GUEST REVIEW: The Doomed City, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Everyone in our house is sick. Luckily, our friend Thomas Casey at has swooped in to save the day with a guest review.
The Doomed City, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1972; Gollancz, 2017).
One of the annoying obstacles to effective social or economic planning is that there is no Earth-2, no separate, isolated Earth where you can run experiments to see how the results turn out compared to an Earth-1 control. We just have this one planet, and we are generally left guessing whether the implementation of certain policies over others would result in greater human wellbeing or happiness compared to the world in which we actually live. If you could set up Earth-2, what would it look like? Who would you recruit to live on Earth-2? How different would you want it to be from Earth-1? Where would you start? What would be your parameters for success? What if your experiment failed? What if the project were doomed from the start?
These kinds of questions roughly frame the background of Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s greatest novel, The Doomed City. Unfortunately, although the brothers completed the novel in 1972, it was not published in the USSR until 1989, when controls on publishing were relaxed during glasnost and perestroika. Prior to that, the novel was just too dark, too pessimistic, too contrary to Soviet ideology to ever make it past government censors. For years, only three copies of the novel existed, each one hidden with a different trusted friend. The book was not published in English until quite recently: Chicago River Press released the first English version of The Doomed City in 2016, and the following year, Gollancz released a version as part of its SF Masterworks series. Nevertheless, The Doomed City has still not reached much of an English audience.
The Strugatsky brothers were no strangers to the gloom and hopelessness of a doomed city. The brothers were Leningraders, born in 1925 and 1933 respectively. While Arkady was evacuated from Leningrad (and then drafted into the Soviet army in 1943), Boris and their mother lived through the siege of their hometown, which lasted from September 1941 to October 1944. But the city of The Doomed City is not Leningrad (at least not transparently so). The titular city is instead, the City, an isolated, crumbling metropolis run by the Mentors and the subject of the Experiment. The citizens of the City—criminals, fugitives, and volunteers—aren’t even sure where the City is located, and it’s not clear how they got there. It may not even be on Earth. And no one knows what the Experiment entails either. The Experiment is the Experiment, as they like to remind each other, and they each have a role to play in it, however ambiguous that role may be.
Despite the tragic circumstances of their youth, the Strugatsky brothers began their writing careers together as optimistic Soviet techno-futurists. They gained a name for themselves with the creation of the Noon Universe, a socialist utopia where the real conflict is between the good and the better. The characters of the Noon Universe seek personal and social improvement through technological advancement and exploration. On the strength of these stories (and their ideological orthodoxy), the Strugatsky brothers became the most popular science fiction writers in the USSR, and the best-known Soviet sci-fi writers outside of their country.
Sometime in the 1960s, however, their writing began to take on a darker, more pessimistic tone. Their best-known novel, Roadside Picnic, emerged from this shift in their writing. First published in 1971, Roadside Picnic tells the story of the Visitation, an extraterrestrial event that occurred in six different “zones” around the globe over a two-day period. The nature of the Visitation, the appearance of the visitors, and their means of transportation were completely unknown. But the zones themselves exhibited peculiar and dangerous properties following the Visitation and become the obsessive interest of “stalkers,” men who trespass into the zones to bring curious visitors—often more like pilgrims—and to recover strange artifacts left behind during the Visitation. What sets Roadside Picnic apart from their earlier work is the absence of optimism. The nature of the Visitation is utterly unknowable to humanity and remains for men only a source of danger or vague mystification. While mankind may wish to improve itself by comprehending the Visitation and harnessing new-found knowledge for the betterment of society, that is impossible. Man has run up against a wall of unknowing that it cannot overcome.
Roadside Picnic is perhaps better known to more people through Andrei Tarkovsky’s loose film adaptation, Stalker. But Tarkovsky’s Stalker is a very different sort of story. Tarkovsky relies on the basic concept of the book as a vehicle for exploring its mystical implications. In Tarkovsky’s film, the Zone becomes a place where the veil between the material and supernatural worlds has grown thin and leaky. The Zone is a dangerous place in the way man approaching the Divine is always dangerous. The Second Book of Samuel relates that Uzzah died touching the Ark of the Covenant while attempting to steady it when the oxen carrying it stumbled. This is the kind of hazard presented by the Zone in Tarkovsky’s film. Only the Stalker, a type of spiritual guide in the film, understands how to navigate the Zone and receive its blessings rather than its curses. In this way, Tarkovsky’s Stalker describes a noetic encounter with God rather than with an unknowable advanced civilization.
