Pseudonyms of the Strugatskys. The Strugatsky brothers: bibliography, creativity and interesting facts

Several years ago, the books of the Strugatsky brothers were already published in electronic form and were freely distributed on the RuNet. Then the writers' heirs closed the library as a protest against piracy. And now they changed their minds and returned the texts to free access on the official website.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, or ABS, wrote excellent social science fiction - honest, straightforward. Their works have long been dismantled into quotes. Having read ABS, you can theatrically fall onto the sofa, screaming: “The noble don has been hit in the heel!”

The abbreviation ABS began the tradition of assigning abbreviations to each science fiction book. So PNS - “Monday begins on Saturday”, TBB - “It’s hard to be a god.”

Many literary scholars and simply enthusiastic people advise reading the Strugatskys in chronological order. Lifehacker recommends starting with any book from this list.

1 and 2. NIICHAVO cycle

Fantasy, satire.
Year of publication: 1965–1967.
Place and time of action: Russia, 20th century.
Reader age: any.

The series about the everyday life of employees of the Research Institute of Witchcraft and Wizardry has only one drawback: it consists of only two books. But it is from them that many discover the Strugatskys.

We also recommend that you start easy - with the story “Monday Begins on Saturday” and “The Tale of Troika.” Scientific can be satirical. And the everyday life of scientists is exciting (even if in the end they have to fight not with science, but with bureaucracy).

3. It's hard to be a god

Social fiction.
Place and time of action: outside the Earth, distant future.
Year of publication: 1964.
Reader age: any.

This is no longer a laughing matter. The story “It's Hard to Be a God” is considered one of the iconic works of the Strugatskys - the very embodiment of social fiction. Imagine a distant planet stuck in the Middle Ages. Now send historians from our time to this planet and think about how they will help this society achieve a brighter future.

Now imagine that you are the most powerful on the planet and will survive when the world around you collapses. But despite all your strength, power and knowledge, which is ahead of your time, you cannot save everyone. Even the most beloved ones. What would win in you - human or social?

...we know and understand men (...), but none of us would dare to say that he knows and understands women. And children, for that matter! After all, children are, of course, the third special type of intelligent beings living on Earth.
Boris Strugatsky

By the way, this is one of the few books by the Strugatskys in which there is a leading female character - a rarity for ABS books.

4. Roadside Picnic

Adventure fiction.
Year of publication: 1972.
Place and time of action: Earth, 21st century.
Reader age: any.

A heavy, dark, pessimistic book. The scene is Earth after. People live a life in which mortal danger hangs over them every day, but everyone is so used to it that they take it as a routine.

What if the aliens are neither friendly humanoids nor giant cockroaches out to destroy Orion's Belt? What if anomalous Zones appear on your planet, into which everyone rushes? Dangerous. Scary. Deadly. But you can feel alive only by avoiding death.

That's right: a person needs money so that he never thinks about it.

Based on this story, Andrei Tarkovsky made the film “Stalker”. Based on it, the developers later released the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series. And now American representatives of the film industry are making a series based on the story.

The book is no more than 180 pages. Read it before the release of the series to understand the gulf that separates modern commercial projects from the completely non-commercial Strugatskys.

5. The doomed city

Social fiction.
Place and time of action: another world, indefinite time.
Year of publication: 1989.
Reader age: adults.

Precisely doomed, not doomed. ABS named their novel after the painting by Nicholas Roerich, which struck them “with its dark beauty and the feeling of hopelessness that emanated from it.”

roerich-museum.org

You agree to the experiment and go into an artificially created world. This time the alien is you. And around you is Babylon, crowded with the same people who have their own vices, knowledge and hidden motives. The world resembles an anthill, into which occasionally someone great pokes a stick to stir up movement. What happens when the experiment gets out of control? What if this is not the first experiment?

The Strugatsky brothers are excellent at combining complex socio-psychological motives and dynamic action in one work. Therefore, they are equally interesting to read for both a schoolchild and a professor of social psychology. But if you want to understand what the book is really about, grow up. And then take on “The Doomed City.”

