04/16/71—AS: I saw Bella at the YG. She said there’s nothing doing. Avramenko asked her to try to be diplomatic about it: to tell us that there’s no paper, and they are all booked up, and so on, so forth, but she told me straight out that somewhere in the upper echelons they suggested having nothing to do with the Strugatskys for the time being…. That’s the hegemony bearing down!
And the Picnic wasn’t written yet, and we’re talking, essentially, about novels that have never caused a Big Ideological Disturbance, about little stories that are completely harmless and even apolitical. It’s just that the higher-ups wanted nothing to do with those Strugatskys at all, and this overall reluctance was being superimposed on a difficult situation within the publishing house: this was right at the time that the change of leadership was taking place, when they were beginning to root out all the best things created by the then-editorial SF staff under Sergei Georgievich Zhemaitis and Bella Grigorievna Kliueva, due to whose cares and labors flourished the second generation of Soviet science fiction.
At the start of the 1980s, Arkady and I were giving serious thought to the project of gathering, organizing, and disseminating, at least by samizdat, “A History of One Publication” (or “How It’s Done”)—a compendium of genuine documents (letters, reviews, complaints, applications, authorial wails and howls in written form) related to the history of publishing the anthology Unintended Meetings, whose key novel turned out to be the Picnic. At one time, I had even begun systematically sorting and selecting the existing materials, but soon gave it up; it was dead-end work, a laborious task with no future, and there was a certain palpable immodesty in the whole project—who were we, after all, to use our own example to illustrate the functioning of the ideological machine of the 1970s, especially against the background of the fates of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Georgi Vladimov, Vladimir Voinovich, and many, many other worthies?
The project was abandoned, but we returned to it once more after the beginning of perestroika in the mid-1980s, during the dawn of the new and even newest times, when there appeared a real possibility of not merely passing around a certain collection of materials but of publishing it according to all the rules, with didactic commentary and venomous descriptions of the main characters, many of whom had retained their positions at the time and were capable of influencing literary processes. We were joined by indefatigable ludens [a Strugatsky term indicating a subspecies of humans with superior mental powers —tr.]: Vadim Kazakov, a science fiction expert and literary critic from Saratov, and his friends. I relayed all the materials to them—the compendium was for the most part ready—but pretty soon it became clear that there was no real possibility of publishing it; no one had the money for this kind of publication, which was unlikely to be profitable. Besides, things were happening at breakneck speed: the putsch, Arkady’s passing, the fall of the USSR, the democratic revolution—a velvet revolution, but a revolution nonetheless. For a period of literally months, our project lost the most minimal relevance.
And now I’m sitting behind a desk, staring at three reasonably thick folders lying in front of me, and am aware of a disappointment mixed with uncertainty and a noticeable touch of bewilderment. Inside these folders are the letters to the Young Guard publishing house (to the editors, the managing editor, the head editor, the director), complaints to the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (CC AULYCL), plaintive petitions to the Department of Culture of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU), and, of course, replies from all these organizations and our letters to each other—a veritable mountain of paper, by the most conservative calculation more than two hundred documents—and I have no idea now what to do with it all.
At first, I was looking forward to using this afterword to tell the story of publishing the Picnic: naming once-hated names; jeering to my heart’s content at the cowards, idiots, informers, and scoundrels; astounding the reader with the absurdity, idiocy, and meanness of the world we’re all from; being ironic and instructive, deliberately objective and ruthless, benevolent and caustic all at once. And now I’m sitting here, looking at these folders, and realizing that I’m hopelessly late and that no one needs me—not my irony, not my generosity, and not my burntout hatred. They have ceased to exist, those once-powerful organizations with almost unlimited right to allow and to hinder; they have ceased to exist and are forgotten to such an extent that it would be tedious and dull to explain to the present-day reader who is who, why it didn’t make sense to complain to the Department of Culture of the CC, why the only thing to do was to complain to the Department of Print and Propaganda, and who were Albert Andreevich Beliaev, Pyotr Nilovich Demichev, and Mikhail Vasilyevich Zimyanin—and these were the tigers and elephants of the Soviet ideological fauna, rulers of destinies, deciders of fates! Who remembers them today, and who cares about those of them who are still among the living? So then why bother with the small fry—the shrill crowd of petty bureaucrats of ideology, the countless ideological demons, who caused untold and immeasurable harm and whose vileness and meanness require (as they liked to write in the nineteenth century) a mightier, sharper, and more experienced pen than my own? I don’t even want to mention them here—let them be swallowed up by the past, like evil spirits, and disappear…
If I did, after all, decide to publish here even a simple list of pertinent documents with a brief description of each one, this list would look approximately like this:
04/30/75 A→B (the editors have “serious doubts” about RP)
05/06/75 A letter from A&BS to Medvedev with a request for an editorial response
06/25/75 A letter from Ziberov explaining the delay
07/08/75 The editorial response from Medvedev and Ziberov
07/21/75 A reply from A&BS to the editorial response
08/23/75 B→A (the anthology was touched up and sent to the editors back in July)
09/01/75 A notification from Ziberov acknowledging receipt of the manuscript
11/05/75 A letter from Medvedev rejecting the Picnic
11/17/75 A letter from A&BS to Medvedev arguing against the rejection
11/17/75 A letter from Medvedev to B expressing perplexity
01/08/76 A letter from A&BS to Poleschuk with a complaint about Medvedev
01/24/76 A notification from Parshin acknowledging the receipt of the letter to the CC AULYCL
02/20/76 A letter from Parshin about measures taken
03/10/76 B→A (proposing letters to Parshin and Sinelnikov)
03/24/76 A letter from A&BS to Parshin with a reminder
03/24/76 A letter from A&BS to Sinelnikov with a reminder
03/30/76 A letter from Parshin about measures taken
04/05/76 A→B (suggesting a letter to higher authorities)
04/12/76 A letter from Medvedev rejecting the Picnic
And so on, so forth. Who needs this today, and who today would read it?
But if not this, then what is there left to write about? Without this tedious/boring list and the gloomy/spiteful commentary on it, how do you tell the story of publishing the Picnic— a story that is in a certain sense almost mysterious? Because this novel probably wasn’t without its flaws, but at the same time it was also not without evident merits: it was clearly gripping, capable of making a reasonably strong impression on a reader (it did, after all, inspire a remarkable reader like Andrei Tarkovsky to make an outstanding film); at the same time it certainly didn’t contain any criticism of the existing order and, on the contrary, seemed to be in line with the reigning antibourgeois ideology. So then why, for what mysterious—mystical? infernal?—reasons was it doomed to spend more than eight years passing through the publishing house?