Arkady Strugatsky - The Dead Mountaineer's Inn

Arkady Natonovich Strugatsky (1925-1991) was born in Batumi but grew up in Leningrad, leaving only during the siege of 1942. He served in the Soviet army, and it was in the Military Institute of Foreign Languages that he became proficient in English and Japanese. From 1955 on, he worked as a writer, and in 1958, he started to collaborate with his brother. Unlike Arkady, Boris Strugatsky (1933-2012) stayed in Leningrad during the siege and then became an astronomer and computer engineer. During the course of their careers, the two brothers would become icons of Russian science fiction, but also of Russian literature in general, although mostly known in Europe. They've never been well known in the United States.

Literary influences on the Strugatsky brothers include Stanislaw Lem, who tended toward satire and societal commentary that's not so much funny as tellingly observant. Yet not all literary influences are literary: the siege of Leningrad was among the most brutal events of World War II, and Arkady's flight from the city proved to be its own kind of tragedy: it ended in the death of the brothers' father. But even if they had been shielded from the worst of what happened during the war, it seems unlikely that the deprivation and desperate acts surrounding them could have been without impact. Soviet censorship also was an issue for the brothers, as it was for any honest writer of the time; some of their works did not appear in print until after the fall of the USSR. And in their fiction, over time, relatively optimistic views of the future and of humanity would give way to dystopias, to alienation and a generalized cynicism about human institutions.

Only two years after The Dead Mountaineer's Inn , the Strugatsky brothers would publish the iconic Roadside Picnic , turned into the classic movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky. The two books could not be more different-the latter is an iconic anvil of a book, the former a delicate cobweb of timing and absurdity. Roadside Picnic fits perfectly within the brothers' overall body of deeply science-fictional work, while The Dead Mountaineer's Inn seems like an amusing one-off-among the last of their works to value pure play above all else.

So where exactly did The Dead Mountaineer's Inn come from? In Boris Strugatsky's short memoir Comments on the Way Left Behind , published in Russia in 1999, he states that they had wanted to write a detective story for some time, based on a familiarity with Rex Stout, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, John le Carre, and others. This in the context of being aware of a "fundamental vice" of any detective story: "Two vices, to be precise: first, the pettiness of any criminal motive, and second, the imminence of a boring, disappointingly dull, plausibility-killing, awkward explanation. You can count all possible motives on the fingers of one hand... Your interest inevitably declines as soon as whos and whys are revealed."

Thus they strove to create a narrative that, underneath its seeming whimsy, would be "paradoxical," complete with an unexpected twist. In 1968, in the midst of writer's block caused by external pressures – i.e., Soviet censors – they came upon the solution, in part to "learn to write well but for money," even if they later came to see the endeavor as impossible to achieve due to the inflexibility of mystery-fiction tropes. A locked-room mystery that wasn't. A whodunit that becomes something else. Whatever their later reservations, Boris and Arkady found The Dead Mountaineer's Inn "sheer pleasure" to write-and that pleasure comes across to the reader today.

In the same memoir, Boris recounts how they anticipated having no trouble publishing The Dead Mountaineer's Inn -originally titled The Murder Case: Yet Another Requiem for the Detective Novel -only to find out to their surprise that they were wrong, because of prior ideological "misbehavior" that had created suspicion. "It turned out we had gone too far with being apolitical and asocial. It turned out that our editors wished there were some struggles in the novel-class struggle, struggle for peace, struggle of ideas, just anything."

As a result, when the novel was finally published, the gangsters in this edition had to be changed to neo-Nazis, a move the brothers thought was in extreme bad taste. When The Dead Mountaineer's Inn was later published as a children's book, a different change had to be made: deleting the mulled wine Glebsky pours into his coffee, since children's books of the time could not mention drinking alcohol. (Eventually, the novel also became a video game and a Russian movie.)

But no matter how the brothers might have been influenced by crime fiction, their science-fictional souls still glimmer darkly upon the fallen snow of the chapters in The Dead Mountaineer's Inn , a novel that revels in every kind of tension, that inhabits every available transitional space. The mystery that wants to explain, and the science-fiction story that wants to leave something vague or unexplained: the unexplored horizon, the limits of human understanding. I can almost imagine each brother as the advocate for one of the two causes-the cause of order and the cause of not-order-and only this tussle can create the requisite balance between the two.

Early on, before the two are cut off from the world by an avalanche, the inn's owner says to Grebsky: "But as soon as the unknown becomes known, it's just as flat, gray and uninteresting as everything else."

For the very longest time, the Strugatsky brothers endeavor to make this novel complex and kinetic and fun.

You are about to enter the Dead Mountaineer's Inn.

Are you who you say you are?

Are you what you say you are?

What, exactly, will you tell Grebsky when he comes knocking on your door?

"Reports from the Vingus region, near the city of Mur, indicate the arrival of a flying machine, from which yellow-green humanoids possessing three legs and eight eyes each have emerged. In their thirst for scandal, the bourgeois press has rushed to call these humanoids visitors from another planet..."

(FROM THE NEWSPAPERS)

1.

I stopped the car, got out and took off my sunglasses. Everything was exactly as Zgut had said it would be. The inn was two stories high, a yellowish-green color, with a mournful-looking sign hanging over the front porch that read, "THE DEAD MOUNTAINEER'S INN." Deep spongy snowdrifts on either side of the porch bristled with different-colored skis-I counted seven of them, one with a boot still on it. Knobby dull icicles thick as your arm dangled off the roof. A pale face peered out of the rightmost window on the first floor, and now the front door opened and a bald, stocky man wearing a red fur vest over a dazzling nylon shirt appeared on the porch. He approached with slow, heavy steps and then stopped in front of me. He had a coarse, ruddy face and the neck of a heavyweight champion. He did not look at me. His melancholy gaze was focused somewhere to the side, expressing a sad dignity. No doubt this was Alek Snevar himself, owner of the inn, the valley surrounding it, and Bottleneck Pass.

"There..." he said in an unnaturally low and muffled voice. "It happened over there." He pointed with his hand. There was a corkscrew in it. "On that peak..."

I turned, squinting towards the terrifying-looking blue-grey cliff that enclosed the valley to the west: at the pale tongues of snow and the serrated ridge, which looked so distinct against the sky's deep blue background that it might have been painted there.

"The carabiner broke," the owner continued in the same muffled voice. "He fell two hundred meters straight down, to his death. There was nothing for him to catch hold of on the smooth rock. Perhaps he cried out. Nobody heard him. Perhaps he prayed. Only God was listening. When he hit the cliffs we heard the avalanche here, like the roar of an animal being woken up: a hungry, greedy roar. The ground shook as he crashed into it, along with forty-two thousand tons of powder..."