{"id":93061,"date":"2015-12-22T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T17:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93061"},"modified":"2015-12-21T11:51:46","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T16:51:46","slug":"give-me-that-old-time-socialist-utopia-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/22\/give-me-that-old-time-socialist-utopia-2\/","title":{"rendered":"(Give Me That) Old-Time Socialist Utopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"strugatsky\"<\/a>

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.<\/p><\/div>\n

How the Strugatsky brothers\u2019 science fiction went from utopian to dystopian.<\/em><\/p>\n

Near the beginning of The Dead Mountaineer\u2019s Inn<\/em><\/a>, a 1970 novel by the Russian science-fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the innkeeper, Alek Snevar, proposes to his guest, police inspector Peter Glebsky, that mystery is always preferable to explanation. \u201cHaven\u2019t you ever noticed how much more interesting the unknown is than the known?\u201d Snevar asks. \u201cThe unknown makes us think\u2014it makes our blood run a little quicker and gives rise to various delightful trains of thought. It beckons, it promises. It\u2019s like a fire flickering in the depths of the night.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a strange idea to appear at the beginning of what seems to be a locked-room mystery novel\u2014a genre in which all puzzles are meant to be solved. Soon after Glebsky\u2019s arrival, a blizzard blocks the road to the inn. Right on cue, another of the guests, a Scandinavian named Olaf Andvarafors, is found dead in his room with his neck twisted, the window open, and the door locked from the inside. Everyone at the inn is a suspect: Simone Simone, a nervous, billiard-playing physicist; Hinkus, a \u201cyouth counselor\u201d on sick leave; a celebrity magician named Du Barnstoker and his androgynous ward, Brun (\u201cthe sole progeny of [his] dear departed brother\u201d); an imperious alcoholic named Albert Moses, and his knockout wife, Mrs. Moses. Then there is Snevar and his maid, Kaisa; a St. Bernard named Lel; and Luarvik L. Luarvik, a mysterious one-armed man who shows up half dead after being caught in the storm. With this bizarre cast you expect to find plenty of red herrings before a hiding-in-plain-sight solution is revealed.<\/p>\n

Instead, The Dead Mountaineer\u2019s Inn<\/em> departs from anything that either detective or reader\u00a0could deduce. For the Strugatskys, the deviation was practically involuntary. In his 1999 memoir, Comments on the Way Left Behind<\/em>, Boris Strugatsky writes that they intended to write a commercial mystery novel along the lines of Erle Stanley Gardner or John le Carr\u00e9. But they were unable to resist their speculative impulses: in place of a clever solution for the events at the inn, they introduced a bigger mystery. Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year! How the Strugatsky brothers\u2019 science fiction went from utopian to dystopian. Near the beginning of The Dead Mountaineer\u2019s Inn, a 1970 novel by the Russian science-fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":333,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20653],"tags":[18076,18071,18073,18075,18074,10512,200,14496,13517,18072,7746,16961],"class_list":["post-93061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2015","tag-aleksei-german","tag-arkady-and-boris-strugatsky","tag-dystopia","tag-hard-to-be-a-god","tag-noon-22nd-century","tag-sci-fi","tag-science-fiction","tag-soviet-literature","tag-stalin","tag-strugatsky-brothers","tag-ussr","tag-utopia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Strugatsky Brothers\u2019 Sci-Fi Went from Starry-Eyed to Sad<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The duo are widely known for science fiction that critiqued the Soviet Union from within\u2014but their early work was far more utopian, Ezra Glinter explains\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/22\/give-me-that-old-time-socialist-utopia-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"(Give Me That) Old-Time Socialist Utopia by Ezra Glinter\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 22, 2015 \u2013 We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. 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