Zamyatin and the Strugatskys: The Representation of Freedom in We and The Snail On The Slope
[Published in Zamyatin’s WE – A Collection of Critical Essays, Gary Kern, ed. Ardis, 1988.]
Forty years passed between the completion of Zamyatin’s We and the appearance of the Strugatskys’ first stories. In that span, few artistically interesting works of scientific fantasy were produced in the Soviet Union. The Stalinist “doctrine of limits” proscribed futuristic projecting beyond the fulfillment of the next Plan, and the literary experimentation of the ’20s, when writers frequently played variations on Wellsian themes, was suppressed (Suvin, Metamorphoses 264). In its place came the socialist realist project novel. The cosmic struggles of the human species against “external” and human nature were replaced by the national struggle to modernize and collectivize, while fending off the agents of foreign enemies. With the repudiation of Stalin in 1956 came also the successes of the Soviet space program, the apotheosis of science as the only social practice not subject to ideological control, and the repudiation of the doctrine of limits. As if the liberation from the cult of personality had liberated them from terrestrial gravity, science fiction writers immediately set their hands to recovering the cosmic utopian tradition of the ’20s. The first major work of the new style was Ivan Efremov’s immensely popular Andromeda in 1958. In 1959, the best of Efremov’s followers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, began a career that has produced the most significant oeuvre of science fiction in the Soviet Union.
Highly technological societies evidently require, and produce, a large and constant supply of quasi-mythic stories about the possible fate of the complex relationship between scientific culture and humane values. The history of Soviet science fiction differs from its Western counterparts, U.S. and British science fiction, because of the central role that a clearly defined philosophy of science plays in Soviet Marxism (Graham 9-23). 1 Since Marxism-Leninism is held by Soviet ideologists to be both proven by science, and the full elaboration of the underlying laws of nature in social life, there is little leeway for playing with philosophical-scientific ideas or speculating on “other realities.” In severe times, deviations from the official word on the nature of things or scientific practice are quickly construed as veiled attacks on the foundations of Marxism-Leninism. As Soviet censors know very well, science-fiction is an inherently critical genre. Even the Western pulp space opera that treats science as the magic of a corporate technocracy “unconsciously” criticizes actual science for not being magic, for not making our fondest wishes come true. In the West, this critical overtone may actually promote loyalty to the ideology of technological development independent of social and political forces. But in the Soviet Union, science is not considered an autonomous force. For the Soviet state, Soviet science is a servant of Marxist-Leninist goals. The orthodox argument is obviously circular: science proves, and hence legitimates, the Soviet political order; therefore Marxist-Leninist political practice is the only scientific approach to reality. The writings of Marx and Engels, however, allow for a much more open-ended and dialectical concept of science (Graham 24–68). As a result, it is possible to write philosophical speculations consonant with Marxism that are as critical of Soviet science as any right-wing tract. Speculation on the other realities by Soviet scientific fantasists inevitably draws attention to the disparity between the dialectical adventures of the human species promised by Marx and Engels, and the concrete practices of a repressive nationalistic and bureaucratic elite.
Zamyatin’s We adapted the Dostoevskyan theme of defining human freedom in a world ruled by the ideal of the total rationalization of life to scientific fantasy. We established the new parameters of this theme, in the collision between two topoi: the One State, representing totalitarian rationalization, and the Mephi’s world beyond the Green Wall, representing the desire for freedom. Just setting up the antithesis in these terms insured that Zamyatin’s book would be suppressed by the revolutionary authorities trying frantically to establish their legitimacy during the civil war and under extreme economic hardship. Later regimes also felt that Zamyatin’s shoe fit too well. Consequently,
Zamyatin’s book has never appeared in the Soviet Union other than in samizdat; it was not even printed in Russian as a book until 1952, more than thirty years after its completion.
The Strugatskys, by contrast, benefited from the liberalization of science under Khrushchev. They wrote comic fables, as utopian socialists, idealizing the ongoing dialectical progress they believed would continue post festum, when terrestrial class struggle has ended, and humanity can turn its collective energies to its struggle with external nature (Suvin, “Introduction” 3-4). But with the post-Krushchev chill, and the repression of the liberal scientific establishment in the Brezhnev years, the Strugatskys also joined the tradition of speculating about scientific rationality as a way to explore the problem of freedom in a despotic world. In their critical works of the mid and late ’60s, the Strugatskys adopted a paradigm similar to that of We. One work in particular, their first “underground” fiction, The Snail on the Slope, bears a striking formal, as well as thematic, resemblance to Zamyatin’s satire.
Knowing this, we would nonetheless be right to expect great differences between Zamyatin’s and the Strugatskys’ treatments. Zamyatin’s work emerged from the avantgardisme and expressionism of the Twenties. Zamyatin himself was a cultural phenomenon inconceivable in contemporary Soviet society. The radical individualism he preached has little resonance in a culture that has taught two generations of its children to view individualism as a vice and the collective as the origin and goal of all value. We must also keep in mind that before they became critical writers, the Strugatskys were the most popular writers of scientific fantasy in Eastern Europe, the first writers to have been read in space, and the literary spokesmen for the scientific “generation of the Sixties.” They did not abandon the socialist utopianism of their early work; indeed, as Darko Suvin writes, their critical works can be read as parables of the Soviet intelligentsia’s struggle to maintain a utopian morality in an increasingly totalitarian world (“Introduction” 3-4).
In the following pages, I will offer an analysis of the paradigm of the struggle between rationalization and freedom in We and The Snail on the Slope. Then I will attempt to show how The Snail on the Slope might be read as a critique of Zamyatin’s ambiguous representation of
freedom, from the standpoint of the utopianism of the “generation of the Sixties.” My argument has two parts. In the first, I offer a reading of Zamyatin’s depiction of freedom rather different from the usual reading: I will argue that the idea of freedom in We is purely formal, and therefore empty, and that We is actually a micromyth about the conflict between two aspects of determining nature outside human control and responsibility. In the second part, I will propose a way to read the Strugatskys’ novel as a response to Zamyatin, and an attempt to resolve the problem of the absence of freedom which appears to be
implicit in the antithetical paradigm of the novels. The Strugatskys’ resolution, I propose, will be the attempt to depict a dialectical third term: the committed intellectual.
I.
