Later, another extremely important condition appeared: we absolutely had to know what would “soothe our souls”—what would be the ending of the planned work, the final landmark in the direction of which we were supposed to be dragging the plotline. But at the beginning of the 1960s, we still didn’t understand how important that was, and therefore we would often take a risk and be forced to change the entire plot along the way. Which is exactly what happened with Seventh Heaven.

The “sturdy substantial skeleton” of the novel Arkady suggested was without a doubt good and promised us some wonderful work. But apparently, even at an early stage of the discussions, some differences in approach between the coauthors appeared; we hadn’t even sat down at the table to begin the work when there was already a debate, the details of which I certainly do not remember, but its general course can be traced through other excerpts from Arkady’s letters. (My own letters through the year 1963 were lost—alas!—irretrievably.)

The last phrase is a slightly modified quotation from our beloved Dumas trilogy, and we’re apparently talking about the vein in which to write the new novel.

I had my own views on that subject. What they were exactly can be guessed from my brother’s comments in this next excerpt:

This entire exchange was happening against a very interesting political backdrop. In the middle of December 1962 (I don’t remember the exact date), Nikita Khrushchev saw an exhibition of contemporary art at the Moscow Manege. Goaded (according to rumors) by Leonid Ilichev, then the head of the ideological commission of the Central Committee, the furious chief—a renowned expert in the areas of painting and all fine arts, you understand—ran through the exhibition halls (again according to rumors), shouting, “Assholes! Who do you work for? Whose bread do you eat? Motherfuckers! Who did you daub this for, daubers?” He stamped his feet, blood rushed to his face, and he showered spittle for two yards around him. (This was precisely the origin of the famous anecdote in which Nikita the Corn Man, staring at a certain ugly image in a frame, yells in a voice not his own, “And what’s this butt with ears?” And is answered with fear and trembling: “That’s a mirror, Nikita Sergeyevich.”)

All mass media without exception immediately descended on abstraction and formalism in art, as if for the last ten years they had been preparing just for this, collecting materials and only waiting for permission to speak about this burning topic.

And that was only the beginning. “On December 17, at the Reception House on Lenin Hills, there was a meeting of the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet government with the writers and artists.” Brezhnev, Voronov, Kirilenko, Kozlov, Kosygin, Mikoyan, Polyansky, Suslov, Khrushchev, and various other prominent plainclothes literary and art critics gathered in one place in order to “make comments and suggestions on the development of literature and art.”

Observations were made. The press was no longer roaring, it was literally howling: THERE CAN BE No COMPROMISE; THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ARTIST; THE LIGHT OF CLARITY; THE WORRY THAT GIVES US WINGS; ART AND PSEUDO-ART; TOGETHER WITH THE PEOPLE; OUR STRENGTH AND WEAPON; THIS IS OUR PARTY, THIS IS OUR ART!; DOING IT LENIN’S WAY; ALIEN VOICES… It was as if an ancient abscess had burst. Bad blood and pus overflowed from the newspaper pages. All those who during the years of the “thaw” had gone quiet (it seemed to us), who had flattened their ears and only looked around like hunted animals, as if waiting for the inconceivable, impossible, improbable retribution for the past; all these monstrous offspring of Stalinism and Beria-ism, who were up to the elbows in the blood of innocent victims, all these covert and overt informers, ideological operators and moronic do-gooders—they all instantly sprang out of their hiding places; they all turned out to be right on the spot, energetic, agile, able hyenas of the pen, alligators of the typewriter. Go to it!

But that wasn’t all. On March 7, 1963, the “exchange of opinions on literature and art” was continued. The experts were joined by a number of other connoisseurs of the fine arts—Podgorny, Grishin, and Mazurov. The exchange of opinions lasted two days. The newspaper howls intensified, even though you’d think that was impossible. THE GREATNESS OF TRUE ART; DOING IT LENIN’S WAY! (seen before, but now with an exclamation mark); THE PHILOSOPHY OF WESTERN ART: EMPTINESS, DECAY, DEATH; HIGH IDEALS AND ARTISTIC SKILL: THE GREAT POWER OF SOVIET LITERATURE AND ART; THERE’S NO “THIRD” IDEOLOGY!; CREATING IN THE NAME OF COMMUNISM; GLORIFYING, PRAISING, CULTIVATING HEROISM; HOLD STEADY! (the number of exclamation marks is definitely increasing); PURSUITS IN POETRY, TRUE AND FALSE; LOOKING AHEAD!

That was Yuliy Kim instantly responding—as always, poisonously and with perfect precision:

All the record players in all the intellectuals’ kitchens were ringing with his verses, performed in a deliberately cloying and even tender voice.

“Kochets” doubtlessly refers here to the colleagues and associates of V. Kochetov, the then-chief editor of the pro-Stalin journal October, an inveterate Stalinist, anti-Semite, and reactionary who was even occasionally reprimanded by the authorities in order to maintain decorum “in the eyes of the international labor movement.”

They started with the modern artists: Falk, Sidur, Ernst Neizvestny, and then, before anyone knew it, they went after Ilya Ehrenburg, Viktor Nekrasov, Andrei Voznesensky, Alexander Yashin, and the movie I Am Twenty. And of course, anyone who felt like it walked all over Aksenov, Yevtushenko, Sosnora, Ahmadulina, and even—but politely, bowing the whole time!—Solzhenitsyn. (Solzhenitsyn still remained in favor with the Man. But the rest of the entourage, how they all hated and feared him! In favor with the king, out of favor with his huntsmen.)

