Arkady Strugatsky - Hard to Be a God

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 © 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

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