Zamyatin’s We has been justly considered the model of twentieth-century anti-utopian fiction. In that book, Zamyatin set up the dystopian norm for future writers, by reversing the axiological terms of nineteenth-century utopian fiction. Modern utopias had represented the liberal vision of historical struggle. On one side of the conflict was despotism, associated with the arbitrary rule of individuals whose authority derived from two quintessentially irrational sources, birth and force. On the other side was the (sometimes revolutionary) desire for freedom. For liberals from More on,2 the consummation of human freedom from feudal arbitrariness was the vision of a rational, equitable and peaceful social life for all humankind. In this way, the liberal ideal of the rationally self-ruled individual was conflated with millenialism, and synthesized in the vision of a rationally self-ruled society. Zamyatin turned this value-hierarchy upside down. We‘s One State is the fantastic logical extension of a victorious naive socialism. The One State depicts the despotism of rationality applied to even the smallest endeavors of each member of the collective. The revolutionary Mephi on the other hand embody the counter-rational, counter-equitable, and counter-peaceful society of Nietzschean individuals.3
Zamyatin often expressed the idea that human history is one of oppositions and reversals, in which only the contradiction of accepted norms creates value. In We, Zamyatin illustrates the process through a dynamic “turn of the turn,” the reversal of the new terms (i.e., the identification of despotism with rationality and of freedom with irrationality) into inchoate, newer terms. This transformation sets the novel in motion. We observe the One State on the verge of collapsing under its own contradictions. The “integration of the ultimate equation of the universe” (We 1) has little future after D-503’s fantasectomy; since his genius is an aspect of his imagination, very little of the former may be left after the excision of the latter. In any case, one can doubt whether anyone will be left to appreciate the vision of the integrated happy cosmos after the mass lobotomization of the Numbers. By the same token, the Mephi may be in the process of “entropizing” itself. The organization of the nomads into a revolutionary shock force fighting for the abstract goal of freedom from totalitarianism may be the first step toward the inevitable transformation of the movement’s energy into entropy, foretold by I-330 (We 176).
Zamyatin infuses these formal reversals of ideological antinomies with life by weaving political, sociological, and psychological ideas into a mythic web. He takes ostensibly distinct, and even contradictory, ideas from different realms of experience, and makes them aspects of the conflict between two informing, abstract essences, for which I-330 gives thermodynamic names: “energy” and “entropy” (We 164). The One State embodies not only the totalitarian political state, but also the entropy of social thought, and “psychological entropy”: the incapacity for creative thought. By identifying mental entropy with the desire for happiness, Zamyatin makes even humanity’s intangible spiritual desires reflect the same process as material social and physical tendencies. Each of these realms has entropy in common. In each, energy is so minutely hyperorganized that it cannot get out of its one steady state, and thus can no longer work for the progress of the species. The idea of energy implies the same identity of realms of experience. Politically, it is manifest in revolution; socially, in individualism; psychologically, in erotic desire and poetic inspiration; spiritually, in the desire for freedom. All share the natural world’s “negentropic” effusion of organic life, the creation of new conditions. The threads are drawn so tight, that each action, image and ellipsis in D-503’s narrative reveals some aspect of the eternal collision of the two essences. In Zamyatin’s universe, impersonal material forces replace spiritual forces. Although they have physical names, they resemble the oppositions-in-tension of Heraclitean metaphysics. Every
aspect of human life is ultimately naturalized, by being made an aspect
of physical (and hence, meta-physical) laws.
Zamyatin constructed We as an ideological micromyth, in Lévi-Strauss’s sense of the term myth: an ideal resolution of contradictions
perceived in reality, through their displacement into more manageable
oppositions (Structural Anthropology 224). Kathleen Lewis and Harry Weber have shown the extent to which We parodies the hyperbolic language of the Proletarian poets and A.K. Gastev, the poet and soon-to-be director of the Taylorist Central Institute of Labor (254-66). Zamyatin considered his sociofantasy to be part of an artistic-political polemic he was waging with the proletarian writers. He considered his work as a species of “warning literature” and he consistently referred to the writer as an oracle, whose duty is to make the present aware of its possible evolutions, and to counteract the smugness of the present. He considered the conflict of artistic wills and interests between the Proletkultists and the experimentalists as an important moment in the broader political conflict between philistine conformism and creativity. In We, this conflict is displaced to the level of metaphysical conflict between iron laws of the universe manifest in, and symbolized by, psychological, social and political experience.
In dualistic myths, the two forces of the duality are seldom treated completely equally. Even though they are formally commensurate in power, one side is generally considered affectively more worthy of devotion than the other. In the eternal struggle of Zoroastrianism between the dark Ahriman and the light Ahura-Mazda, for instance, it is usually the latter to whom devotion is due. In We, as well, readers generally feel a strong preference for I-330 and the freedom party, especially in the conflict with totalitarianism that most readers take to be the villain of the book. When read closely with Zamyatin’s own pronouncements, it is tempting to interpret the conflict between the One State and the Mephi as a struggle between good and evil, true freedom versus false happiness, irrational-creative-life affirming passion versus dehumanized-deathly-mechanical tyranny. Mephi good, One State bad; energy positive, entropy negative. Zamyatin himself invites this view in his essays of the late teens and early twenties, where he sometimes warns of the threat of entropy, and sometimes announces the inevitability of energy’s revolutions.
But the dualism must not be ignored. Even though Zamyatin constantly hints at the superiority of “freedom” over “happiness,” within the structure of We these affirmations are empty. For We does not represent freedom at all. Why so many readers consider the book to be a passionate defense of individual freedom deserves a discussion in its own right. In this space, I can offer only one possible explanation. Zamyatin’s technique is characteristic of what has been called insinuating satire. This mode implicates the reader in making a satiric judgment on folly without that judgment ever being made manifest in the text. In essence, the reader is seduced, simply by trying to decode a highly indirect narrative, into recognizing the “correct” point of view. Zamyatin is a brilliant seducer. He plays on the reader’s need to supply the terms of passion (“freedom”) — eroticism, lust, primitivist nostalgia, poetic inspiration, etc. — from his or her own experience, in order to fill in the ellipses D-503 does not want to fill in, and hence to “complete” D-503’s character. Since it is the reader who must dig the names of these passions out of what D-503 keeps back and unnamed, the reader is seduced into co-operating with the story (i.e., accepting its assumptions) just as D-503 is seduced into co-operating with Mephi. As readers of the book, we have very little information for deciding whether, by identifying with D-503’s desire, we are gaining the “author’s” insight into the human condition (authoritative wisdom), or being used by the persona, “Zamyatin,” for the immediate polemical purpose of undermining the Taylorites and the Proletkult. Even if, as Lewis and Weber suggest, D-503 is a parody of the Proletkult artists in the way Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is a parody of the “men of the sixties” (275), we are still left uncertain about how to evaluate I-330 and the Mephi. In the same way, as completers of D-503’s character, we have no way of determining whether I-330 authentically cares for D-503 as a subject (an “I”), or whether her behavior is dictated by the overriding need to gain access to the Integral. As readers, we are kept active by having to fill in the narrative’s ellipses, as D-503 is driven to fill I-330’s gaps — both activities feel better than speculating on the determining forces of the world. Yet both Zamyatin and I-330 may only be playing ironic games with our commitments.
