And what about our Izya Katzman—a unequivocal Jew, and worse still, an ostentatiously provocative Jew, one of the main characters, and moreover one who constantly lectures the central character, a Russian, like some greenhorn kid, and not only lectures him but regularly defeats him in all their ideological clashes?
And the central character himself, Andrei Voronin, a Komsomol Leninist-Stalinist, a thoroughgoing communist true believer, a champion of the happiness of the common people, who evolves with such spontaneous ease into a top-ranking bureaucrat, a smooth, lordly, self-indulgent, petty chieftain and arbiter of human destiny?
And what about the instinctive ease with which this Komsomol Stalinist becomes first the good friend and then the comrade-in-arms of an inveterate Hitlerite Nazi—and how much these apparent ideological antagonists turn out to have in common?
And the characters’ seditious speculation about a possible connection between the Experiment and the problem of building communism? And the absolute ideological aberration of the scene with the Great Strategist? And the central character’s utterly cynical line of reasoning about monuments and greatness? And the entire spirit of the novel, its atmosphere, permeated with doubts, disbelief, and a stubborn reluctance to glorify and acclaim anything?
Nowadays no reader or publisher is going to be astounded, let alone frightened, by all these themes, but back then, twenty-five years ago, when the authors were working on the novel, we constantly repeated to each other, like an incantation, “You have to write for the desk drawer in a way that makes it impossible to publish, but also makes it seem like there’s nothing they can put you away for.” At the same time, the authors realized that you could be put away for absolutely anything at any moment, even for improperly crossing the street, but nonetheless we were counting on the context of a “nonprejudicial approach,” in which the order to put someone away has not yet been handed down from the top but is still only maturing, so to speak, down below.
The primary goal of our novel was not clear from the very beginning, but gradually assumed the following form: to demonstrate how, under the pressure of the circumstances of life, a young man’s worldview radically changes, how he shifts from the position of an unshakable fanatic to the condition of a man suspended, as it were, in an airless ideological void, without even the slightest purchase for his feet. A life trajectory very familiar to the authors, and one which we consider not merely dramatic but also instructive. After all, an entire generation traveled this path over the period from 1940 to 1985.
How to live in conditions of ideological vacuum? How and what for? In my opinion this question remains highly relevant even today—which is why City, despite being so vehemently politicized and so categorically of its own time, potentially remains of interest to the present-day reader—provided that this reader has any interest at all in problems of this kind.
Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City
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