“DO NOT THROW THE OARS!”

OUR DATES

"Arktanych" - many called him. “This warm and old-fashioned home nickname was much more in line with him than Classic, as he was often called, without explaining who he was talking about,” he would say on the evening of October 13, 1991, after his untimely ...

"Arktanych" - many called him. “This warm and old-fashioned home nickname was much more in line with him than Classic, as he was often called, without explaining who he was talking about,” critic Vadim Kazakov will say on the evening of October 13, 1991, after his untimely death.

“How nice it was to know that somewhere far away, five thousand kilometers away, lives a great and kind Teacher who knows, if not the answers, then at least the questions that everyone must answer in this terribly distorted and distorted world,” one of the main researchers of the Strugatskys' work, the creator of the Russian Science Fiction website, Vladimir Borisov, will exhale sadly. And he will add: “How to live further? Where are we to sail? And for what? I don't know. But as a testament, we were left with the words of the Teacher: “You must not throw the oars!” ...

The word "Teacher" brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky always wrote only with a capital letter. They were teachers for several generations.

Those who were brought up by their books were subtly different from others and intuitively recognized each other when they met. Quotations from the Strugatskys acted as a password, as a sign of a like-minded person who understands you perfectly, as an identification mark in the twilight of a stagnant era. It was worth hearing from a stranger “Your carpets are beautiful, but I have to go”, “Rod to the right, shoe to the left” or “Professor Vibegallo ate” - and it became clear: this is a person of the same blood as you. He doesn't need to be explained what the Midas small field synthesizer is, the scattered information collector and null transport, what vertical progress is and why Monday starts on Saturday...

Arkady Strugatsky was the elder of two smart and fearless, cheerful and kind brothers, who, according to the St. Petersburg writer and critic Andrei Balabukha, "the personification of science fiction itself." With regard to Arkady Natanovich, the main word in this series was “kind”. There were legends about his extraordinary kindness and desire to help aspiring writers, which, when checked, turned out to be the true truth.

Of course, according to Boris Strugatsky, “a lot depended on his mood at the moment: God forbid you should fall under his hot hand — he could be both harsh and ferocious.” True, this applied exclusively to the "pugs from literature", in response to the yelping of which Arkady Natanovich could snap. And yet, Arkady Natanovich was very reminiscent of one of the favorite (if not the most beloved) heroes of the Strugatsky brothers - Leonid Gorbovsky. The one who acted according to the principle: "Of all possible decisions, choose the kindest." And who, the Strugatskys write, "was like from a fairy tale: always kind and therefore always right."

He had an amazing fate. At least three times Arkady Strugatsky had to die. For the first time - in besieged Leningrad in the winter of 1941 - 1942, when, according to the memoirs, "mother and Boris still somehow held on, and father and Arkady were on the verge of death from dystrophy." The second time was in January 1942, on the way to the evacuation, when the truck on which he and his father were traveling fell through the ice. Father, having caught a cold (he already had a sick heart), died in Vologda, where they miraculously managed to get, but Arkady survived. And the third time - in 1943, when he, a cadet of the Aktobe mortar school, after graduation, was inevitably waiting for the battle on the Kursk Bulge, where almost his entire course laid down his head. However, another miracle happened. Shortly before graduation, the school selected candidates for the Military Institute of Foreign Languages. And, as Boris Strugatsky recalls, “they put the whole school to write either an essay or a dictation and chose the two most literate.” One of them was Arkady ...

After graduating in 1949 from the Japanese Department of the Oriental Faculty until 1955, Arkady Strugatsky served in the Far East as a divisional translator from Japanese. He experienced a powerful earthquake and tsunami, participated in the hunt for poachers (in the manner of Jack London's Tales of the Fishing Patrol). And it was then that an event occurred that, apparently, predetermined his writer's fate.

