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 journaclass="underline"
…12–16 (April 1963) was in Leningrad…. Made a decent sketch of The Observer (formerly Seventh Heaven)…
08/13/1963— …Wrote Hard to Be a God in June. Now hesitating, unsure what to do with it. Detgiz won’t take it. Maybe we should try Novy Mir?
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.
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Foreword copyright © 2014 by Hari Kunzru
Afterword copyright © 2014 by Boris Strugatsky
English language translation copyright © 2014 by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
All rights reserved
Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, IL 60610
ISBN 978-1-61374-828-2
The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strugatskii, Arkadii, 1925–1991, author.
[Trudno byt’ bogom. English. 2014]
Hard to be a god / Arkady and Boris Strugatsky ; translated by Olena Bormashenko.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-61374-828-2
I. Strugatskii, Boris, 1933–2012, author. II. Bormashenko, Olena, translator.
III. Title.
PG3476.S78835T7813 2014
891.73’44—dc23
2014007355
Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
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