The Strugatsky Brothers: Critical Message in the Soviet Science-Fiction Novel

Abstract

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky expressed the criticism of the USSR regime by means of their science-fiction novels, showing in their imagined worlds the imperfections of the Soviet system and their concerns in relation to human nature, reflecting on its potentials and limitations regarding the development of a better future. Through their novels, they embodied the archetype of the Soviet intellectual committed to the ideal of a communist society and disillusioned by the reality of an authoritarian, inefficient and repressive regime. Their conflicts with the strict Soviet censorship voiced the diffused wish of an internal transformation in order to create a more tolerant and human system. This view was displayed through the use of allegories and the conception of fictional worlds, aiming to suggest parallelisms with the USSR, which were understood by the contemporary Soviet readers. The dystopia was a motif that incarnated the pessimism of these authors in regard to the possibilities of progress for the human kind, as it is shown in the novels Hard to Be a God, The Doomed City and Roadside Picnic. Their works became an example inside the USSR for the criticism of Soviet model till its fall, which coincided with the death of Arkadi Strugatsky and the end of their literary production.