Arkady Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic

Years ago I read a criticism of a novelette, in which the critic was furious because the author had written: “He blew his nose and wiped it.” He said that it went against everything beautiful and exalted which literature should give the nation.

This is only a small illustration of what bloody fools are born under the sun.

Oh, how sweet it would be to quote all this to the gentlemen from Young Guard! And to add something from myself in the same vein. But, alas, this would be completely pointless and maybe even tactically wrong. Besides, as it became clear to us many, many years later, we had completely misunderstood the motivations and psychology of these people.

You see, we had then sincerely assumed that our editors were simply afraid of the higher-ups and didn’t want to make themselves vulnerable by publishing yet another dubious work by extremely dubious authors. And the entire time, in all our letters and applications, we took great pains to emphasize that which to us seemed completely obvious: the novel contained nothing criminal; it was quite ideologically appropriate and certainly not dangerous in that sense. And the fact that the world depicted in it was coarse, cruel, and hopeless, well, that was how it had to be—it was the world of “decaying capitalism and triumphant bourgeois ideology.”

It didn’t even cross our minds that the issue had nothing to do with ideology. They, those quintessential “bloody fools,” actually did think this way: that language must be as colorless, smooth, and glossy as possible and certainly shouldn’t be at all coarse; that science fiction necessarily has to be fantastic and on no account should have anything to do with crude, observable, and brutal reality; that the reader must in general be protected from reality—let him live by daydreams, reveries, and beautiful incorporeal ideas. The heroes of a novel shouldn’t “walk,” they should “advance”; not talk but “utter”; on no account “yell” but only “exclaim.” This was a certain peculiar aesthetic, a reasonably self-contained notion of literature in general and of science fiction in particular—a peculiar worldview, if you like. One that’s rather widespread, by the way, and relatively harmless, but only under the condition that the holder of this worldview isn’t given the chance to influence the literary process.

However, judging from a letter I wrote to Arkady on August 4, 1977:

…Medvedev has been dealt with in the following way: a) Fifty-three stylistic changes from the “Vulgarisms” list have been made—it’s explained in the letter that this is done in respect for the requests from the CC AULYCL. b) Interpretations of corpses as cyborgs for investigating earthlings, and of the Sphere—as some kind of bionic device which detects biological currents—have been inserted; it’s explained in the letter that this was done to be left in peace. c) The letter further states that the remaining demands of the editors (concerning violence and so on) are actually an ideological mistake, as they result in glossing over capitalist reality. Everything has been sent with a request for a notification, and judging from the notification, has been received at the YG on the 26th of July of this year. To hell, to hell…

That was the very height of battle. Much, much more still lay ahead: further paroxysms of editorial vigilance, attempts to break the contract with the authors entirely, our complaints and plaintive petitions to the All-Union Agency on Copyrights (AUAC), CC AULYCL, CC CPSU…

The Unintended Meetings anthology saw the light of day in the autumn of 1980, disfigured, massacred, and pathetic. The only thing remaining from the original plan was Space Mowgli; Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel had been lost on the fields of battle more than five years before, while the Picnic had undergone such editing that the authors wanted neither to read it nor even simply to flip through its pages.

But the authors prevailed. This was one of the rarest occurrences in the history of Soviet publishing: the publisher didn’t want to release a book but the authors forced it to. Experts thought that such a thing was completely impossible. It turns out that it was possible. Eight years. Fourteen letters to the “big” and “little” Central Committees. Two hundred degrading corrections of the text. An incalculable amount of nervous energy wasted on trivialities… Yes, the authors prevailed; there’s no arguing with that.

But it was a Pyrrhic victory.

Nonetheless, the Picnic was and still is the most popular of the Strugatsky novels—at least abroad. It’s possible that this is due to Tarkovsky’s brilliant film Stalker acting as a catalyst. But the fact remains: some fifty editions in twenty countries, including the United States (three editions), the United Kingdom (four), France (two), Germany (seven), Spain (two, one in Catalan), Poland (six), the Czech Republic (five), Italy (three), Finland (two), Bulgaria (four), and so on. In Russia, Roadside Picnic is also fairly highly acclaimed, although it lags behind, say, Monday Starts on Saturday. Roadside Picnic lives on and maybe will even make it to the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Of course, the text of the Picnic presented here is completely restored and returned to the authors’ version. But to this day, I find the Unintended Meetings anthology unpleasant to even hold in my hands, never mind read.

Copyright © 1972 Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Foreword copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin

Afterword copyright © 2012 by Boris Strugatsky

English language translation copyright © 2012 by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-61374-341-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strugatskii, Arkadii Natanovich, author.

[Piknik na obochine. English. 2012]

Roadside picnic / Arkady and Boris Strugatsky ; translated by Olena Bormashenko.

pages ; cm

Summary: “Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of the extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-61374-341-6

1. Science fiction, Russian. I. Strugatskii, Boris Natanovich, author.

II. Bormashenko, Olena, translator. III. Title.

PG3476.S78835P5513 2012

891.73’44—dc23

2012001294

Cover and interior design: Sarah Olson

Cover image: Still from the 1979 film Stalker, Mosfilm

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

Roadside Picnic was first published in England and America in 1977, in a translation by A. W. Bouis. My review, “A New Book by the Strugatskys” is in Science Fiction Studies 12 (vol. 4, pt. 2, July 1977).