Given the indeterminacy of We‘s narrative, we have no ethical or axiological basis for preferring the romantic revolutions of the Mephi to the totalitarian state, in spite of the distaste we may feel for the fantasectomizing One State. The two sides of the conflict are formally equal. The immediate success of the Mephi rebellion depends on the success I-330 has in dominating D-503; and the suppression of the rebellion appears to depend on the Benefactor’s ability to do the same thing. We is a brilliant ironic title — for D-503 can never be an “I.” His identity is a function either of the State, or of I-330. He is always “we.” The power of the Mephi, no less than that of the One State, derives from its capacity to captivate the reader’s surrogate. As the physicalistic terms imply, “energy” and “entropy” refer to power, not to ethical values. The One State is beyond good and evil, just like the Mephi. And the Mephi’s claim to freedom is as sham as the Benefactor’s claim to do good. Rather than liberating D-503 from domination and encouraging him to develop his own autonomy, I-330 and the Mephi offer him only another we-state. They provide him with an entrance into uncertainty, but with no way to choose.
In his essays, Zamyatin liked to link his thinking with Hegel’s. He specifically associated his idea of the heretic who denies the present in the interest of the future with the move in Hegel’s dialectic called the negation of the negation.
Today is doomed to die, because yesterday has died and because tomorrow shall be born. Such is the cruel and wise law. Cruel, because it dooms to terminal dissatisfaction those who today already see the distant heights of tomorrow; wise, because only eternal dissatisfaction is the guarantee of unending movement forward, of unending creativity. He who has found his ideal today, has already turned into the pillar of salt as was Lot’s wife, has already grown into the earth and moved no further. The world lives only by heretics: Christ the heretic, Copernicus the heretic, Tolstoy the heretic. Our creed is heresy: tomorrow is infallibly heresy for the today which has been turned into the pillar of salt, for the yesterday which has crumbled into dust. Today negates yesterday, but tomorrow is the negation of the negation: always the same dialectical path, which carries the world into infinity along a grandiose parabola. Thesis yesterday, antithesis today, synthesis tomorrow. (Quoted in Shane 23)
At least in terms of We, however, Zamyatin’s invocation of Hegel is
inappropriate. One important element of the dialectic is lacking in We: the progressive universalization of freedom. In what way the future foretold by I-330 or Zamyatin’s heretic-prophets is freer than the present, Zamyatin does not say. He indicates only that it is “other” than the present. Zamyatin’s fascination with the contestation of social norms leads him to describe history as a process in which abstract forces oscillate in power; the “content” of one becomes the other, but like Yeats’ gyres, they do not cease to be formally, and essentially, what they were from the beginning. They are always “conformity” and “contestation.” Movement into the future is not progressive here, in the dialectical sense. The achievements of Christ, Copernicus, Tolstoy — not to speak of I-330 and the Mephi — do not increase the general freedom of humanity. On the contrary, Zamyatin implies that whenever their views are incorporated by the mass of “world-maintaining individuals” (to use Hegel’s phrase), their energy is dissipated: “all truths are false: the essence of the dialectical process is that today’s truths become errors tomorrow” (Quoted in Shane 23). The heretical figures are embodiments only of formal opposition, not carriers of freedom. Past, present and future are merely empty abstractions. What gives value to Zamyatin’s great scientists and artists
is, ultimately, their mere formal opposition to the presents in which they lived.
Opposition of heresy to orthodoxy does not by itself produce progressively more freedom; and We does not go beyond this unmediated opposition. Because Zamyatin does not really represent the negation of the negation, he does not represent the Hegelian dialectic, either. Rather than motivating synthesis — and the possibilities of “freedom” — by raising reality to a qualitatively new level, Zamyatin’s artist-scientist acts as an opposite eternally linked to that which it opposes. Hegel describes unmediated opposition like this:
Positive and negative are supposed to express an absolute difference. The two however are at bottom the same: the name of either might be transferred to the other. Thus, for example, debts and assets are not two particular, self-subsisting species of property. What is negative to the debtor, is a positive to the creditor. A way to the east is also a way to the west. Positive and negative are therefore intrinsically conditioned by one another, and are only in relation to each other. The north pole of the magnet cannot be without the south pole, and vice versa. If we cut a magnet in two, we have not a north pole in one piece, and a south pole in the other. Similarly, in electricity the positive and negative are not two diverse and
independent fluids. In oppositions, the different is not confronted by any other, but by its other. (Quoted in Graham 56-7)
Unmediated opposition may create a universe of powerful transformations; but for Hegel and Marx both, freedom can emerge only with the transcendence of mere oppositions in society. Zamyatin provides only a return of opposition through an exchange of “content.” The energy party and the entropy party exist in the same way. They have value only in relation to one another. They may exchange their “content,” but they will always exist formally as mutually defining opposites. To prefer one over the other is as absurd as to prefer a positive over a negative pole. 4
We is not, then, a moral lesson about freedom in satiric guise. It is a micromyth about eternal, ahistorical oppositions that have little, if anything, to do with human responsibility or choice. The values attached to each side are results, not causes. In elaborating I-330’s famous analogy of happiness and freedom to entropy and energy (We 165), Zamyatin shows how little responsibility this putative freedom provides:
The law of revolution is not a social law. It is a cosmic, universal law-like the laws of the conservation of energy (entropy). Some day, an exact formula for the law of revolution will be established. And in this formula, nations, classes, stars-and books-will be expressed as numerical equations. (“On Literature, Entropy, etc.,” Ginsburg 107-8)
The terms in which the ostensibly anti-authoritarian polemic is cast
preclude the notion of autonomy. Like the vulgar Marxists he opposed, Zamyatin claims only that history and culture will behave in such and such a way, not that one should behave in a certain way based on ethical considerations. This way of imagining political freedom bears an odd resemblance to the way Zamyatin’s powerful adversary, Gastev, expressed his vision of the totally rationalized utopia, which was one of the sources for Zamyatin’s One State.
The mechanization, not only of gestures, not only of production methods, but of everyday thinking, coupled with extreme rationality, normalizes to a striking degree the psychology of the proletariat. It is this very feature which gives the proletarian psychology a striking anonymity, which allows one to qualify the individual proletarian unit as A, B, C or as 325.075 and O, etc …. The manifestations of such a mechanized collectivism are so alien to personality, so anonymous, that the movement of these collective-complexes approach the movement of things so that it seems there is no longer an individual human being, but even, normalized steps, faces without expression, a soul without lyricism, emotion measured not by a cry or a laugh, but by manometer and taxometer …. In this psychology, from one end of the world to the other, flow potent massive streams, creating one world head in place of a million heads. This tendency will next imperceptibly render individual thinking impossible, and thought will become an objective psychic process of a whole class, with systems of psychological switches and locks. (Quoted in Lewis and Weber 259)
Although they begin from radically different positions, Gastev and Zamyatin both subsume human actions to physics, and an “objective psychic process.” It is plausible that Zamyatin formulated his revolutionary hyperbole specifically to answer Gastev’s eschatology. If so, then in the heat of the polemic he expressed his position with the same mythopoeic scientistic premises as his opponent. In neither Gastev’s nor Zamyatin’s visions does individual, or even collective, responsibility for history play a part. Zamyatin wished to ridicule the machine-society of Gastev’s myth by subjecting the ”paradise” of uniformity to the physics of conflict. He believed he was defeating mechanical statics with thermodynamics. The classical thermodynamics Zamyatin learned from Meyer, however, does not provide for freedom within the system.
