Roadside without a picnic

The literary twins I. Ilf and E. Petrov left us a funny story from the time of the NEP, but you can’t guess from it about the horrors of Solovki, that is, about the wings in front of which Ostap Bender and Shura Balaganov dance on stage. Especially since the authors passionately love the power of the "workers and peasants" and despise the "former" and Nepmen.

What the Strugatsky brothers will leave us (and what we have used all our lives) - Arkady (who is no longer with us) and Boris, whose 75th birthday we will celebrate on April 15, cannot be counted and assessed, because truth is priceless, fierce and uncompromising . In the work of the Strugatskys, starting from the pink dawn "Monday begins on Saturday" and ending with Boris Natanovich's single novel, published in the mid-90s under the pseudonym Vititsky - "Search for Destiny, or the Twenty-seventh Theorem of Ethics", fit our whole life with its timid questions and chilling backhand answers. This is what always distinguished the Strugatsky brothers: to give a generation an answer without waiting for a question.

To throw such answers in the face of Soviet reality, military cunning was needed. And the Strugatskys came up with it. They gave their heroes a strong rear: that same mythical communism with a human face, an old, old fairy tale, absolutely implausible, but so humane in the mouths of two wise writers. The USSR, which never existed, from which Bykov, Dauga, Gorbovsky start to Venus; or the Earth, which is not listed in any real galactic atlases, the Earth is the base of rescuers-progressors for the terrible Arkanar or the scary planet with white submarines and Fiery Creators, from which the stars are not visible.

Maxim Kammerer and Wanderer Sikorski will start from this mythical, happy and free Earth. It seemed to the young heroes of "Monday" Vitka Korneev and Sasha Privalov that the problem was in bureaucrats, mediocrity and grabbers. This is the early 60s. Thaw. And then they hit us on the head with a dusty bag of problems. "Inhabited Island" and "It's Hard to Be a God". Neither Maxim, nor the Stranger, nor Anton-Rumata had anywhere to return to.

This is the most terrible thing that an old tobacconist could tell. There is no land, because the West is not a replacement for it, it is engaged in progressorism carelessly and from case to case. Unless the scribes and wise men (and even then not all) could escape to the West, to this Promised Land. But the rest is incurable and there is nowhere to go: our life has passed in Arkanar, between the clubs of the Grays and the spears of the Blacks, and there are still Fiery Creators, half anonymous, half criminal, and the whole country is covered with a network of propaganda of the Towers, and the masses are choking in servile delight, and we are geeks, we only have a headache. Kill them all? Rumata did this and ceased to be a god. There are not enough geeks to fix life on a cursed planet or in a cursed Arkanar. World of the Strugatskys. Our world.

And to top it all, Boris Natanovich also finds out in the “Twenty-seventh Theorem of Ethics” that we did not live in order to bring the country to democracy, as Stas Krasnogorov thought, but only so that the evil genius Viscount (defense military) did sausages from people, created zombies. This is our knowledge worked. Do you hear, Vitya Korneev and Cristobal Junta from "Monday"? Science leads to the abyss. We were looking for freedom for everyone, but we provided a feeding trough for the next Fiery Creators. When Boris Natanovich is asked about the prospects, he answers bluntly: “Yes, a slave country ... yes, several generations must change ... no, none of us will live ...”

If the whole world is a prison, then our place is at the bucket, or, in the Strugatskys' slang, at the curb. The picnic is cancelled.