Despite the thematic divergences between the Strugatsky brothers’ original novel and Tarkovsky’s film version, it would be wrong to suggest the Strugatskys were unmoved by spiritual themes. While the brothers were writing Roadside Picnic, they were also working on The Doomed City. As the story goes, the Strugatskys were inspired to write The Doomed City after having encountered the work of the Russian artist, Nicholas Roerich, whose 1914 painting of the same title “astounded” the authors “with its somber beauty and the sense of hopelessness emanating from it.” The painting depicts an isolated city at dusk, the fading light purpling the mountains that lie in the background, while an enormous mottled serpent coils itself around its walls. Roerich was himself a spiritually attuned artist, sharply antipathetic to the Soviet Union’s official atheist materialism.
So what is the City? In many ways, it’s a fairly generic, contemporary, large metropolis not unlike the Strugatsky brothers’ hometown, J.G. Ballard’s London, or Paul Schrader’s New York. It contains streets and cars, government buildings and offices, dingy apartments and unreliable public transportation. People get up in the morning and go to work, complain about traffic, and avoid mentally ill derelicts on the sidewalk. The City exudes an air of 1970s urban stagnation and decay. Nothing seems to work properly. Trash collects on the street and whole neighborhoods are best avoided at night. But that’s about where the comparisons end.
The City is spread out on a great shelf of land between a towering yellow wall and an endless abyss. “Looking to the west, there was a boundless, blue-green void[.] To the east, towering up vertically and blotting out the sky, was an unbounded expanse of solid yellow, with a narrow protruding terrace along which the city stretched… Infinite void to the west and infinite Solidity to the east.” To the south stretches endless swampland and farms. But to the north, the City continues, although much of it is out of bounds. No one really knows how far the City continues to the north. The City expands southward while power and water services are cut off to the older sections in the north. It is forbidden to travel there. The sun itself is artificial. It is switched off at night and everything instantly goes dark. Morning comes and the sun is simply turned back on.
The City is populated by men and women from all over the Earth (as we know it) from different times and places, but mostly from a period of time roughly from the end of the Second World War to about 1970. Everyone is able to freely communicate in his own language and hears everyone else speaking in his own native tongue. Every citizen is assigned (and periodically reassigned) a job that has nothing to do with whatever training he or she may have received on Earth. The central character of the novel, a Russian named Andrei Veronin, was trained as an astrophysicist in Leningrad, but we meet him as the novel opens working as a trash collector. His coworker, the American Donald Cooper, was a sociology professor. No one is ever given an explanation for his particular job assignment. In fact, to provide an explanation would be contrary to the nature of the Experiment. The Experiment is the Experiment. Simply make a good job of anything you are given to do. That’s all there is to it. We follow Andrei as he progresses from trash collector to criminal investigator, to chief editor of one of the City’s newspapers, to senior counselor of a new regime that eventually takes power.
Andrei is a volunteer, and he brings with him an innate faith in the Experiment carried over from his days as a loyal Komsomol member in his youth in the USSR. “Andrei was…transfixed by a poignant joy at the thought that all these people from different countries, and even from different times, were all here together and all doing one thing of great importance, each at his own post.” Everyone, in one way or another, brings his own baggage along with him to the City; for Andrei, the purpose of the Experiment is surely to build a model Communist society. But his friends don’t necessarily agree. The farmer, Uncle Yura, thinks the Mentors are aliens and the City is a kind of fish tank or zoo. Kensi believes the Mentors are preparing to colonize the Earth and are using the Experiment to study the psychology of their future slaves. Others think the Mentors were humans from another dimension. Fritz, the former Wehrmacht NCO, believes the Experiment is meant to select the most energetic and resourceful citizens and drop them back on Earth as new leaders of civilization. For his part, Donald thinks the Experiment has already failed long ago, and it’s just continuing to roll along under its own inertia. And a man Andrei will meet later in the book thinks the City is another place entirely, a place poignantly described by St. Anthony, Hieronymus Bosch, and Dante.