Whether Zamyatin presented freedom in this way in We because he did not think through the implications of his scientific analogy, or because he intended to create a thematic contradiction in the novel, is beside the point. (Even so, it is a very interesting question.) 5 We is a rhapsody of interlocking oppositions; Zamyatin’s paradoxes are so acute that they destroy his protagonist. Entropy and energy are mutually dependent and defining concepts in the same universe of discourse; they form a duality, neither term of which is “free” of the other. In the same way I would argue, that Gastev’s Factory-State and Zamyatin’s “law of revolution” are also mutually dependent and defining concepts in the same universe of discourse. In the same way, Zamyatin’s insistence on the poetic artist’s role as a prophet creates a de-personalizing paradox. Against the Proletkult vision of a whole class as a single subject, Zamyatin extolls individualism without a subject. By inflating the poetic subject, which is the supposed incarnation of spontaneity and freedom, Zamyatin in effect arrives at the same determinism — although by cosmic, and not human, laws. For the poet can only speak in accordance with iron laws. While Gastev depersonalizes the mass, Zamyatin depersonalizes the individual.
I do not intend these remarks as denigrations of We. I consider the novel a great work. But not of humanism. Rather, I find it most intelligible as Nietzschean satire on the morality of mores. I wish only to show here that the antithetical topology of We presents problems in the representation of freedom for writers like the Strugatsky brothers, who feel obligated to present their public with images of correct ethical action.
II.
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky came to immediate prominence during the youth-centered literary exuberance of the post-1956 de-Stalinization. At first, they merely modified the conventions of socialist realist adventure fantasy for science fictional purposes. Their theme was the adventure of the dialectic, and their special talent was for imagining new dialectical oppositions (or nova) 6 confronting the “thesis-world.” They would focus on the personal dilemmas and cognitive ambiguities that even true-minded socialist humanists might face, simply because they are human. The Strugatskys’ ability to portray ambiguous philosophical-scientific situations was unprecedented in Soviet science fiction, and they often used the science fictional novum as a way to go beyond the doctrinaire limits placed on science fiction before them. They were among the first Soviet writers to depict nonhumanoid aliens, alien intelligences superior to the human, and even the catastrophic effects of scientific research not necessarily linked to the “negative science” of capitalism.
In these early works, the Strugatskys represented the idealism of the confident, youthful corps of scientists and engineers, and the students beginning their scientific educations, in the early ’60s. For the generation of the Sputnik, science had become the consummate utopian activity. Its methods seemed to embody the ideals of honesty and truthfulness, and hence the heroic humanistic challenge to the immorality of the personality cult and Lysenkoism. Its achievements seemed to be creating the material means for fulfilling the conditions of utopian life in the future. And its organization seemed to exemplify the ideal of communal work on an international scale.
By the mid-60s, however, the Strugatskys had become less interested in depicting heroic adventures of cognition in the external world of nature. They turned to the theme of the confusion within the social practice of science resulting from the bureaucratization of research and the vitiation of science’s original utopian goals. Contemporary models for such confusion were not hard to come by. The actual conditions of the Soviet scientific intelligentsia in the early ’60s had fostered a double-bind. On the one hand, most of the Lysenkoite pressures to subject research to the power and doctrine of the Party were eased, and many scientific institutions were liberated, in a series of administrative reorganizations, from direct accountability to the Party. At the same time, Lysenko retained Khrushchev’s enthusiastic support, and the new scientific administrators doubted the lastingness of the reforms. The Party, moreover, which could never be ignored, continued to maintain that science was to be guided by the Party and its philosophers. 7
The deposing of Khrushchev in 1964 (and of Lysenko immediately afterward) brought on a new series of “reforms” and a new double-bind. To limit further damage to the new leadership’s authority, and to insure efficiency after the debacles of Khrushchev’s “pragmatic” regime, controls were tightened on the scientific institutions, and the Party gradually regained direct control over the scientific establishment. In reaction to the liberalization of Eastern Europe and its widespread support among Soviet scientists, the ideological correctness of scientists once again became a matter dear to the authorities. Thus, the repudiation of the ideological distortion of scientific theory (i.e., Lysenko’s “Michurinist biology” and the concept of “socialist science”) led paradoxically to the intensified repression of scientific practice, particularly the extension of censorship and the curtailing of foreign travel. Some highly respected academicians might protest the deepening reaction with the hope of moral support from the West. Most scientific workers faced quick and severe reprisals for ideological deviation.
The cultural chill and enforced conformism of the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime came as a defeat for the generation of the Sixties. Beginning in 1966, the Strugatskys abandoned their post festum topos and its idealism. Influenced by the Polish fantasist, Stanislaw Lem, and the newly translated works of Kafka, their fiction became less “extrapolative,” and increasingly “analogical” (Suvin, “Introduction” 5): they wrote less about the golden future of the species than about the present’s strenuous struggle to maintain its integrity. In 1968, at the height of their popularity, and under attack from influential conservative critics, the Strugatskys penned what Suvin has called their credo: “Each scientist must be a revolutionary humanist; otherwise the inertia of history will shunt him into the ranks of irresponsible scoundrels leading the world to its destruction” (Quoted in “Introduction” 19).
The Snail on the Slope was the first of the Strugatskys’ works to be suppressed in the Soviet Union. It consists of two independent and complementary narratives, each of which was published once in the Soviet Union, and subsequently republished abroad in unauthorized editions. 8 The tales are set, respectively, in a vast, archetypal Forest, and in the labyrinthine, fantastically bureaucratic scientific institute, the Forest Research and Exploitation Authority, known as the Directorate. The first tale tells of a romantic humanist named Pepper, who has come to the Directorate as a sort of visiting fellow. Pepper represents the literary intellectual. He is treated as a sad clown, brought in to entertain the aimless Directorate personnel with his idealistic antics. He approaches the Forest with a romantic’s longing to commune with unmediated Nature; and he is partly right — the Forest does function as an inscrutable Other, resembling the mysterious sentient planet in Lem’s Solaris. The Directorate, however, with its absurd routines and all powerful but always absent Director, is not interested in learning about the Forest. It wants only to destroy the Forest’s mysteries. Unable to acquire permits to visit the Forest or leave the Directorate, Pepper finally abandons his hopes for a moral world-transformation through the Forest. He discovers one day that he himself has been made, inexplicably, the Director. He acquiesces to the tradition based “in the depths of time” of issuing at least one new order every day, including one proclaiming involvement with chance a crime.
