“The older Arkady and the younger Boris began as devout communist idealists in thrall of the revolutionary Soviet project, and they ended as its harshest critics and opponents, equating the drabness and nightmares of Kafka’s world with Soviet values.”
“Science fiction for them, however, was not merely a ploy, a method for speaking of the forbidden through allegories and Aesopian language; it was the only suitable artistic response to their time’s moral and technological collapses and a deeply philosophical enterprise.”
“Two major propositions emerge from their historicist philosophical worldview. The first, partially borrowed from the great Stanisław Lem, presents the human-centric view of the universe as fundamentally flawed. Human history is nothing but “a picnic on the side of the road” in the wider cosmos, to use the title of their most well-known work, making perennial human challenges not merely insoluble but also insignificant.”
““Progress” for the Strugatskys becomes a deeply suspect word.”
“The second proposition, their version of “civilization and its discontents,” suggests that humanity is doomed because it can never resolve the tension between chaos and order.”
“Chaos, which signifies freedom but also destruction, should be controlled, but any attempt at doing so on a large scale turns into an enactment of terror by the state, the party, or whatever other institution takes its place. Not enamored with religion, anarchy, democracy, or utopia, the brothers see this tension between order and chaos as the only truly intractable facet of human politics and life.”
“Their most developed and longest attempt at describing it (and perhaps unraveling it) is the novel The Doomed City, skillfully translated for the first time into English by Andrew Bromfield.”
“The plot takes place in a city with “infinite Void to the West and infinite Solidity to the east,” where the sun is extinguished and reignited at will.”
“In his commentary, Boris invariably returns to Vasily Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate, whose main idea was the unity of the Nazi and Stalinist systems, a concept which also becomes the central thrust of The Doomed City.”
“Andrei links the necessity of communism with the problem of chaos, which must be mastered and transformed “into the new beautiful forms of human relations that are called communism.” Again, this philosophic idealism quickly and (as the Strugatskys insist) inevitably transforms into a thirst for power, the satisfaction of his basest desires, demagoguery, and a fundamental disregard for individual human life.”
““That was no Experiment,” he reasons. “And that city was more terrible than this one […] In that city nothing was more ordinary than death. But the authorities still functioned, and while the authorities functioned, the city stood.” The authorities, he now realizes, didn’t care about “us”: individuals did not exist for them, only an amorphous “P for Population” which could be acceptably sacrificed or even eradicated. The siege becomes a window to the totalitarian and, particularly, Stalinist mindset.”
“The trauma of the siege forces Andrei to return to the problem of chaos, “intrinsic to man,” and the Bolshevik ideology’s attempt at subduing it, “doing it in,” fated like any ideology to succeed “not for very long, and only at the cost of spilling a lot of blood.””
“Andrei rhetorically asks: “Who is really the good person here? The one who aspires to allow the free play of chaos — a.k.a. freedom, equality, and brotherhood — or the one who aspires to reduce […] ‘social entropy’ to the minimum?””
“The problem that he discovers is that this “free play of chaos” is equally futile since people, driven by their animalistic instincts, strive not for equality and brotherhood but power.”