The Inhabited Island

AFTERWORD ^{BY BORIS STRUGATSKY}

It is known with absolute certainty when this novel was conceived—on June 12, 1967, the following entry appeared in our work journal: “We need to compose a proposal for an optimistic story about [first] contact.” And immediately thereafter:

It is curious that this emphatically cheerful entry is situated precisely between two profoundly somber ones—06/12/67: “B. has arrived in Moscow in connection with the rejection of TоТ by Detgiz”; and 06/13/67: “Offensive snub at Young Guard with TоТ.”[1] This double blow stunned us, uncoupling us from reality for a while. We were left, so to speak, in a state of “artistic punch-drunkenness.”

I remember very clearly how, discouraged and angry, we said to each other, “Ah, you don’t want satire? You don’t need Saltykov-Shchedrins any longer? Contemporary problems no longer perturb you? Aaall right! You’ll get an empty-headed, harebrained, absolutely toothless, entertaining novel about the adventures of spunky kid, a twenty-second-century Young Communist…” We humorous lads seemingly intended to punish someone among the holders of power for rejecting the serious themes and problems we were offering. Punish Comrade Farfurkis with a frivolous novel! Laughable. It is laughable and a little embarrassing to remember it now. But at that time, in the summer and autumn of 1967, when all the editorial offices who were friendliest to us had, one after another, rejected Tale of the Troika and Ugly Swans, we failed to see anything amusing in what was happening.

We set about The Inhabited Island without enthusiasm, but very soon the work enthralled us. It turned to be a damned thrilling occupation—writing a toothless, strictly entertaining novel! Especially since quite soon it stopped seeming so very toothless to us. The radiation towers, and the degenerates, and the Battle Guards—everything fell into place like cartridges slipping into the magazine, everything found its prototype in our adorable reality, everything proved to be a vehicle for a subtext. Moreover, it happened quite regardless of our will, seemingly of its own accord, like the multicolored candy crumbs in some magical kaleidoscope that transforms chaos and a random mishmash into an elegant, coherent, and entirely symmetrical little picture.

It was splendid, inventing a new, fantastic world—and it was even more splendid endowing it with highly familiar attributes and various realia. I’m looking through the work journal at the moment: November 1967, the Komarovo Writers’ House, we only worked during the day, but how we worked: seven, ten, eleven(!) pages a day. Not fair copy, of course, but draft text, created and extracted out of nothing, out of oblivion! At that rate we finished the draft in only two passes, 296 pages in thirty-two working days. The clean copy was written even faster, twelve to sixteen pages a day, and in May the completed manuscript was taken off to Detgiz in Moscow and, almost simultaneously, to the Leningrad journal Neva.

Thus the novel (an unprecedentedly thick Strugatsky novel for that time) was written in a period of six months. Its entire subsequent history is an agonizing story of polishing, smoothing out, ideologically deburring, adapting, and adjusting the text to conform to the various and often absolutely unpredictable demands of the Great and Mighty Censoring Machine.

“What is a telegraph pole? It’s a well-edited pine tree.” They failed to reduce The Inhabited Island to the condition of a pole—in fact the pine tree remained a pine tree, despite all the ingenious efforts of the delimbers in plainclothes—but nonetheless a more than ample hash was made of things, with even more authorial blood set boiling and authorial nerves frayed. And this grueling struggle for definitive and irreproachable ideological decontamination went on for very nearly a year.

Two factors played an absolutely essential role in this battle. First, we (and the novel) were damn lucky with our editors—both at Detgiz and at Neva. At Detgiz the novel was handled by Nina Matveevna Berkova, an old friend and defender of ours, a highly experienced editor who had been through hell and high water, who knew the theory and practice of Soviet literature from A to Z, who never gave way to despair, who knew how to retreat and was always ready to advance. And in Neva we were overseen by Samuil Aronovich Lurie, a supremely subtle stylist and natural-born literary scholar, as intelligent and vitriolic as the devil, a connoisseur of the psychology of Soviet ideological bosses in general and the psychology of A. F. Popov, the editor-in-chief of Neva at the time, in particular. If not for the efforts of these friends who were our editors, the fate of the novel could have been different—it would either not have appeared at all or would have been so badly mutilated as to be unrecognizable.

