But there were lots of things we were unable to save. “The minister of state security, Malyuta Skuratov,” for example. Or the line from Merlin’s story: “In the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of a hand hardened by toil . . .” And several other little trifles, which someone thought were harmful . . .
Everything (or almost everything) that was lost at that time is happily recovered in this present edition, thanks once again to the friendly and self-sacrificing efforts of the ludens4 who have gone through a heap of all kinds of earlier editions and drafts. Sveta Bondarenko, Volodya Borisov, Vadim Kazakov, Viktor Kurilsky, and Yuri Fleishman: thanks to you all!
Notes
1. AUTHORS’ NOTE: “A full belly is deaf to learning.”
Notes
1. AUTHORS’ NOTE: “Where you can do nothing, you should want nothing.”
2. AUTHORS’ NOTE: “You will be called upon when you are needed.”
Notes
1. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: A printer’s page would have constituted approximately forty thousand characters. The Strugatskys are envisioning a story about thirty-five to forty letter-size pages long.
2. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: “Detgiz” is Detskoe Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo, the State Publishing House for Children’s Literature.
3. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Glavlit is Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Literatury i Izdatelstv, the Central Directorate for Literary and Publishing Matters.
4. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The ludens are a humanoid race with superior mental powers that appear in the stories set in the Strugatskys’ Noon Universe.
Monday Starts on Saturday Page 28