In good time, the purulent wave reached even our outskirts, our quiet science fiction shop. On March 26, 1963, there was an expanded meeting of the science fiction and adventure section of the Moscow Writers’ Organization. The following people were present: Georgiy Tushkan (the chairman of the section, the author of several adventure stories and the science fiction novel Black Whirlwind), A. P. Kazantsev, Georgy Gurevich, Anatoly Dneprov, Roman Kim (the author of the stories “The Notebook Found in Suncheon,”

“The Girl from Hiroshima,” and “Burn After Reading”), Sergei Zemaitis (the head of the science fiction editorship at the Young Guard publishing house), Yevgeny Pavlovich Brandis, and many others. Here’s a characteristic passage from Arkady’s detailed report about it:

So now it seemed like absolutely everyone got what was coming to them.

However, no one was arrested. No one was even kicked out of the Writers’ Union. Moreover, in the midst of the purulent stream we were even allowed to put together two or three articles containing careful objections and an outline of our (and not the party’s) point of view. These objections were immediately trampled and crushed, but the fact of their appearance already meant that the authorities were not aiming to kill.

And already, the reigning Soviet playwright Anatoly Sofronov (a real piece of work, I’m sorry to say), was arrogantly soothing the frightened: “Some are now expressing concerns: that there might be excesses, that someone might be ‘suppressed,’ etc. Don’t worry, they won’t ‘suppress’ us, no need to fear. Our Soviet regime is kind, our party is kind and humane. We must do honest, good work, then everything will be all right.”

But we weren’t as much afraid as disgusted. Everything felt vile and repulsive, like rotten meat. No one really knew what had caused this rapid return to the abscess. It was possible that the authorities were upset about the very recent painful flick on the nose they had received during the Cuban Missile Crisis and were taking out their anger on their own people. It was possible that the agricultural situation had deteriorated even further, and shortages of bread were already being predicted for the near future (they did occur in 1963). It was possible that it was simply the time to show the swollen-headed “intelligoosia” who’s the master of this house and who he stands with—not your Ehrenburgs, not your Ernst Neizvestnys, not your suspicious Nekrasovs—but with the good old guard, tried and true, long since bought, cowed, and reliable.

One could pick any of these versions or all of them at once. But one thing became, as they say, painfully clear. We shouldn’t have illusions. We shouldn’t have hopes for a brighter future. We were being governed by goons and enemies of culture. They will never be with us. They will always be against us. They will never let us say what we believe is right, because what they believe is right is something completely different. And if for us communism is a world of freedom and creativity, for them communism is a society where the people immediately and with pleasure perform all the prescriptions of the party and government.

The realization of these simple—although then far from obvious for us—truths was painful, like the realization of any truth, but beneficial at the same time. New ideas appeared and strongly demanded their immediate implementation. The “fun story in the spirit of The Three Musketeers” that we had thought up began to appear in an entirely different light, and I didn’t need long speeches to convince Arkady that they needed to make a substantial ideological adjustment in The Observer. The time of “light things,” the time of “swords and cardinals” seemed to have passed. Or maybe it simply hadn’t come yet. The adventure story had to, was obliged to, become a story about the fate of the intelligentsia, submerged in the twilight of the Middle Ages.

From Arkady’s journal:

We never did try Novy Mir, but we did try the thick journal Moskva. To no avail. The manuscript was returned with a condescendingly negative review—apparently Moskva didn’t print science fiction.

In general, the novel inspired contradictory reactions from the reading public. Our editors were especially puzzled. Everything in this novel was unusual to them, and a lot of requests (quite friendly, by the way, and not at all meanly critical) were made. On the advice of I. A. Efremov, we renamed the Minister of the Defense of the Crown Don Reba (he had previously been Don Rebia—an overly simple anagram, in the opinion of Ivan Antonovich.) Moreover, we had to do a lot of work on the text and add an entire big scene where Arata the Hunchback demands lightning from the hero and doesn’t receive it.

It’s amazing that this novel went through all the hurdles of censorship without any particular difficulties. Either the liberalism of the then-leaders of the Young Guard played a role, or the careful maneuvers of our wonderful editor, Bela Grigorevna Klyueva, or maybe it was actually just that there was a certain retreat after the recent ideological hysteria—our enemies were catching their breath and complacently looking around the newly captured lands and beachheads.

Although on the book’s release, a reaction of a certain sort followed immediately. This might have been the first time that the Strugatskys were attacked by the big guns. The academic of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Y. Frantsev accused the authors of abstractionism and surrealism, while his venerable fellow writer V. Nemtsov accused us of pornography. Fortunately, that was still a time when it was permissible to respond to the attacks, and I. Efremov stood up for us in his brilliant article “Billions of Facets of the Future.” And the political temperature outside had by then gone down. In short, nothing happened. (The ideological mutts would still occasionally bark at this novel from their yards, but then we got around to publishing Tale of the Troika, The Final Circle of Paradise, The Snail on the Slope—and against that background, the novel Hard to Be a God, to the surprise of the authors, even became a work to emulate. The Strugatskys were already being scolded: what’s this, look at Hard to Be a God—you know what to do when you feel like it, why don’t you keep working in that vein?)

The novel, we must admit, was a success. Some readers found in it adventures reminiscent of The Three Musketeers, others cool science fiction. Teenagers liked the exciting plot; the intelligentsia the dissident ideas and attacks on totalitarianism. Over the course of a dozen years, the polls all showed that the novel shared the first and second place in the ratings with our Monday Starts on Saturday. As of October 1997, it had a circulation of 2.6 million in Russian, and that’s not counting the Soviet publications in foreign languages and the languages of the peoples of the USSR. And among foreign publications, it occupies a solid second place immediately after Roadside Picnic. According to my information, it has been published in forty-nine editions in twenty-one countries, including Germany (eight editions), Bulgaria (five), Spain (five), Poland (four), France (four), the Czech Republic (three), etc.