The second tale centers on Kandid, a microbiologist from the Directorate’s bioresearch station. After his helicopter has crashed in the Forest, Kandid is adopted and nursed back to health by a village of
aboriginal Forest dwellers, who even provide him with a very young wife; thus they include Kandid in their society, even though they believe he is their mental inferior, a “dummy.” Most of the villagers appear to have lost their capacity for reflection, and live with no sense of the future or the past, perpetually repeating their words and acts. Kandid too finds he must exert great effort just to maintain a train of thought. This befuddlement seems to be linked to a mysterious transformation of the Forest’s geography and climate, which is known to the villagers as “the Accession.” In the course of a dogged journey to return to the biostation, Kandid discovers that the Accession is the present phase of a grandiose project to reshape the Forest and to destroy the Directorate, guided by the “splendid Maidens,” a society of former native women who have acquired the power of parthenogenesis. They also control various experimental life-forms, viruses, organic machines, zombies, and a mysterious lilac fog.
Although they view men as an evolutionary mistake, the Maidens are not murderously hostile to Kandid when he stumbles on a “troika” of them near their strange omphalic city shrouded in a lilac fog. They believe he might be reeducated to serve them. But after his girl-wife has been taken off by her mother, now a Maiden, Kandid escapes and returns to his village. With a scalpel found on his journey, Kandid defends his village from the zombie-like “deadlings” used by the Maidens to abduct the village women. He remains intent on returning home, but for the moment he accepts solidarity with the villagers who healed and nurtured him. Kandid acknowledges that the Maidens, with their technology and pure female communism, may be an evolutionary necessity. To resist them may be to resist natural law. But he decides that the values of human respect and compassion may demand precisely such resistance, the assertion of individual autonomy in the face of historical necessity.
The allegorical topoi of The Snail on the Slope, the Forest and the Directorate, are familiar. They correspond to the antithetical worlds of We: the One State’s city of rationality and the florid wilderness beyond the Green Wall. Like We, The Snail on the Slope divides the world into two warring regions of force: a locus of “entropy” — self-enclosed, overrationalized, masculine, intent on subduing organic processes with technologies of control; and a locus of “energy” — fluid, organic, feminine, the source of the forces that will ultimately invade and disrupt the sterile order of utopia. Since We‘s city satirizes the ideal of a totally rationalized society, it retains some of the attractions of the ideal; it has its cool beauties, its radiant glass, its reflecting pavements, its ice-blue clarity. The Strugatskys’ Directorate, by contrast, satirizes the actual result of trying to enact this ideal. 9 The Directorate is a Kafkaesque mess — always dark, muddy, and dusty. The Directorate’s ostensible object of observation, the Forest, is not even visible from it. Walls and buildings block the view at every turn. The staff is always in a muddle, fiddling with make-work. No one has any idea of what to do, beyond the abstract — and impossible — goal of eradicating the Forest. Nothing works right. Nothing changes. The real purpose of the Directorate is not to study the Forest, but to extend its patriarchal, bureaucratic authority over it, and to impose the reason of rationalization into the heart of Nature. (Resembling in this the goal of sending the rocket-ship Integral to far galaxies in order to subjugate their peoples to “the beneficent yoke of reason” [We 1 ]). Even this goal is stymied by the bureaucracy’s obsession with its self-complicating procedures and the staff’s genius in evading them. Ultimately, everything in the Directorate is inspired by the desire to prevent change. The sign over the door in the Directorate’s office reads “No Exit.”
Zamyatin’s and the Strugatskys’ entropotopias share certain symbolic qualities as well. Most important is the identification of entropy in both books with the putatively masculine desire to establish hierarchies, rationalize all processes, and to dominate Nature with technological violence. Zamyatin’s gender-typing leaves no doubt that the One State is absolutely patriarchal. The Directorate is also dominated by men. 10
The Forest is a more difficult constellation of symbols to explain, for its allegorical significance is not clear. It might be read as the fluid ground of being, the source of all that changes according to the laws of nature and history, where new things are created and the old destroyed. Its fluid topography changes so quickly that Directorate’s maps of it are always already obsolete. Its life forms are so plastic that there is no way to distinguish animal from plant, or even the animate from the inanimate. There is no determining the direction of the drastic natural metamorphoses that are constantly occurring.
In both We and The Snail on the Slope, the forces of creative energy are associated with femininity: with I-330 and the Maidens, respectively. Symbolically, this creative power is manifest in both books as female lubricity. 11 The power of these feminine forces is in their ability to undermine male rationality, analogous in both novels with castration. In her role as femme fatale, I-330 is an archetypal vamp. D-503 never tires of alluding to her “bite smile” and association of blood. Her manipulation of D-503 to gain control of his rocket, in order to liberate the city (and perhaps even to blast it with the rocket’s burners (We 174), underscores that the success of the Mephi rebellion depends on the destruction of patriarchal power through a woman’s appropriation of its main symbol and tool. The Maidens’ power is similarly threatening to the association of male potency and positivistic science. But in The Snail on the Slope there is the significant difference that there is very little male potency left to threaten. The Maidens’ organic science is clearly superior to that of the Directorate’s men. The Maidens’ name for the Directorate, the “White Rocks” (Snail 182), is an appropriate metaphor for the sterile evolutionary vestige the Maidens are leaving behind. 12
But there are other differences between the Mephi and the Maidens. Just as the Directorate shows that the entropy of the One State leads not to the beauties of a Crystal Palace, but to rotten banality, so the Maidens represent the glorious Nietzschean Mephi as a society of quasi-Stalinist projectors. Their forest transformation resembles closely Stalin’s All-Union Program for the Transformation of Nature, which was to include changing the climate, eliminating deserts, and constructing gigantic water projects (Medvedev, Soviet Science 61-2). Their indifference to the Forest dwellers, along with the snatches of their rhetoric that Kandid catches (Snail 52), indicates that the Maidens are hardly the purveyors of universal freedom. By separating their work and society from the humanity of the past, the Maidens deprive the reader of the only source of intelligibility and meaning s/he has. For Kandid (and through him, the Strugatskys) the Maidens’ Forest represents not freedom, but unintelligible change.
In The Snail on the Slope, the Strugatskys transmute Zamyatin’s transmutations. They too depict antithetical worlds of competing superpowers closely associated with energy and entropy, freedom (to transform nature) and happiness (in conformity). But unlike the world of We, in which, as I tried to show, the ethical deadlock is beneath the surface, the absence of morality and freedom in The Snail on the Slope is glaring. As we have seen, the Strugatskys consider themselves spokesmen for “revolutionary humanism.” They view their science fiction in the Eastern European liberal tradition as a form of public literary-moral instruction. They attempt to solve the problem of moral circularity implicit in the two-world topology through a third term with no counterpart in We: Kandid, the image of personal autonomy gained through commitment.