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky on the balcony. 1980s Birth name:

Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky, Boris Natanovich Strugatsky

Nicknames:

S. Berezhkov, S. Vitin, S. Pobedin, S. Yaroslavtsev, S. Vititsky

Date of birth: Citizenship: Type of activity: Years of creativity: Genre:

Science fiction

Debut: Awards:

Aelita Award

Works on the website Lib.ru rusf.ru/abs

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Strugatsky brothers)- brothers Arkady Natanovich (08/28/1925, Batumi - 10/12/1991, Moscow) and Boris Natanovich (04/15/1933, St. Petersburg - 11/19/2012, St. Petersburg), Soviet writers, co-authors , screenwriters, classics of modern science and social fiction.

Arkady Strugatsky graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow (1949), worked as a translator from English and Japanese, and as an editor.

Boris Strugatsky graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Leningrad University (1955) with a degree in stellar astronomer, and worked at the Pulkovo Observatory.

Boris Natanovich began writing in the early 1950s. Arkady Strugatsky's first artistic publication, the story “Bikini Ashes” (1956), written together with Lev Petrov while still serving in the army, is dedicated to the tragic events associated with the testing of a hydrogen bomb on the Bikini Atoll, and remained, in the words of Wojciech Kaitoch, “typical for that time an example of “anti-imperialist prose.”

In January 1958, the brothers' first joint work was published in the magazine "Technology for Youth" - the science fiction story "From the Outside", later reworked into the story of the same name.

The last joint work of the Strugatskys was the play - the warning “The Jews of the City of St. Petersburg, or Sad Conversations by Candlelight” (1990).

Arkady Strugatsky wrote several works alone under the pseudonym S. Yaroslavtsev: the burlesque fairy tale “Expedition to the Underworld” (1974, parts 1-2; 1984, part 3), the story “Details of the life of Nikita Vorontsov” (1984) and the story “The Devil Among Men "(1990-1991), published in 1993.

After the death of Arkady Strugatsky in 1991, Boris Strugatsky, by his own definition, continued to “cut a thick log of literature with a two-handed saw, but without a partner.” Under the pseudonym S. Vititsky, his novels “The Search for Destiny, or the Twenty-Seventh Theorem of Ethics” (1994-1995) and “The Powerless of This World” (2003) were published.

The Strugatskys are the authors of a number of film scripts. Under the pseudonyms S. Berezhkov, S. Vitin, S. Pobedin, the brothers translated novels by Andre Norton, Hal Clement, and John Wyndham from English. Arkady Strugatsky translated from Japanese the stories of Akutagawa Ryunosuke, the novels of Kobo Abe, Natsume Soseki, Noma Hiroshi, Sanyutei Encho, and the medieval novel “The Tale of Yoshitsune.”

The Strugatskys' works were published in translation in 42 languages in 33 countries (more than 500 editions).

The small planet [[(3054) Strugatsky|No. 3054, discovered on September 11, 1977 at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, is named after the Strugatskys.

The Strugatsky brothers are laureates of the Symbol of Science medal.

Essay on creativity

The first notable work of the Strugatsky brothers is the science fiction story “The Country of Crimson Clouds” (1959). According to recollections, the story “The Country of Crimson Clouds” was started as a bet with Arkady Natanovich’s wife, Elena Ilyinichna. Connected by common characters with this story, the sequels - “The Path to Amalthea” (1960), “Interns” (1962), as well as the stories of the Strugatskys’ first collection “Six Matches” (1960) laid the foundation for a multi-volume cycle of works about the future World of Noon, in which the authors I would like to live. The Strugatskys color traditional fantasy schemes with action-packed moves and collisions, vivid images, and humor.

Each new book by the Strugatskys became an event and provoked vivid and controversial discussions. Inevitably and repeatedly, many critics compared the world created by the Strugatskys with the world described in Ivan Efremov’s utopia “The Andromeda Nebula.” The Strugatskys' first books met the requirements of socialist realism. A distinctive feature of these books, in comparison with the examples of Soviet science fiction of that time, were “non-schematic” heroes (intellectuals, humanists, devoted to scientific research and moral responsibility to humanity), original and bold fantastic ideas about the development of science and technology. They organically coincided with the period of “thaw” in the country. Their books during this period are permeated with a spirit of optimism, faith in progress, in the ability of human nature and society to change for the better. The programmatic book of this period was the story “Noon, XXII Century” (1962).

Starting with the stories “It’s Hard to Be a God” (1964) and “Monday Begins on Saturday” (1965), elements of social criticism, as well as modeling options for historical development, appear in the Strugatskys’ works. The story “Predatory Things of the Century” (1965) is written in the tradition of the “warning novel” popular in the West.