It’s soon clear that something isn’t quite right. It bothers Andrei that the streets are full of criminals, living conditions are poor, food isn’t always easy to come by, and nothing seems to work as smoothly as it should. Garbage disposal is delayed because the official tallyman is required to count all the trucks first. Some of the directives issued by the City government don’t seem to make much sense. Due to increased attacks on the police to steal their weapons, the police are disarmed. The solution to crime, instead, is to abolish the police and release all the City’s mental patients. That way, criminals will be discouraged from roaming the streets at night.
And then the baboons show up.
No one know where they came from, but thousands of baboons suddenly descend on the City, causing mayhem everywhere. But the City government has a solution to the baboons too. The idea is brilliantly simple: you just regularize the presence of the baboons. “It is proposed to register all the monkeys, fit them with metal collars and disks bearing their names, and then assign them to institutions and private individuals, who will be responsible for them henceforth… All other work has been abandoned—all the factories are producing collars and name disks. Our Mr. Mayor is personally taking into his care three mature baboons and is calling on the public to follow his example.”
In his subsequent job as a criminal investigator, Andrei also encounters something metaphysically odd about the City. First, he’s warned about a possible Anticity located somewhere to the north. The Anticity is a potential source of danger, possibly espionage. And Andrei’s friend, Izya Katzman, who has become a kind of amateur archivist, has been making periodic travels into the abandoned northern parts of the City. People have also been disappearing. Andrei is assigned the Building Case: witnesses claim that before the missing people disappeared, they had entered a redbrick building. It always sounded like the same building, but it was always in a different place. Rumors were spread about this unusual red building “that wandered around the City of its own volition, settling somewhere between the ordinary buildings, opening the ghastly jaws of its doors and lying in wait there for the incautious.” Some had escaped, sometimes jumping from the building’s second or third-story windows. These survivors told stories of contracting corridors, ascending staircases that led not to the second floor but to the basement, strange music… It seems possible that the Building Case may be somehow related to the Falling Stars Case: bodies had been found at the foot of the Yellow Wall, as if they had jumped from a great height. But no one has any idea how someone could have scaled the Wall.
Andrei finds the Red Building, and so does Izya Katzman.
It's worth saying something about Izya Katzman, who may be the most important character in The Doomed City. Katzman is almost a stereotype of an intellectual Russian Jew, and he plays the role of a foil to the earnest Andrei. Izya is his own man. He came to the City purely out of curiosity. He refused to do the work assigned to him and instead roams the City, looking for information on its purpose and meaning. Izya is cynical, sloppy, and always several steps ahead of Andrei. I picture him looking like John Turturro in Barton Fink. He’s no respecter of persons, either, and he always says whatever he thinks — something that gets him into trouble. When Izya discloses that he has recovered files from the abandoned Old City Hall, Andrei has him arrested and turned over to Fritz for interrogation. But Andrei and Fritz both come to rely on Izya, recognizing the value of Izya’s insight into the nature of the City.
Fritz himself rises to power on a wave of populist anger while Andrei is working as the senior editor of a newspaper. Fritz is a man of action, and when the sun stops working one day he makes his move. Farmers and disgruntled citizens of the City rally to his banner, and the first thing they do is round up all the crazies and baboons roaming the City and shoot them. Andrei plays his role as an editor, first fighting against government censorship and then defending the independence of his paper from Fritz’s newly formed authority government. But then he’s offered a seat on Fritz’s executive council as Minister for Science & Technology and his attitude changes: Andrei find himself fat and happy, ensconced in a corner office suite, married to a beautiful woman, living in an upscale home he now frets about decorating with just the right rug. He has come a long way from his time as a garbage collector. The City is doing well, too. It has moved on from the Experiment. Even discussing the Experiment is now forbidden. Fritz runs the City for the people of the City. And, after all the shooting is over, an elevated degree of calm and material prosperity descends on the City. It seems that Fritz’s policies are largely working. Crime disappears and, as a result, Fritz has even abolished the death penalty. But this tranquility provides fertile ground for another kind of social menace—ennui. Izya, of course, predicts all this:
“There will be assassination attempts… There’ll be an explosion of drug addiction. There’ll be affluence riots. The hippies have already appeared, I won’t even mention them. There’ll be protest suicides, self-immolations, people blowing themselves up… [R]ustling up everything the broad masses need is relatively simple, isn’t it? So your problems are by definition problems that have solutions. You’ll never understand people who kill themselves as a gesture of protest… [Y]ou take away from people the onus of providing their own daily bread and you don’t give them anything in return. People get sick of it all and start feeling bored.”
