Arkady Strugatsky: The Doomed City

In the Strugatskys' work, too, the whispering became more and more audible through the fanfares of lines proclaiming the happy communist future on Earth. Certainly, everything on Earth was still hunky-dory and all for free, and everyone spoke Russian, but events taking place in the troubled outskirts of the galaxy sometimes suggested a different reading of the current editorial in Pravda .

In The Doomed City , everything apparently happens somewhere that isn't Earth, and not even on a different planet but in a special world -- a hermetic world that is located outside time and space. Its characters have been plucked out of real life, but from various countries and various times in the twentieth century. Here we have a British colonel of World War I vintage, we have a German soldier who did his fighting in World War II, we have the "Soviet man" Andrei, coopted from the 1950s, and an American college professor from the 1960s. They all seem to speak the same language, but that language isn't Russian. Abducted from their own familiar earthly lives, times, and cultures, they have been transported to the City, where they have become the subjects of the Experiment, which has no beginning or end, while its goal and its meaning are kept secret from the participants, who are constantly subjected to various trials. No one, in fact, has any intention at all of keeping the subjects advised about the tests that are being carried out. The organizers of the Experiment look like ordinary people, just as officials of the Communist Party and case officers from the security services did -- they smile just as gently and call for patience just as earnestly. And all the inhabitants of the City show patience.

The Doomed City was completed in 1972 but not published in full until sixteen years later, after the beginning of perestroika. It is surprising that it was published even then, because the allusion to the Soviet Union here is so transparent that there was reason to fear, not only for the Strugatskys but also for the censors who allowed the book to see print.

Never mind the fact that it is not only inhabitants of the former Russian Empire who are enlisted to the City, that there are foreigners there too. Never mind that the regime there changes, and in some ways this City also resembles the West -- perhaps even more than it resembles the Soviet Union. Never mind that the Soviet Union also exists in this book in its own right, thereby testifying that it is not the City and the City is not it. All these defensive ruses are disavowed by the theme of the endless Experiment on living people.

The Strugatskys, in company with the entire country, were searching for an answer to the questions "What for?" "What do I need this for?" "What do they treat us like this for?" But as the final experimenters died out who might possibly have still remembered the purpose for which the Experiment had been undertaken, any hope of receiving an answer faded away. Our sacrifices and our deprivations could no longer buy us a ticket for admission to the Garden of Eden. At some point meaningful action had been transformed into eviscerated ritual, into a cargo cult; we were simply idly plodding around in circles. This queue had no beginning and no end. It was an ouroboros, with its own tail firmly grasped in its own teeth.

That is what I would have written about The Doomed City , my favorite book by the Strugatskys, a year ago.

But during that year, after several visits to their home city of St. Petersburg, I realized something. The City is not an abstraction. It is this city, Leningrad-Petrograd-St. Petersburg, built among the swamps, at record speed, on human bones, by decree of the czar, and destined to be the capital. It is this city, somber and dank, not designed for human inhabitation but obeying the order to gallantly stand and obstinately sparkle through the mist and the rust. It is this city -- the "cradle of the revolution," the arena of the Bolshevik coup, the city that survived the interminable Nazi blockade, the city that the economical Germans cut off from supply lines but didn't storm, so that its inhabitants would all starve to death for themselves. But they survived and didn't surrender, although they were sometimes forced to eat each other, while the Soviet army was busy with more important business elsewhere. That wasn't the first experiment to be carried out on them, and it wasn't the last.

This was the discovery I made during the last year: the inhabitants of the thrice-renamed St. Petersburg had always called it what they still call it today -- simply "the City." They love it desperately, and the more they have to suffer for it, the more they love it. The Strugatskys loved it, of course. But how do you honestly tell people about such a love?

In the West there is simply no need for the kind of science fiction that we had: you already have enough space without it to discuss the fate and fortunes of your own countries and your own peoples. "Serious" literature, for instance. Not to mention talk shows. But in a country where the main newspaper is called Truth precisely because it is crammed to overflowing with lies, there comes a point at which science fiction is transformed into a means for at least hinting at the true state of affairs. What people expected from the Strugatskys were genuine prophecies. The difference from the West was not only that millions of people stood in line for their books but also what those millions tried to find in the Strugatskys' novels. And what they found.

Because the Strugatskys' prophecies often came true. And weren't they the first who dared to state on paper that the City was doomed?

Hastily the vicious pike

Called the small carp through his mike.

"Little carplings, how's your day?"

"Thanks, we're doing quite OK."

- Valentin Kataev, Radiogiraffe

... I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars...

- The Revelation of Saint John the Divine (The Apocalypse)

PART I -- The Garbage Collector

1

The trash cans were rusty and battered, and the lids had come loose, so there were scraps of newspaper poking up from under them and potato peels dangling down. They were like the bills of slovenly pelicans that are none too picky about their food. The cans looked way too heavy to lift, but in fact, working in tandem with Wang, it was a breeze to jerk a can like that up toward Donald's outstretched hands and set it on the edge of the truck's lowered sideboard. You just had to watch out for your fingers. And after that you could adjust your mittens and take a few breaths through your nose while Donald walked the can farther in on the back of the truck and left it there.

The damp chill of nighttime breathed in through the wide-open gates, and under the archway a naked, yellow lightbulb swayed on a wire that was furred with grime. In its light Wang's face looked like the face of a man with a chronic case of jaundice, but Donald's face was invisible in the shadow of his wide-brimmed cowboy hat. The chipped and peeling gray walls were furrowed by horizontal slashes and adorned with obscene, life-size depictions of women. Dark clumps of dusty cobwebs dangled from the vaulting, and standing beside the door of the caretaker's lodge was a disorderly crowd of the empty bottles and stewed-fruit jars that Wang collected, carefully sorted, and handed in for recycling...

When there was only one trash can left, Wang took a shovel and a broom and started sweeping up the trash left on the asphalt surface.

"Ah, stop scrabbling around, Wang," Donald exclaimed irritably. "You scrabble around that way every time. It's still not going get any cleaner, is it?"