In the mid-1960s. The Strugatskys became not only the most popular authors in the genre of science fiction, but also spokesmen for the sentiments of the young, opposition-minded Soviet intelligentsia. Their satire is directed against the omnipotence of bureaucracy, dogmatism, and conformism. In the stories “Snail on the Slope” (1966–1968), “The Second Invasion of the Martians” (1967), “The Tale of Troika” (1968), the Strugatskys, masterfully using the language of allegory, the techniques of allegory and hyperbole, create vivid, grotesquely pointed pictures of social pathology , generated by the Soviet version of totalitarianism. All this brought upon the Strugatskys sharp criticism from the Soviet ideological apparatus. Some of the works they had already published were actually withdrawn from circulation. The novel "Ugly Swans" (completed in 1967, published in 1972, Frankfurt am Main) was banned and distributed in samizdat. Their works were published with great difficulty in small-circulation editions.

In the late 1960s and 1970s. The Strugatskys create a number of works with a predominance of existential-philosophical issues. In the stories “Baby” (1970), “Roadside Picnic” (1972), “A Billion Years Before the End of the World” (1976), the issues of competition of values, choice of behavior in critical, “borderline” situations and responsibility for this choice. The theme of the Zone - a territory in which strange phenomena occur after a Visit from aliens, and stalkers - daredevils who secretly penetrate this Zone - was developed in Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Stalker", filmed in 1979 based on the script by the Strugatskys.

In the novel “The Doomed City” (written in 1975, published in 1987), the authors build a dynamic model of Soviet ideologized consciousness and explore the various phases of its “life cycle.” The evolution of the main character of the novel, Andrei Voronin, symbolically reflects the spiritual experience of generations of Soviet people of the Stalin and post-Stalin eras.

The Strugatskys' latest novels - "The Beetle in the Anthill" (1979), "Waves Quench the Wind" (1984), "Burdened with Evil" (1988) - indicate a crisis in the rationalistic and humanistic-educational foundations of the authors' worldview. The Strugatskys now question both the concept of social progress and the power of reason, its ability to find an answer to the tragic collisions of existence.

In a number of works by the Strugatskys, whose father was a Jew, traces of national reflection are noticeable. Many critics see the novels The Inhabited Island (1969) and The Beetle in the Anthill as allegorical depictions of the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union. One of the main characters in the novel “The Doomed City” is Izya Katsman, in whose life many characteristic features of the fate of a Galut (see Galut) Jew were concentrated. Publicistically frank criticism of anti-Semitism is contained in the novel “Burdened with Evil” and in the play “The Jews of the City of St. Petersburg” (1990).

The Strugatskys always considered themselves Russian writers, but they turned to allusions to Jewish themes, reflections on the essence of Jewry and its role in world history throughout their entire career (especially from the late 1960s), this enriched their works with non-trivial situations and metaphors , imparted additional drama to their universalistic searches and insights.

Boris Strugatsky prepared “Comments on what has been covered” (2000-2001; published as a separate edition in 2003) for the complete collected works of the Strugatskys, in which he described in detail the history of the creation of the Strugatskys’ works. On the official website of the Strugatskys, an interview continued from June 1998, in which Boris Strugatsky already answered several thousand questions.

Collected works of the Strugatskys

Until now, four complete works of A. and B. Strugatsky have been published in Russian (not counting various book series and collections). The first attempts to publish the collected works of the authors were made in the USSR in 1988, as a result of which in 1989 the Moskovsky Rabochiy publishing house published a two-volume collection of “Selected Works” with a circulation of 100 thousand copies. Its peculiarity was the text of the story “The Tale of Troika”, specially prepared by the authors for this collection, representing an intermediate version between the “Angarsk” and “Smenovsky” versions.