The character of Kandid allows the reader to construct a position simultaneously in the midst of things and on the sidelines of the superpower conflict. At the novel’s conclusion, Kandid meditates on the amorality of the historical necessity that creates the Maidens and the Accession, and recognizes that he himself is not “outside morality” (Snail 242). The Accession confronts him with the choice between accepting pure necessity (and hence, pure power) and the perhaps quixotic solidarity with a nearly helpless humanity. Kandid suddenly recognizes that he has begun to view the world ”from the side” (Snail 243), and this estranged point of view is the necessary issue of his existential estrangement from both power-centers. It is this alienation that provides Kandid with the conditions for a choice, the opportunity to exercise his autonomy.
Thus, whereas We seduces and plays with the reader, ultimately reducing strangeness to interminable oppositions, the Strugatskys point to a place on the margin of oppositions. Suvin has called The Snail on the Slope an open-ended parable (“Introduction” 6). It is important to set this mode against Zamyatin’s myth of eternal opposition and exchange. For although Kandid cannot immediately influence the conflict between the Maidens and the Directorate, or save the old Forest society, he preserves traditional humane values while observing his antagonists. The conclusion of the struggle cannot be extrapolated from the conclusion of the novel — hence its open-endedness. But the presence of Kandid allows for the possibility, even if only the possibility, that human freedom may influence the future. In We, the physical-historical cycle allows for no future significantly different from the present. A tertium non datur holds.
Kandid represents the possibility of synthesis. He is less than a force, yet curiously more complex than the Directorate or the Forest. He contains elements of both topoi. He originates from the biostation, which is on the cusp of the two. His specialty is microbiology, the study of the smallest beings’ relation to the living whole — a perspective singularly lacking both in the Directorate’s bureaucracy and the Accession’s grandiose engineering. In a novel that foregrounds gender symbolism to such a degree, his status is peculiar. Although he is a man, he refuses to dominate women, or to be dominated by them (as Pepper is). In a world where masculine “hard” technologies wrestle with feminine “soft” ones, Kandid has his particular tool: the scalpel. Perhaps left specifically for him by a former male biostation colleague now serving the Maidens, the scalpel is conventionally associated with masculine attributes. It is inorganic and, of course, emphatically phallic. It is the symbolic tool of analytical reason, the knife with which organic tissue is cut to lay the interior bare, and for excising diseased tissue. Its immediate function for Kandid is the negative one of keeping the villagers from dying out. With it, he destroys the otherwise indestructible “deadlings,” and thus prevents the Maidens from abducting the villagers’ future. He is a counter-castrator, using a masculine tool to protect his community. Moreover, the scalpel is only a tool of small-scale defense. It is not an alternative to technology. It is only effective against one of the Accession’s vehicles, and probably has no power against swampings, viruses and the lilac fog. Kandid then can only preserve the autonomy of his own beleagured community, wait, and observe. He cannot stand as an alternative to the historical process that divides reality into two inhuman power blocs. He is neither revolutionary nor a power-protected positivist.
Darko Suvin has interpreted the tales of The Snail on the Slope as parables about the two paths available to the modern intelligentsia. “In
relation to the other human characters,” Suvin writes, “as well as to the
overriding and unmanageable presences of the Forest and the Directorate, Pepper and Kandid finally come to stand for the two horns of an alternative facing modern intellectuals (as the text sees it): accommodation and refusal” (“Introduction” 13). I would add this to Suvin’s point. Pepper’s “accommodation” re-enacts D-503’s submission to the Benefactor. For Pepper, the desperate need for meaning and community, and his feeling of exclusion from the primal reality of the Forest, are so great that he is ultimately willing to accept the Directorship as a surrogate. And the Directorate is perfectly willing to make submission palatable. By making Pepper its executive, the Directorate satisfies his need to be above the norm, without losing any of its actual power — which, in fact, lies precisely in its capacity to make the abdication of choice seem like the goal of freedom. Pepper is a parody of autonomy. Unable to find true reason, he settles for rationalization.
Kandid, on the other hand, does not succumb to despair. His “refusal” is made easy by the fact that he has been forcibly and accidentally uprooted from his milieu. He enacts the role of the free-floating intellectual, whose interests correspond not to those of a particular class, nation, or sex, but to the ideal social life: utopia. Since the values of the ideal are based on the best qualities of the past selected from the chaos of history, Kandid is a “conservative”; his appropriate commitment is to the oldest “organic” culture in the novel, the villagers’. (It is interesting to note, in this regard, that Kandid’s tale can be read as a Mannheimian commentary on Lukács’ ideas in History and Class Consciousness. The possibility of alliance with the ”emergent class” is wide open for Kandid. The Maidens offer him the opportunity for a reorientation of his gifts; and there’s evidence that at least one of Kandid’s former Directorate colleagues [Karl Etinghof] has chosen that path [Snail 149-52]. Instead, Kandid chooses to uphold ideal social and spiritual values and the actually existing traditional community. The Maidens’ Stalinist language and project leave little doubt that this emergent class is completely amoral, and absolutely hostile to the humanist ideal. From the Maidens’ side, since they are no longer completely “human,” in the usual sense, the usual “humanism” means nothing to them.)
The Snail on the Slope thus reverses the political-axiological reversal Zamyatin had effected in We. The Strugatskys return to the liberal ideal, now seen as a limited, temporary holding pattern. When both the global forces of the superpower struggle are hostile to human freedom, the book seems to say, then the agent and locus of freedom must be the one that liberalism has traditionally maintained: the moral individual. This liberalism is not, of course, the possessive individualism usual in the West. It harks back rather to the pre-revolutionary Russian tradition of the socially conscious intelligentsia, which believed that it mediated between the masses and the ruling classes through its “disinterested” regard for truth in the service of the nation.
But whether this moral of individual rectitude is effectively represented in the novel may be disputed. Few works of science fiction in any culture are as indirect as The Snail on the Slope. This obliqueness leaves unclear whether we can speak of an assertion of anything at all, or whether the novel is ultimately “about” the profound ambivalence and confusion of its own conditions of creation. One reads the novel with the feeling that the contradictions and problems of the Forest and the Directorate are not really intelligible at all — to anyone. Kandid’s humanism, the only element of rest and hope in the confusion, cannot compete in vividness with the grotesque transformations of the Forest’s nature or the Directorate’s paralogisms. We pay less attention to Kandid’s hard-won tentative conclusion and Pepper’s “fall into power” (“Introduction” 13), than to the virtuosity of the Strugatskys’ incomprehensible inventions and the psychoanalytic questions about the book’s gender symbolism. Nor does the association of the quasi-Stalinist world-transforming project with historical necessity and evolutionary transformation give confidence that the authors themselves have much faith in Kandid’s defense of human values.