Second, the general political context of that time. It was 1968, “the year of Czechoslovakia,” when the Czech Gorbachevs were desperately attempting to prove to the Soviet monsters that “socialism with a human face” was possible and even inevitable. At times it seemed that they were pulling it off, that at any moment the Stalinists would retreat and give way. No one knew what would happen in a month’s time—whether freedom would triumph, as in Prague, or whether everything would finally come full circle, back to remorseless ideological glaciation, perhaps even to the total triumph of the proponents of the GULAG.

With one accord the liberal intelligentsia expressed their opposition, all eagerly trying to convince each other (in their kitchens) that Dubček was certain to win, because it was impossible to strike down the ideological rebellion by force—that would be against the mood of the times, this wasn’t Hungary in 1956, and all these Brezhnev-Suslovs were too spineless, they didn’t have the good old Stalinist tempering, they didn’t have enough fire in their bellies, and the army these days wasn’t what it used to be. “Yes it is, our army’s still what it used to be,” the cleverest of us objected. “And their bellies have enough fire in them, don’t you worry. You can be sure the Brezhnev-Suslovs won’t flinch, and they’ll never give way to any Dubčeks, because it’s a matter of the Brezhnevs’ own survival.”

And there was deadly silence from those few individuals who generally could not be directly contacted, who already knew in May that the matter had been decided. And, of course, nothing was said by those who didn’t know anything for certain but sensed it, sensed it with their very skin: everything will be as it should be, everything will be the way it’s supposed to be, everything will be the way it always has been—the midlevel bosses, naturally including the junior officers of the ideological army, and the editors-in-chief of journals, the handlers of the Party’s regional committees and city committees, the staff of Glavlit…[2]

The scales were wavering in the balance. No one wanted to make the final decisions; everyone was waiting to see which way the drawbar of history would turn. Those in positions of responsibility tried not to read any manuscripts at all, and when they did, they put forward mind-boggling demands to authors, and when those had been taken into account, they put forward others, even more mind-boggling.

In Neva they demanded that we: shorten it; take out words such as “homeland,” “patriot” and “fatherland”; it wasn’t permissible for Mak to have forgotten what Hitler was called; clarify the role of Wanderer; emphasize the presence of social inequality in the Land of the Fathers; replace the Galactic Security Commission with a different term, with different initials…[3]

At Detgiz (to begin with) they demanded that we: shorten it; take out the naturalism in the description of war; clarify the role of Wanderer; obfuscate the social order of the Land of the Fathers; emphatically exclude the very concept of “Guards” (replace it, say, with “Legion”); emphatically alter the very concept of “Unknown Fathers”; remove terms such as “social democrats,” “communists,” etc.

However, as Vladimir Vysotsky sang in those years, “but that was just for starters.” The full implications were waiting for us up ahead.

In early 1969 the serial version of the novel appeared in Neva. Despite the general toughening up of the ideological climate as a consequence of the Czechoslovak “disgrace,” despite the sacred horror that had seized the obsequiously and fearfully trembling ideological bosses, despite the fact that at that precise moment several articles berating the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction had all simultaneously drawn to a head and burst—despite all of this, we managed to publish the novel, and with only limited, in effect minimal, losses. This was a success. Indeed, you could say it was a victory that had seemed unlikely and that no one had expected.

At Detgiz things also seemed to be going well. In mid-May Arkady wrote that The Inhabited Island had been allowed through unscathed, without a single remark. The book had gone off to the printers. Furthermore, the production department had promised that, although the book was planned for the third quarter, a chink might possibly be found in order to bring it out in the second, i.e., in June or July.