The complete works of the Strugatskys today are:

Collected works of the publishing house "Text", the main body of which was published in 1991-1994. edited by A. Mirer (under the pseudonym A. Zerkalov) and M. Gurevich. The collected works were arranged in chronological and thematic order (for example, “Noon, XXII Century” and “Distant Rainbow”, as well as “Monday Begins on Saturday” and “The Tale of Troika” were published in one volume). At the request of the authors, their debut story “The Country of Crimson Clouds” was not included in the collection (it was published only as part of the second additional volume). The first volumes were printed in a circulation of 225 thousand copies, subsequent volumes - 100 thousand copies. Initially, it was planned to publish 10 volumes, for each of which A. Mirer wrote a short preface; he also owned the biography of A. and B. Strugatsky in the first volume - the first published. Most of the texts were published in “canonical” versions, known to fans, but Roadside Picnic and Inhabited Island, which suffered from censorship, were first published in the author’s edition, and The Tale of Troika was published in the 1989 version. In 1992-1994 . Four additional volumes were released, including some early works (including “The Country of Crimson Clouds”, included at the request of readers), dramatic works and film scripts, a literary recording of A. Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker” and things published by A. N. and B . N. Strugatsky independently. They were printed in circulations from 100 thousand to 10 thousand copies.
Book series “The Worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers”, published on the initiative of Nikolai Yutanov by the publishing companies Terra Fantastica and AST since 1996. Currently, the publication has been transferred to the Stalker publishing house (Donetsk) as part of the “Unknown Strugatsky” project. As of September 2009, 28 books were published within the series, printed in a circulation of 3000-5000 copies. (additional prints follow annually). The texts are arranged thematically. This book series remains to this day the most representative collection of texts related to the life and work of A. and B. Strugatsky (for example, translations of Western fiction by the Strugatskys were not published in other collected works, as were a number of dramatic works). As part of the series, 6 books of the “Unknown Strugatsky” project were published, containing materials from the Strugatsky archive - drafts and unrealized manuscripts, a work diary and personal correspondence of the authors. “Lame Fate” was published separately, without the insert story “Ugly Swans.” “The Tale of Troika” was first published in both editions - “Angarsk” and “Smenovskaya”, and since then it has been republished only in this way.
Collected works of the Stalker publishing house(Donetsk, Ukraine), implemented in 2000-2003. in 12 volumes (originally it was planned to publish 11 volumes, published in 2000-2001). Sometimes it is called “black” - based on the color of the cover. The editor-in-chief was S. Bondarenko (with the participation of L. Filippov), the volumes were published in a circulation of 10 thousand copies. The main feature of this edition was its closeness to the format of an academic collected works: all texts were carefully checked against the original manuscripts (when possible), all volumes were provided with detailed comments by B. N. Strugatsky, selected fragments from the criticism of his time, etc. related materials. The 11th volume was devoted to the publication of a number of completed but unpublished works (for example, A. N. Strugatsky’s debut story “How Kang Died” in 1946); it also included a significant part of the Strugatskys’ journalistic works. All texts of the collected works were grouped in chronological order. The 12th (additional) volume includes a monograph by the Polish literary critic V. Kaitokh “The Strugatsky Brothers”, as well as correspondence between B. N. Strugatsky and B. G. Stern. This collection of works is available in electronic form on the official website of A. and B. Strugatsky. In 2004, an additional edition was published (with the same ISBN), and in 2007, this collection of works was reprinted in Moscow by the AST publishing house (also in black covers) as a “second, revised edition.” In 2009, it was published in a different design, although it was also indicated that its original layout was made by the Stalker publishing house. The volumes in the AST edition of 2009 are not numbered, but are designated by the years of writing of the texts included in them (for example, “ 1955 - 1959 »).
Collected works of the publishing house "Eksmo" in 10 volumes, implemented in 2007-2008. The volumes were published both as part of the “Founding Fathers” series and in multi-colored covers. Its contents did not follow chronological order; the texts were published based on the collected works of “Stalker” with the appendix of “Comments on what has been covered” by B. N. Strugatsky.

Bibliography

The year of first publication is indicated

Novels and stories

1959 - Country of Crimson Clouds
1960 - From Beyond (based on the story of the same name, published in 1958)
1960 - Path to Amalthea
1962 - Noon, XXII century
1962 - Trainees
1962 - Attempt to escape
1963 - Distant Rainbow
1964 - It's hard to be a god
1965 - Monday starts on Saturday
1965 - Predatory things of the century
1990 - Anxiety (first version of Snail on the Slope, written in 1965)
1968 - Snail on the Slope (written in 1965)
1987 - Ugly Swans (written in 1967)
1968 - Second Martian invasion
1968 - The Tale of Troika
1969 - Inhabited Island
1970 - Hotel “At the Dead Mountaineer”
1971 - Baby
1972 - Roadside Picnic
1988-1989 - Doomed City (written in 1972)
1974 - Guy from the Underworld
1976-1977 - A billion years before the end of the world
1980 - A Tale of Friendship and Unfriendship
1979-1980 - Beetle in the anthill
1986 - Lame Fate (written in 1982)
1985-1986 - Waves extinguish the wind
1988 - Burdened with Evil, or Forty Years Later
1990 - Jews of the city of St. Petersburg, or Sad conversations by candlelight (play)

