Male and Female in The Snail on the Slope by the Strugatsky Brothers

Abstract

Many of the best works of Russian literature defy classification by genre. It may be that the broad Russian imagination cannot be contained in narrow Western aesthetic categories. On the other hand, Russian writers may simply have emulated the formal originality of Pushkin's novel in verse Evgeny Onegin (1823-31), thus establishing a tradition of untraditional forms. In any case, following Onegin came nineteenth-century mixedgenre masterpieces such as Dead Souls, Gogol's long poem in A Double Life, Karolina Pavlova's sketch (ocherk) in poetry and prose; and War and Peace, a philosophical-historical epic that Tolstoy himself refused to call a novel.1 And in the twentieth century such literary experiments continued unabated among Russian symbolists, futurists, and NEP writers.2 In this context we can more easily understand the unconventional form of The Snail on the Slope (Ulitka na sklone). This contemporary