However, the book did not appear in either June or July. Moreover, in early June an article entitled “Leaves and Roots” appeared in the journal Soviet Literature, renowned for its incisive, one might even say extreme, national-patriotic tendency. In this article our Inhabited Island was held up as an example of literature without any roots. At the time this part of the article seemed to me (and not only to me) to be “stupid and vacuous” and therefore in no way dangerous. Big deal, so they berate the authors because they let a null-transmitter overshadow the people, and because the novel doesn’t contain any genuine artistic images. What else is new? We had heard worse things than that about ourselves! Back then we were far more alarmed by a denunciation received at the same time by the Leningrad Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from a certain true-believing candidate of sciences,[4] physicist, and colonel all in one. With the directness of a military man and Party member, the physicist-colonel quite simply, without any fuzziness or equivocation, accused the authors of the novel published in Neva of mockery of the army, anti-patriotism, and other such barefaced anti-Soviet propaganda. It was suggested that measures be taken.

It is not possible to give a definite answer to the question of precisely which straw broke the camel’s back, but on June 13, 1969, the passage of the novel through Detgiz was halted by an instruction from on high, and the manuscript was confiscated from the printing house. The period of the Great Stand of the Detgiz version of The Inhabited Island began.[5]

There is no point in listing all the rumors, or even the most plausible of them, that appeared at the time, migrated from mouth to mouth, and vanished into oblivion without a trace, not having received even the slightest solid substantiation. The correct interpretation of events was probably expressed by those commentators who judged that the quantity of scandals around the name of the brothers Strugatsky (six vituperative articles in the central press in six months) had finally made the transition to quality, and it had been decided by someone somewhere to turn the screws on the recalcitrant rebels and apply exemplary punishment. However, even this hypothesis, which explains rather well the opening and middlegame of the chess match that played out, in no way explains the relatively successful endgame.

After six months of frostbitten standoff, the manuscript suddenly reappeared in the authors’ field of view—directly from Glavlit, covered all over with multitudinous notes and accompanied by instructions, which in the appropriate fashion were immediately brought to our notice through the agency of the editor. It was difficult at the time and is now quite impossible to judge which precise instructions had issued from the inner depths of the censorship commission and which had been formulated by the management of the publishing house. On this point there were, and still are, differing views, and this mystery will never be solved now. In essence, the instructions for us to carry out boiled down to a requirement to remove from the novel as many as possible realities of Soviet life (ideally all of them, without exception) and, first and foremost, the Russian surnames of the characters.

In January 1970 we got together at our mother’s place in Leningrad, and over four days we performed the titanic task of cleaning up the manuscript, which could actually be more correctly be described as polluting it, in the unappetizing sense of nocturnal pollution.

First to fall victim to this stylistic self-repression was the Russian Maxim Rostislavsky, who henceforth became, forever and always, to the end of time, the German Maxim Kammerer. Pavel Grigorievich (a.k.a. Wanderer), became Rudolf Sikorsky, and in general the novel acquired a slight but distinct German accent: tanks were transformed into Panzerwagen, military offenders into Blitzträger, “snot-nosed fool” became “Dummkopf! Rotznase!” The following terms disappeared from the novel: “foot-cloths,” “convicts,” “salad, with shrimp,” “tobacco and eau de cologne,” medals,” “counterintelligence,” and “sugar candy,” as well as certain proverbs and sayings, such as “God marks the scoundrel.” The interlude “There’s a Bad Kind of Smell Here…” disappeared completely, without a trace. And the Unknown Fathers Dad, Father-in-Law, and Stepbrother were transformed into the Fire-Bearing Creators Chancellor, Count, and Baron.

It is not possible to list all the corrections and expurgations here; it is not even possible to list the most substantial of them. Yuri Fleishman, in carrying out the quite incredibly finicky task of comparing the final manuscript with the Detgiz publication, discovered 896 variations—corrections, abridgements, insertions, substitutions… eight hundred and ninety-six!

But this was, if not yet the end of the story, then at least its culmination. The corrected version was passed back to Glavlit at Nogin Square, and before five months had passed (on 05/22/70) I received a brief epistle from Arkady:

The book, naturally, didn’t come out in September; it didn’t even come out in November. This saga, the cautionary tale of the publication of a cheerful, absolutely ideologically consistent, purely entertaining little story of a twenty-second-century Young Communist, conceived and written by its authors primarily for the sake of the money, finally ended in January 1971.

