Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the doomed city fb2. “The Doomed City” Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Doomed city Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

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Title: Doomed City

About the book “The Doomed City” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The novel “The Doomed City” is a kind of dystopia. The action takes place on a mysterious planet, where mysterious experimenters - the so-called Mentors - gathered earthlings of the 20th century. Each earthling voluntarily decided to participate in an unknown Experiment, each voluntarily left his time and his country - Germany in the 1940s, the USA in the 1960s, Sweden in the 1970s. etc. Most of them live in a certain City under an artificial sun. The experiment gets out of the control of the Mentors, and then various models of development of the human community are considered - quasi-Fourierist self-government, dictatorship, etc.

The main character is Andrei, a Leningrad physics student in the early 1950s. - goes from a fanatical Komsomol-Stalinist to a completely apolitical bourgeois-conformist, adviser to the dictator. But the instinct of a scientist does not allow him to completely turn into a layman: he goes on an expedition to explore the desert, areas abandoned by the inhabitants of the City many years ago. There, as M. Amusin writes, “reality bristles against a person, trying to break him physically and psychologically. Living monuments march. A terrible yellow haze thickens in the air, and madness attacks people, and they destroy each other in a paroxysm of hatred.” The heroes of the novel “walk across the scorched desert, only one step ahead of the death from thirst that pursues them.” And at the “point of the Beginning of the World” Andrei meets his own reflection, a double, shoots him, kills himself and is transported from the delusional reality of the City to Leningrad in the early 50s.

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Quotes from the book “The Doomed City” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

“Okay, okay,” Geiger said. - Everyone knows that you are on your own. Let's return to our suicides. Do you think that means there will be suicides, no matter what policy we pursue?
– They will be precisely because you are pursuing a very specific policy! – said Izya. – And the further, the more, because you take away people’s concern for their daily bread and give them nothing in return. People get sick and bored. Therefore, there will be suicides, drug addiction, sexual revolutions, stupid riots over a eaten egg...

At first, most eat what is given to them. And in the end, all its life it deals with the problem of choice, what should it choose to devour? Not eaten yet?..

The one who has the power has the right to power. And even more precisely, if you like, the right to power has the one who exercises this power. If you know how to subordinate, you have the right to power. If you don't know how - sorry!..

And the elite in itself, the elite for itself - who does it bother? She is annoying - to the point of fury, to the point of fury! - this is another matter, but annoying is one of its functions... But complete equality is a swamp, stagnation.

Prominent Russian Soviet prose writers, film playwrights, co-author brothers, the undisputed leaders of Soviet science fiction over the past three decades and the most famous Soviet science fiction writers abroad (at the beginning of the 1991s - 321 book publications in 27 countries); classics of modern SF, whose influence on its development, in particular in the USSR, is difficult to overestimate.

Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky was born on August 28, 1925 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 evacuation, 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.

Wide fame came to the Strugatsky brothers after the publication of their first SF stories, which were examples of good “hard” (natural science) SF and differed from other works of those years by their greater attention to the psychological development of characters - “Six Matches” (1959), “Test of the TFR” ( 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 SF. 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 SF worlds 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).

This page contains a bibliography of the writer named “The Strugatsky Brothers”, that is, only those works that were signed by both brothers. Bibliographies of works written by them separately from each other, as well as under pseudonyms, can be seen on the individual pages of A. N. Strugatsky and B. N. Strugatsky.

When you want to delve into something deep, philosophical, and sometimes difficult to understand, you should pay attention to the work of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Their novel “The Doomed City” is fantastic, but at the same time philosophical and complex. It touches on the topics of ideology, the values of society and the individual, the influence of society on the worldview of an individual. You wonder how much the perception of a person who not so long ago was convinced of something completely different can change. Writers seem to ask questions, but do not say them openly. But you still hope to get answers, but there are not as many of them as you would like.

The novel takes place on an unknown planet in an uncertain time. People live in a certain City. People from different eras and different countries are sent here. The only indispensable condition is that before sending them they must be in a very difficult situation. There are quite a lot of volunteers. So, here you can meet an American from the 60s, a Russian from the 40s, and so on. They have no difficulty understanding each other, but at the same time each speaks their own language.

All people in the City are participating in an Experiment, the details of which are unknown. They can explain everything incomprehensible only by saying that this should be so according to the rules of the Experiment. They receive professional assignments and do what they are told to do. Some want to know what is outside the City, how everything works here, they want answers to their questions. At some point, the Mentors can no longer control how the Experiment goes...

The work belongs to the Fantasy genre. It was published in 1975 by AST Publishing House. On our website you can download the book "The Doomed City" in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format or read online. The book's rating is 4.46 out of 5. Here, before reading, you can also turn to reviews from readers who are already familiar with the book and find out their opinion. In our partner's online store you can buy and read the book in paper version.