Collections of stories

1960 - Six matches
- "From Outside" (1960)
- "Deep Search" (1960)
- "The Forgotten Experiment" (1959)
- "Six Matches" (1958)
- "Test of SKIBR" (1959)
- "Private Speculations" (1959)
- "Defeat" (1959)

1960 - “The Path to Amalthea”
- "The Path to Amalthea" (1960)
- "Almost the Same" (1960)
- "Night in the Desert" (1960, another title for the story "Night on Mars")
- "Emergency" (1960)

Film adaptations

Translations by the Strugatsky brothers

Abe Kobo. Just like a person: A Tale / Transl. from Japanese S. Berezhkova
Abe Kobo. Totaloscope: A Story / Transl. from Japanese S. Berezhkova
Abe Kobo. The Fourth Ice Age: A Tale / Transl. from Japanese S. Berezhkova

Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky was born on August 28, 1925 years in the city of Batumi, then lived in Leningrad. Father is an art critic, mother is a teacher. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, he worked on the construction of fortifications, then in a grenade workshop. At the end of January 1942, together with his father, he was evacuated from besieged Leningrad. Miraculously, he survived - the only one in the entire carriage. He buried his father in Vologda. I ended up in the city of Chkalov (now Orenburg). In the city of Tashla, Orenburg region, he worked at a milk collection point, and was drafted into the army there. He studied at the Aktobe art school. In the spring of 1943, just before graduation, he was sent to Moscow, to the Military Institute of Foreign Languages. He graduated from it in 1949 with a specialty - translator from English and Japanese. He was a teacher at the Kansk School of Military Translators and served as a divisional translator in the Far East. Demobilized in 1955. He worked at the Abstract Journal, then as an editor at Detgiz and Goslitizdat.

Boris Natanovich Strugatsky was born on April 15, 1933. in Leningrad, returned there after the evacuation, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Leningrad State University with a diploma in astronomy, worked at the Pulkovo Observatory; since 1960 - professional writer. Member of the Writers' Union. He published mainly in collaboration with his brother (he is also known for his translations of American SF - in collaboration with his brother, under the pseudonyms S. Pobedin and S. Vitin). Laureate of the State Prize of the RSFSR (1986 - for the script of the film “Letters from a Dead Man”, together with V. Rybakov and director K. Lopushansky). Permanent leader of the seminar for young science fiction writers at the St. Petersburg Writers' Organization. Lived and worked in St. Petersburg.

Science Fiction by the Strugatsky Brothers

Wide fame came to the Strugatsky brothers after the publication of the first Science Fiction stories, which were examples of good “hard” (natural science) Science Fiction and differed from other works of those years by their great attention to the psychological development of characters - “Six Matches” (1959), “Test of the SKR "(1960), "Private Assumptions" (1960) and others; the majority compiled the collection “Six Matches” (1960). In a number of early stories, the Strugatsky brothers successfully tested for the first time the method of constructing their own history of the future - the first and to this day remains unsurpassed in Soviet Science Fiction. Unlike similar large-scale constructions by R. Heinlein, P. Anderson, L. Niven and other science fiction writers, the near future according to the Strugatskys did not have a clearly defined chronological scheme from the very beginning (it was later restored by enthusiastic readers from the Luden research group). , but more attention was paid to the creation of “through” characters, moving from book to book and mentioned occasionally. As a result, individual fragments eventually formed into a bright, multicolored, internally evolving and organic mosaic - one of the most significant worlds of Science Fiction in Russian literature.

The list of awards and prizes given below is far from complete. In the list compiled by Vadim Kazakov, only in the period from 1959 to 1990, 17 awards and other distinctions received by the Strugatskys are mentioned (almost half of which are foreign). They received their first prize in 1959 for the story “The Country of Crimson Clouds” - third place in the competition for the best book about science and technology for schoolchildren, held by the Ministry of Education of the RSFSR (first place went to “The Andromeda Nebula” by I. A. Efremov).