This sense that the unintelligibility of the superpower struggle is the more interesting problem than Kandid’s resolution to the problem of freedom, is reinforced by the curious literary provenance of Kandid’s tale. The parabolic, science-fiction fantasy about confronting alien realities takes shape, ironically, in the venerable pattern of the liberal political novel developed by Walter Scott in his historical novels. Scott characteristically treats the theme of the young representative of a new
culture growing into moral and political awareness by participating in the collision of radically different historical cultures. The unremarkable hero usually allies himself, at first, with the culture fighting against his own native culture; or, alternatively, he is only thought to have joined “the other side.” In the course of the conflict, one side proves itself to be anachronistic, while the other — the hero’s own — shows itself to be intolerant and arrogant, even though it is historically necessary. In Scott’s plots, the romanticized archaic culture must inevitably perish, but the young hero usually learns to respect its ancient codes of honor. Through a marriage with a woman. of the moderate faction of the other side, the hero symbolically synthesizes whatever still remains to be synthesized of the two cultures.
The Strugatskys cannot have been unfamiliar with this mode. Scott’s work is highly regarded in the Soviet Union; it can even be argued that some of the formal models for socialist realist fiction derive from Scott’s technique of mixing sociological realism of background detail with a romance plot mythicizing the emergent social order.13 Many characteristics of this romantic historical realism are evident in The Snail on the Slope in displaced form. Rather than a conflict between two sociocultural value systems, The Snail on the Slope depicts the struggle of three worlds: the Maidens, the Directorate, and the villagers. Further, it is the “meta-organic” society of the Maidens that appears superior to the abstract relations of the Directorate. This reverses the historical hierarchy of Scott’s mythology of the ascendance of the rationalistic bourgeoisie over “organic” feudalism. Kandid does not ally himself with the Maidens, even though the option is open to him. We see Kandid smack in the middle. If he is destined to return to the Directorate with a synthesis, we have no information about it. We only know that he has begun to gain the ironic perspective of the outsider. Scott usually goes on from there. His historical myths are all comic, for all the conflicts are resolved in a synthesis of sociocultural interests. The Strugatskys could not have allowed the conventional synthesis via marriage, with which Scott “synthesized” English liberalism and the ideology of conservative nationalism. No Maiden is likely to marry Kandid. The Maidens are, a priori, those who do not amalgamate the past; their parthenogenic chastity corresponds to the breaking of contact with society. Thus there is nothing to make the emergence of the new evolutionary prodigies seem palatable, necessary and intelligible.
While this open-endedness may create a sense of greater complexity than Scott’s realistic comedy, in other ways it creates greater problems. The Strugatskys have the reader ally with a positive hero, capable of existing outside his conditions. He carries rectitude in his heart, while the world disintegrates around him. His determination to return to the Directorate may be a vestige of the original tale, which appeared in 1966, and thus may have preceded the completion of Pepper’s tale (which appeared two years later). 14 But whatever the issue might be for Kandid, the reader, who has been privy to Pepper’s story, knows that the Directorate has nothing to offer in opposition to the Accession. Kandid is consequently a character without any other possible home than homelessness. In proposing a moral, however tentative, the Strugatskys depict profound ambivalence. While they represent the density of a fantastic reality with great inventiveness, they do not achieve a moral design. They leave their moral agent “lost in the Forest.” Not until their masterpiece, Roadside Picnic, in 1972, do the Strugatskys master this ambivalence, by allowing themselves to be carried with it into complete uncertainty.
Zamyatin did not encounter these problems. The moral-political message of We is only one aspect of the myth of the eternal conflict of energy and entropy, which Zamyatin writes with brilliant economy. While the Strugatskys write about global confusion, and create confusion while representing it, Zamyatin created a myth of the conflict of forces destined to act eternally in the same way — a destiny that invites artistic clarity and brilliance, if little moral and political guidance.
Notes
This essay is an expanded version of a paper presented at the Utopia and its Discontents: Zamyatin, Orwell, Mayakovsky conference held at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in April of 1984.
1. Other works of importance on the subjects are Popovsky, Buccholz, and the two books by Zhores Medvedev.
2. The inclusion of More in the company of liberal utopians bears some explanation. More’s Utopia is more ironical and indeterminate (if such a modern phrase may be used) than its descendants. I do not think a sound case can be made now for More’s advocacy of utopian social relations. But liberal and socialist advocates of utopia who come after More consider him their precursor, which has led to detaching Utopia from its complex social and literary context. More was, of course, neither anti-clerical nor anti-feudal per se. The strongest critiques of arbitrariness in Utopia are leveled against nascent capital- ist landowners who enclose their lands. On the ideology of liberalism, see Mannheim 219-29 and Ruggiero.
3. Zamyatin considered Nietzsche — along with Dostoyesvky and Schopenhauer — one of his models (“On Literature, Revolution, etc.” Ginsburg 110). It is surprising that so little has been written about Nietzsche’s influence on Zamyatin and We, which can be easily interpreted as a fable of Nietzschean problems. Also interesting in this respect is the Strugatskys’ ambivalent fascination with the amorality of evolutionary prodigies, who are nonetheless justified in their contempt for the deadly conformity of philistine civilization (the Maidens in The Snail on the Slope, the Zursmansors/”slimies” of The Ugly Swans [1972], and the Visitors of Roadside Picnic [1972]). The whole of twentieth-century science fiction might in fact be read as an ongoing commentary on Nietzschean philosophy. (One need only think of how many major science fiction writers have treated the theme of superman/superwoman: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Cordwainer Smith, Bester, Sturgeon, Stapledon, Dick, LeGuin, Russ, Efremov, Savchenko, Snegov, Lessing, Kubrick, Spielberg, the list goes on).
4. In this context, I want only to show that neither Zamyatin’s conception of the dialectic, nor his conception of freedom are consonant with Hegel’s philosophy, and that the invocation of Hegel is a sign of the philosophical immaturity of Zamyatin’s thinking about freedom. A more interesting question, for another context, is the closeness of Zamyatin’s satirical notion of “happiness” exemplified by the One State to Hegel’s conception of “freedom” as the full self-conscious rational self-determination of the individual in accordance with objective laws and institutions that are rational and universal. See Richard L. Schacht, “Hegel on Freedom,” in MacIntyre (289-328).