In 1954, the Americans detonated a hydrogen bomb near Bikini Atoll. And after Akinori Kuboyama (a radio operator of a Japanese schooner that accidentally fell under the release of radioactive dust) died of radiation sickness, Lev Petrov, a colleague of Arkady, offered to write a story about it together. "Bikini Ashes" was printed - to the great amazement of Arkady, as he himself recalled ...

Returning to Leningrad after demobilization, Arkady found out that his brother Boris, who by that time had graduated from Leningrad State University, an astronomer and a graduate student at the Pulkovo Observatory, had long been drawn to writing. At the beginning of 1956, Arkady moved to Moscow, but this did not interfere with the brothers' creative plans. In 1958, their first stories "From Outside" and "Spontaneous Reflex" were published, in 1959 - the famous "Land of Crimson Clouds".

“The eventful part of our biography ended in 1956,” said Arkady Natanovich. “Next came the books.”

Do I need to remind you of the titles of these books, which every self-respecting fan of science fiction can easily list, being awakened in the dead of night?

“Thousands of years have been looking at us with the hope that we will not become brutal, we will not become bastards, slaves of godfathers and Fuhrers,” Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky said in 1991 in his “Testament”.

In memory of the Teacher, we must live up to this hope.

Boris Strugatsky answers questions from Novaya Gazeta

- Arkady Natanovich managed to see August 1991 and the defeat of the State Emergency Committee. It's clear how he took it. But don't you remember in what terms he assessed this, what forecasts he made (on the days of August 19-21), and so on?

- In my opinion, I called him on the 28th - congratulated him on his birthday. By this point, everything was already over, and there was not much to discuss. Yes, and Arkady Natanovich felt really bad ...

- What do you think he would say today, seeing the enforced state unanimity, praising the president on all TV channels, declaring the opposition a “fifth column” and asserting that the front line passes through every house?

- I think he would say the same thing that all the current liberals say and write without exception. In any case, I can't imagine anything else.

- In the yellow-black-hundred press from time to time there are hints: they say that Arkady Strugatsky served in the NKVD troops during the war, or even allegations that you and your brother, they say, sang about the special services ...

- Both Arkady Natanovich and I belonged to the "organs", like all Soviet people. That is, with hostile and fearful respect. Arkady, of course, never served in any NKVD. This legend arose from the circumstance, apparently, that in 1946 he, a cadet of the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, was seconded to the NKVD of Tatarstan, to Kazan, as an interpreter at the future Tokyo trial of Japanese war criminals being prepared there. He then spent several months in Kazan, translated during interrogations, had seen enough of everyone, kept the most unpleasant memories of these times, but spoke about all this little and extremely reluctantly.

- And what is your attitude today to the FSB and the ever-growing "livestock" of security officers in power?

- I do not share the very widespread belief that the very belonging to the special services makes a monster and a gendarme out of a person. And, in any case, I do not think that "a Chekist in power" is necessarily worse than "a ruddy Komsomol leader in power." Here's how it works. The profession, of course, as a rule, leaves a certain imprint on a person, but not a stigma. In the end, we know the same high-ranking party members in the past, who turned out to be quite decent and quite worthy people.

— The Strugatsky brothers have always been staunch democrats. Now a number of Russian science fiction writers have begun to sing and propagate the monarchy. Why? How do you feel about the monarchy?

— This sudden love for empires and monarchies is a complete mystery to me too. Apparently, a reaction to the costs of perestroika, plus nostalgia for the "great and mighty USSR", when a sausage cost two twenty, and Soviet missiles loomed menacingly over the whole world. I myself am reserved about the monarchy and I am ready to admit that in some version this system may look quite acceptable (Great Britain, for example). In general, Aristotle considered the aristocracy to be the ideal social system. But how can you build an aristocracy that ensures a regular and natural change of elites? Without any change, any noble aristocracy, no matter how noble, in a couple of generations will inevitably degenerate into the most rotten autocracy? Don't know. And no one, in my opinion, knows. So the famous Churchillian formula remains: “Democracy is an ugly form of government, but humanity has not yet come up with anything better” ...