Reese , Kevin Celestial Hellscapes: Cosmology as the Key to the Strugatskiis’ Science Fictions (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 557 Reese, Kevin. Celestial Hellscapes: Cosmology as the Key to the Strugatskiis’ Science Fictions. The Real Twentieth Century. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2019. xxiv + 253 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Appendix. Index. $109.00. Cosmology is not a conventional route into Russian literary scholarship. But, as Kevin Reese’s important new monograph argues, any apparent conventionality in the fiction of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii always screens, or prefigures, a startling inversion of reality. The brothers’ co-authored science fiction novels, most of which appeared between 1960 and 1990, unite popular appeal with ethical profundity. They enjoyed cult status among Soviet readers; they are still widely appreciated today. Andrei Tarkovskii adapted scripts by the Strugatskiis for Stalker (1979) and The Sacrifice (1986); other Russian auteur directors, including Aleksandr Sokurov and Aleksei German Sr, also based major films on the brothers’ novels. Yvonne Howells, author of the only previously published English-language monograph on the Strugatskiis (Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, New York, 1994), showed that these stories’ complex ethical systems and mythical subtexts resonate with Jewish, Christian and Gnostic beliefs. She located Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii within the same tradition of writer-philosophers as Andrei Belyi, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov. To this list of cultural luminaries in dialogue with the Strugatskiis, Reese adds Pushkin: Celestial Hellscapes opens with an epigraph cited from the latter, as does each of its eleven sections. Pushkin, Reese tells us, determines ‘the cosmology of Russian literature’, and therefore ‘[t]o ignore Pushkin in this context would be akin to writing a history of astronomy without Galileo’ (p. xvi). While almost all the Strugatskiis’ major fictions appear at least briefly, Celestial Hellscapes is primarily concerned with seven of the brothers’ most significant novels. Taken in chronological order of composition, each book is discussed in terms of its genesis, political context, the peculiarities of its narrative universe (or cosmology), and their scientific underpinnings. Reese is well-versed in the Strugatskiis’ literary inspirations (from Heinlein and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Kruchenykh, Maiakovskii and Aksenov); he confidently explains abstruse astrophysical references (even providing occasional diagrams). A highlight is the appendix re-interpreting the final pages of Grad obrechennyi (The Doomed City, written in 1974). The novel’s hero, Andrei, appears to be safely home, observing the star Vega from the window of his Leningrad apartment. By performing an astronomical reading of the passage, Reese proves that Vega would have been invisible to any observer at that time and latitude. Therefore, for readers with the astronomical nous to notice the discrepancy, the Strugatskiis imply that the novel’s apparently happy ending SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 558 is an illusion: Andrei cannot be in terrestrial Leningrad and is therefore still stranded in some infernal simulacrum of Earth. Similarly, Reese’s unpacking of the technical term ‘radiant’ in Piknik na obochine (Roadside Picnic, 1972) helps to illuminate the symbolism of that novel’s mysterious Zone, strewn with alien artefacts. His familiarity with physics, mathematics, science fiction and history of science allows Reese to unlock the Strugatskiis’ extensive extra-literary coding, although their literary subtexts remain essential. He reads Vtoroe nashestvie marsian (The Second Martian Invasion, 1967) in light of its obvious precursor text, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), and Piknik na obochine as a counterpart of Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman, 1833), since the protagonists of both works defy indifferent, incalculably superior powers. Chapter four, dramatically titled ‘Poincaré’s Starless Hell’, exemplifies Reese’s interdisciplinary approach. Henri Poincaré speculated in 1905 about humanity’s likely spiritual impoverishment without our view of the stars; in Obitaemyi ostrov (The Inhabited Island, 1969), the Strugatskiis realized this cosmological scenario in the planet Saraksh, with its opaque atmosphere. The inhabitants of Saraksh believe they live on the inner surface of a hollow globe; their conservatism and isolationism is an obvious allegory for Brezhnev’s Russia. Unsurprisingly, Obitaemyi ostrov was heavily censored. Yet the novel’s protagonist, interstellar explorer Maksim Kammerer, is a Soviet Socialist Realist hero par excellence. As Reese suggests, the Strugatskiis did write Socialist Realism: only, on the analogy of Saraksh’s cosmologically deluded denizens, they turned the standard...