5. We is particularly interesting for contemporary criticism because of the obvious split between its formal-psychological information and the social-political information. Zamyatin may well have been aware — even if only to ignore — that basing a fiction on paradoxes cannot yield any other message than paradox. One need not invoke the language of deconstructive criticism to show that We‘s schizophrenic journal-narrative can never be reconciled through a “holophrenic” point of
view. It is in the nature of the book’s cosmos — because it is inscribed in the narrative technique — that the duality can not be dissolved, or even balanced. And yet, not even the plot can be deciphered without the reader positing precisely such a point of view transcending the flux of oppositions. Even the title breaks itself free of decideable meaning. “We” can be taken to properly signify any number of distinct combinations of “consciousness:” D-503 and the One State, D-503 and I-330, I-330 and the Mephi, D-503 and “the reader,” “the reader” and “the author,” “the reader” and “the critic,” etc. This relentless shifting simultaneously enables interpretation (since meaning must be shared) and satirizes it (since every we-state in We is based on ego-less self-subjugation to power). The analogous relentless shifting of interpretations of the text, from the acceptance of responsible “authority” to a recognition of a responsible duality and back again, generates the ideological contradictions inscribed in the novel as the (moral?) superiority of freedom/energy over happiness/entropy versus the formal equivalence (in power) of energy and entropy. Because Zamyatin never does define or represent freedom, however, the opposition between the two value-structures is less “in the text” than between the reader’s desires and the novel’s pseudo-cognitive myth.
6. The best application of Ernst Bloch’s idea of the novum to science fiction is Suvin’s discussion in Chapter 4 of Metamorphoses.
7. For discussions of the administrative reforms of the Sixties, Medvedev, Soviet Science Chapter 7, and Greenberg.
8. According to Diana Greene, the two stories do not appear together before Myers’ English version. Possev (Munich) republished Pepper’s tale under the tittle Ulitka na sklone (The Snail on the Slope) in 1972. Kandid’s tale was republished by Ardis (Ann Arbor) in 1981, under the title Les. When the Kandid section appeared in 1966 for the first time in the anthology Ellenskii sekret, “the Strugatskys described this part as ‘fragments’ of ‘the novella [povest‘J on which we are presently
working,’ and explained that the completed work might ‘appear unusual because essentially it represents, as it were, two novellas in one and contains two totally independent plots.”‘ Greene 2-3; 18.
9. The Directorate may also stand for the actual cities of reason developed by Khrushchev in the late Fifties and early Sixties, the so-called Science Cities, like Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk, where over 60,000 scientists, technicians and support staff were emplaced in an effort to centralize research and development. The Soviet press hailed these Science Cities in language resembling D-503’s panegyrics at the beginning of We. Popovsky provides an example, from a report
by one of his colleagues, Yuri Krelin, on a visit to Akademgorodok in 1968.
As you drive around the city you marvel and rejoice at the beauty of he conifers, the central complex consisting of the hotel, post office, shops and film theatre. All round the outskirts are delightful-looking villas inhabited by academicians and doctors of sciences. And the institutes, the nerve centers of the place, are beautiful too. It is hard to say what is so attractive: the buildings are the same as elsewhere in the country, the homes, shops, and places of work are no different, but everything is beautiful nevertheless. It may be because of the woods, or because you feel that all these common everyday houses are blessed with a spirit of their own, a sense of truth and of the future, a spirit of science and of the intellect. … You walk about the city, into the shops and among the crowds — yet “crowd” is the wrong word…. I have never seen such an almost unbroken succession of intelligent, sensitive faces. The feeling grew on me that every woman I saw was beautiful and that the men were all clever, athletic, and handsome. (Quoted in Popovsky 160].
Ironically, by 1968, many of the science cities were becoming alienated compounds, ridden with alcoholism and class discrimination. A hotbed of protest against the show trials of dissident writers and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Akademgorodok was pulled to a short leash in 1970, and placed under the municipal supervision of Novosibirsk, thus losing its autonomy. (Popovsky Chapter 7; see also Medvedev Soviet Science 75-7).
10. In We, there are only four women characters (including the first dissident in Entry 22, whom D-503 mistakes for I-330). Two of these are “dissidents” (I-330 and the false I-330); one, 0-90, ultimately defies and leaves the One State to bear her illicitly conceived child. The only
woman upholding the city’s laws is U-, and she is a woman manque. She is associated with repressed sexuality (she is unable to tell the difference between a threat of sex and a threat of murder) and perverted motherhood (she believes cruelty is the greatest show of love for children). The Benefactor and the Guardians are men; and the ultimate symbol of state power is the phallic rocket, the Integral. The only vaginal-uterine (or even simply curved) object of state is the Gas Bell, an instrument of torture. At the Directorate, there is an ethic of violently subjugating women sexually (exemplified by the driver Acey’s nostalgic reminiscences of rape), corresponding to the researchers’ desire to rape the Forest. Furthermore, the Directorate’s few women (most of whom occupy markedly servile positions in the hierarchy) seem to have internalized the male dominance in sinister ways. The best analysis of the grotesque gender-typing in The Snail on the Slope can be found in Greene.
11. I-330’s power is not just fluid, it is liquid. She is associated with sap and fiery sexual juices, with red blood and green liqueur. The Maidens carry this association even further. They effect parthenogenesis in steaming, amniotic lakes; in their experimentation, they particularly favor “swamping” previously dry areas, or submerging villages under lakes; they make the atmosphere extremely humid; and their most powerful weapon is the lilac fog (doubtless a cousin of D-503’s yellow fog). The Maidens make the Forest so liquid, it invariably swallows the Directorate’s exploratory phallic machines (e.g., Kandid’s helicopter, Acey’s motorcycle). Unlike Zamyatin, the Strugatskys depict this female lubricity as repulsive and threatening. Greene 9-12.
12. For all its political and sociological interest, the most interesting aspect of The Snail on the Slope may be its gender symbolism. Few non-feminist works foreground sexual politics in such an elaborately displaced way — all the more interesting, in that the authors may not have been aware of the political dimension of their representation of women and men. It is plausible that, in their desire to describe rationally indecipherable phenomena, they “allowed” themselves more unconscious symbolism, including unconscious valuations of sexual relations, than they might have otherwise. (There is a precedent for such a practice: Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris was also written “unconsciously” (correspondence with author) and also reveals a deep ambivalence about the relations of men and women, through the love affair of Kelvin and Rheya.)
13. Georg Lukács’ admiration for Scott is well-known. See The Historical Novel 30-63.
14. A question perhaps only the Strugatskys can answer is whether the Kandid and Pepper tales were written simultaneously and only published two years apart, or whether the stories’ appearances roughly coincide with their completion. If the latter is the case, it has a significant bearing on the interpretation of the book as a whole. In 1966, the year Kandid’s tale appeared in Ellinskii sekret, many people in the Soviet Union perceived a power-struggle between the “moderates” and the hard-line Stalinists for the state and party leadership. This fear of “re-Stalinization” may have inspired the depiction of the “splendid Maidens.” By 1968, the year Pepper’s tale appeared in Baikal, the Strugatskys had clearly become demoralized about the regime’s measures to suppress the influence of European humanist Marxism on the Soviet intelligentsia –which led ultimately to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the same year. If the two tales were completed two years apart, it is possible that Kandid’s hopes from the Directorate were originally intended as a glimmer of hope, a
true destination for the intellectuals in a city of reason. Pepper’s tale, of course, depicts the Directorate as a version of Kafka’s Castle, and thus transforms Kandid’s hope into dark delusion.
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