The Snail on the Slope

by Arkady Strugatsky

  And the question is this: Should we, the authors, consider it a failure that an idea that helped us make the novel multifaceted and deep was never really understood by the reader? I don’t know. I only know that there exist many interpretations of The Snail on the Slope, many of which are totally internally consistent and in no way contradict the text. So maybe it’s actually a good thing that this work generates very different responses from a wide variety of people? And maybe the more interpretations there are, the more reason there is to consider the work successful? After all, the original of the painting The Heroic Feat of Forest Explorer Selivan had been “destroyed . . . as befits a work of art that cannot be allowed to have ambiguous interpretations.” So perhaps the only way a “work of art” can survive is if it has not one but many interpretations?

  Then again, the multitude of possible readings didn’t do The Snail on the Slope much good. The novel didn’t get destroyed, per se, but for many years it was forbidden. In May 1969, a certain V. Aleksandrov (a man of apparently colossal intellect), devoted the following remarkable lines to our novel (I’m quoting with a number of omissions, which in no way change the meaning of his philippic):

  The authors do not state where the action takes place, nor do they mention how their society is organized. But the entirety of their narrative, with all of its events and dialogue, makes it absolutely clear what country they mean. The fantastic society depicted by A. and B. Strugatsky . . . is composed of people who live in chaos and turmoil, who are engaged in aimless, unnecessary busywork, and who carry out stupid laws and directives. Fear, suspicion, sycophancy, and bureaucracy reign here.

  You can’t help but wonder: Is it possible that the author of this critical review was an undercover dissident, who had snuck into the party apparatus in order to have a plausible pretext for dragging the most just and humane Soviet state through the mud? Although it must be said that this piece was only the first (if also the stupidest) in a whole series of vicious pans of The Snail on the Slope. As a result, the novel was only published in its entirety, in its proper form, in the most modern of times—in 1988. And back in the late 1960s, the issues of Baikal that had printed part of the “Administration” half of the novel (wonderfully illustrated by Sever Gansovsky!) had been pulled from libraries and put into a restricted-access collection. The book became samizdat, made its way to the West, and was then published through the Munich publishing house Posev, and subsequently, anyone who was found to be in possession of it during a house search would be in trouble—at work at the very least.

  Both the authors themselves liked and, more importantly, respected this novel, and thought of it as their most complete and important work. For obvious reasons, its total circulation in Russia (the USSR) has been relatively small, around 1.2 million books. However, it’s popular abroad: twenty-seven editions in fifteen countries—a sure third place behind Roadside Picnic and Hard to be a God.