Fritz had already intuited this to some degree. A massive public building project has already begun. Every citizen of the City is expected to spend an allotted shift excavating the footprint of a massive foundation. It is rumored that Fritz wants to build an airbase and accompanying factory to manufacture air ships to explore the Yellow Wall and the void to the west. But Fritz’s most ambitious project is an organized expedition to the north, to be personally led by Andrei and Izya, men he can trust.
The Expedition is the subject of The Doomed City’s fifth and final act. It raises far more questions than it answers. The members of the Expedition encounter fugitives who have escaped the City, mutes who have had their tongues cut out, men who speak a language that (inexplicably) no one understands, wolves, iron beasts, walking statutes, and miles and miles of abandoned buildings. They find human remains barricaded in some of them, and cryptic notes about a shimmering that descends on the street and evaporates people on contact.
Andrei and Izya eventually find themselves alone on a wind-swept plateau stretching ever further into the north beyond the furthest edge of the City. Here, while they share what remains of their potable water, Izya explains to Andrei his theory of the Temple, the metaphorical complex of heroic deeds, words, and music on which civilization subsists. Nobody consciously builds the Temple. It grows and expands of its own accord, absorbing all the best that humanity produces. For Izya, the Temple is the only goal. It is the focus of human meaning. “I know with absolute certainty that the temple is being built, that nothing else serious is happening in history apart from this, and there’s only one purpose in my life—to protect that temple and increase its wealth.” Izya is a high priest of the Temple.
In his essay “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past,” Simon Leys observes that Chinese culture has never understood history or tradition as something lodged in physical structures or monuments, but rather as a living reality in the people themselves. Where civilizations remain robust and healthy, the destruction of the built environment is not really a loss because the people can rebuild, and their new buildings will be no less effective at manifesting the same culture and tradition as those that were lost. Antiquarianism only developed late in Chinese cultural history, and it was associated with a period of spiritual crisis and a loss of faith in the persistence of their world order.
I only drew the connection to The Doomed City months after I finished reading the book for the third time, but I think Leys’ observations about the Chinese relationship with the past provides the key to understanding the book. There is a necessary spiritual connection between the outward manifestation of a civilization and the intangible fire of culture and meaning within its people. If the city—any city—is the bloom or the tree, the culture and its spiritual reserves are its root system. The preserved city of the antiquarian is like a bouquet of cut flowers: it maintains only the appearance of life and vitality. The Strugatskys’ City is a constant churn of abandonment, expansion, and bewilderment because it is both an oddly preservationist project and a diseased growth—it is a tree or bush uprooted and planted in thin, alien soil, watered with ideology, growing under the glow of harsh LED lights. No reordering of the City’s political culture can save it. The City is a dead thing, and always was.
From this perspective, the parallels to the Strugatskys’ USSR are unmistakable. But to what degree are the cities of the West also doomed? Do we still draw life from the soil? Could we rebuild Notre Dame if we had to? Does the same fire still burn within us? Or has an immense serpent already coiled itself around our gates as we empty another little packet of flower food (really just sugar, acid, and bleach) into the vase, hoping to maintain the blooms just a little longer? Are we living in the City?
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Dystopian sci-fi from behind the Iron Curtain is one of a kind. The authors had to be creative in order not to run afoul of the censors, and that results in works with layers of meanings.
I can recommend Janusz Zajdel, too.
That second last paragraph reads like a summary of Spengler's ideas about the development of culture towards their final flowering in a civilisation, which exhausts the culture that it springs from.