Gloomy idealists

About Arkady Strugatsky and Yuri Trifonov

The fact that Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky and Yuri Valentinovich Trifonov were born on the same day - August 28, 1925, of course, is an accident, but a symbolic accident. The differences are striking. Trifonov was a prose writer from God, which is evident even from his debut novel “Students,” which brought the author first noisy fame, and years later - pangs of shame. The Strugatskys (it’s absurd to separate their older brother from their co-author) were excellent readers, knowing the value of a clever phrase and a cleverly tailored plot and confident that this knowledge was enough to build, if not a masterpiece (although why not?), then an intelligent, useful and charming book. Trifonov, with all his reservations, was a powerful traditionalist, stubbornly exploring the composition of the human soul and the no less complex and terribly organized composition of what is called History. The Strugatskys just as consciously chose as their field the dubious (not only for the officialdom, but also for the keepers of the noble tradition) zone of science fiction and in their most serious works they could not do without starships, null-transportation and other “tirmpampamia”. To comprehend and interpret modernity, Strugatsky needed a conditional, inventively constructed future, Trifonov needed an unconditional, as reliably restored as possible, the past, that other life, in the painful search for which the hero of the story of the same name falls out of this life.

On the plot periphery of “Another Life” the theme of spiritualism arises - this is not so far from science fiction. Despite all the dissimilarities, the books of the Strugatskys and Trifonov were dictated by one feeling - an anxious and not fully reflected expectation of the end, either a catastrophic or imperceptible transformation-disappearance of the world they and their contemporaries lived in, a world that tried with all its might to seem unshakable and eternal . Drawing a “bright communist future” in their early works, the Strugatskys constantly doomed the almost ideal inhabitants of the shining and only imaginary reliable day after tomorrow paradise to encounter inescapable tragedies, be it a natural disaster in “Distant Rainbow”, the impossibility of being a god, dearly paid for by the progressor Anton-Rumata , or a much more fraught contact with civilizations no less perfect than the earth’s (in the penultimate story of “Noon of the XXII Century”, the Hunter, who shot a four-armed, three-fingered man, is doomed to suffer for the rest of his life, because he assumes that he killed someone else’s spaceman, and his friend from school years , the doctor who dissected the four-armed man, tries in vain to convince the Hunter, although he knew for sure, knew from the very beginning). It is not at all difficult to discern here the prototypes of the misfortunes that befall the heroes of the stories “The Beetle in the Anthill” and “The Waves Quench the Wind.” If in “Ugly Swans” the youths follow mysterious others from a bad society, then in “Waves...” the appearance of the people is not motivated by the shortcomings of that civilization, which seems to have gotten rid of the last fools. Something's coming...

As was always coming. Stability is imaginary. The established comfort can be disrupted overnight by shadows of the past or guests from the future. The eveiness of Trifonov’s prose directly follows from his close attention to the recent past, behind which, as in the novel “The Nikiforov Syndrome,” over which the hero of the novel “Time and Place” struggles, a more and more distant past inevitably appears. Once it was present, believed itself to be unshakable and cautiously looked into an unclear and inevitable future. Anything, but not at all cloudless. Trifonov knew this no worse than the Strugatskys. That is why their books could not only get along, but also rhyme in the minds of the reading class of the times of developed socialism. That’s why something similar was read from them: what will happen will be (but not the heavens), and you do what you must. Gloominess is not a hindrance to idealism. “Monday begins on Saturday” not because the sixties are cheerful outside, but because it cannot be otherwise. As long as you are at least to some extent free from the circumstances of time and place, from the fairy tale about the troika that is ready to become reality.

Andrey NEMZER