The Inhabited Island
Page 42
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:
Nogin Square has finally released II from its sharp-clawed paws. Permission to publish has been given. The reason for such a long delay has become clear, by the way, but more about that when we meet. It has simply been realized that we are regular Soviet guys and not slanderers or detractors of any kind, it’s just that our attitude is overly critical and sensitive, but that’s okay; with a light guiding hand on our shoulder, we can and should carry on working. . . . It has been calculated that if everything goes smoothly (in production), the book will come out sometime in September.
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 beginni
ng 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.
Notes
1. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: “B.” is Boris Strugatsky; “ToT” is the Strugatsky novel Tale of the Troika. “Detgiz” is Detskoe Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo, the State Publishing House for Children’s Literature, and Young Guard is Molodaya Gvardiya, another Russian publishing house.
2. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: “Glavlit” is short for Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Literatury i Izdatelstv (the Central Directorate for Literary and Publishing Matters), the original name of the main Soviet censorship body. Though the organization was renamed several times, it was still commonly known as Glavlit.
3. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In Russian, “Galactic Security Commission” is “Komissiya Galakticheskoy Bezopasnosti,” or KGB.
4. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The Russian degree of candidate is effectively equivalent to a doctorate.
5. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: A reference to Great Stand on the Ugra River, in which the forces of Ivan the Great faced off against the Great Horde of Akhmat Khan on opposite sides of the Ugra River from October to November 1480.