It’s an interesting question who actually won in this hopeless battle of writers against the state machine. In the end the authors did, after all, manage to launch their creation into the world, if only in a badly mutilated form. But did the censors and bosses succeed at all in achieving their aim of eradicating from the novel the “free spirit” of allusion, the “uncontrollable associations,” and every possible kind of subtext? To some extent—indisputably. Beyond any doubt, the acuity and satirical orientation of the mutilated text suffered badly, but to my mind the bosses did not succeed in completely castrating it. For a long time all manner of “well-wishers” carried on eagerly taking swipes at the novel. And although their critical inspiration rarely rose above accusing the authors of “disrespecting Soviet cosmonautics” (what they had in mind was Maxim’s disdainful attitude toward working in the Free Search), the bosses’ warily hostile attitude to The Inhabited Island, even in its “corrected” modification, remained distinctly discernible. But then, more likely than not, that was simply inertia.

In the present edition the original text of the novel has in large measure been restored. Naturally, it was not possible to give Maxim Kammerer, né Rostislavsky, his “maiden” name back—in the twenty years that have passed he has become the hero of several stories, in which he’s featured rather as Kammerer. It was either change the name everywhere or nowhere. I preferred nowhere. Several changes, made by the authors under pressure, nonetheless proved so felicitous that it was decided to retain them in the restored text—for instance, the bizarre-sounding “educatees” instead of the banal “convicts,” and “Cornet Chachu” instead of “Captain Chachu.” But by far the greatest portion of the nine hundred distortions have, of course, been corrected, and the text has been brought to its canonical form.

I have just reread all of the above and suddenly feel a vague anxiety that I will be misunderstood by the contemporary reader, the reader of the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first.

First, the reader might have gotten the idea that all this time the Strugatskys did nothing else except run around editorial offices, begging them for pity’s sake to print the book, and sobbing into each other’s waistcoats, mutilating their own texts as they sobbed. Well, naturally, all that really did happen—we ran, and sobbed, and mutilated—but it only took up a small part of our working time. After all, it was during these months that our first (and last) science fiction detective novel (The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn) was written, the story Space Mowgli was begun and finished, our “secret” novel The Doomed City was begun and the draft of three parts was finished, and Roadside Picnic was conceived and begun. So, for all the sobbing, both life and work carried on as usual, and we had no time to hang our heads and wring our hands “in violent grief.”

And now for “second.” Second, I recall what the well-known writer Svyatoslav Loginov (“the instant patriarch of Russian fantasy”) said about his recent talk to present-day schoolkids, when he attempted, inter alia, to astound them with the incredible and ludicrous difficulties that a writer encountered in the mid-1970s and suddenly heard a bewildered question from the rows of seats: “If it was so hard to get printed, why didn’t you organize your own publishing house?” The present-day reader simply can’t imagine what we writers of the 1960s and ’70s had to deal with, how ruthlessly and talentlessly the all-powerful Party and state press suppressed literature and culture in general, what a narrow, flimsy little bridge any self-respecting writer had to make his way across: A step to the right and there waiting for you is Article 70 (or 90) of the Criminal Code, trial, prison camp, the nuthouse; in the best-case scenario you are blacklisted and excluded from the literary process for ten years or so. A step to the left and you’re clutched in the embrace of vulgar slobs and talentless botchers, a traitor to your own work, an elastic conscience, a Judas, counting and recounting your vile pieces of silver. The present-day reader is evidently no longer capable of understanding these dilemmas. The psychological gulf between him and people of my time gapes wide, and you can hardly expect to fill it with texts like my commentaries—but, then, no other means exists, does it? Freedom is like the air or good health: while you have it, you don’t notice it and don’t understand how bad things are without it or outside it.

One school of thought, it is true, holds that no one actually even needs freedom—all they need is to be liberated from the need to make decisions. This opinion is quite popular just at present. For it has been said, “It is often the best kind of liberty—liberty from care.” Possibly, possibly… But, then, that is a subject for an entirely different conversation.