Strugatsky: I hope - we will not become a bastard, slaves of godfathers and Fuhrer

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

As a publicist, Arkady Strugatsky is less known than his brother Boris. The main reason is that he died in 1991, not having time to catch the time of freedom of speech. But even in the 1960s and 1980s, Arkady Natanovich, who was not very fond of the press, nevertheless made several predictions about the future of the world and Russia: a teacher is the most important profession of the future, we will see the emergence of a Mass Well-fed ill-mannered person, by 2015 people will be disappointed in the scientific and technological revolution and will hit in mysticism and belief in UFOs.

On August 28, 1925, Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky, a great science fiction writer, humanist and a man of a difficult fate, was born. He, unlike his younger brother Boris, fully met the real and expected war, and this left an imprint on his entire life. A brilliant intellectual, he spent 15 years in the army, which was alien to him in spirit. He began at the age of 16 with the defense of Leningrad, then there was an infantry school, the Military Institute of Foreign Languages. In 1946, at the age of 21, he, as a brilliant expert in the Japanese language, participated in the interrogation of Japanese war criminals. Japanese fanatical doctors were trained for the Tokyo and Khabarovsk trials. Then, for the first time, Arkady Strugatsky began to doubt not just humanity, but its intellectual representatives: how could doctors and university professors lose their human appearance?

Then there was service in the garrisons of the Far East, in military intelligence. Arkady later recalled that the early 1950s was a fear of a global nuclear war. Every day he translated the programs of Japanese and American radio, where they routinely talked about the coming war. His first story was published in 1956 - "Bikini Ashes", it is dedicated to the tragic events associated with the explosion of a hydrogen bomb on the Bikini Atoll.

In 1986, in a writer's questionnaire, his younger brother Boris wrote about Arcadia: "He is 61 years old. He has coronary heart disease, all his teeth fell out - the consequences of the blockade."

In the 1960s and 1980s, Arkady Strugatsky rarely met with readers and the press. Nevertheless, there were such meetings. We have collected several statements by Arkady Natanovich about the future of mankind and the world (from the 11th volume of the collected works of the ABS "Unpublished. Publicism").

1960s

The future of education. At least one tenth, or even one seventh of all mankind will be teachers. Each teacher will work with a small group of students, which he will lead from the very beginning to the very end. Methods - television, hypnopedic - I do not presume to predict. But here's the fact that the teacher will become the second parent, I affirm. Because he will be more authoritative than today's teachers, because he lived a long and, most importantly, interesting, significant life, because he will be kinder, smarter, more necessary.

Material insufficiency distracts a person from his main purpose - creativity, hinders him, hinders his development. The path of the struggle for communist morality runs along the Razor's Edge between the chasms of hunger and satiety. Raising the level of material well-being, we must simultaneously and at the same pace raise the level of spiritual and moral. It seems to us that pedagogy should say the decisive word here - the science of transforming a small animal into a big person. The problem of raising children seems to us now the most important in the world and, unfortunately, this problem has not yet been resolved. It is about upbringing, not training.

About the feat. A feat is a victory of man over his animal instincts and inclinations: over the fear of death, over the fear of losing a calm, well-ordered life, over laziness, over the desire for pleasure. Therefore, the greater the feat, the stronger the internal opposition to it. Therefore, the greatest feats last for years: they are the most difficult to accomplish, and they are almost always selfless.

1970s

About a new type of person. The era of scientific and technological revolution gave birth to a new type of mass person, no longer bound by belonging to certain professional or social groups, but united by signs of a completely different kind. I mean the Massive Well-Fed Ill Man - a disease that many capitalist countries suffer and for the germs of which we should not be careless either.

The jump in the level of material support caused by the scientific and technological revolution was not supported by colossal and painstaking educational work and caught the population of many developed countries by surprise. This is how the Mass Well-Fed Ill-mannered Man appeared.

For a writer, this human type is of great interest. Its appearance brought to life all the charms of the "black face of leisure", right down to the facts of a completely zoological decomposition.

And all the excesses associated with hippism, sexual anomalies, an increase in the number of unmotivated crimes pale, in my opinion, in comparison with consumerism as a spiritual infection that is now spreading across the globe.

1980s

What will the person of 2010-2015 be like? NTP is no longer the source of miracles. On the contrary, he kills a miracle, tearing off his bright attractive clothes and putting it on a par with other facts, long known and organized into the system that is called everyday life.

But a person cannot live without a miracle. Aside from the desperate and hopeless, the desire for a miracle is a purely spiritual need. Sensory hunger, an orientation reflex, this amazing mechanism of the human psyche transfers the expectation of a miracle to those areas that the scientific and technological development has not yet reached: UFOs, parapsychology, relic monsters, Bermuda secrets.

Indifference or sheer practicality in relation to the true miracles of NTP, on the one hand, and on the other hand, disinterested greedy interest in banal pseudo-miracles that have turned into myths of our time - this is the most characteristic feature of the modern mass man, generated by the NTP itself.

About building a parallel society. Can you get along with the bourgeoisie or not? Remove the machine guns - and you can. It does not pose any terrible danger. This idea was expressed by our young hero in The Ugly Swans: we are not going to destroy the old world, let it exist by itself. With philistinism, with hippies, with everything. And we will build our own, in parallel, without ruining anything. But we will not allow ourselves to interfere.

Hippies, metalheads, punks are disgusting. But this is physical disgust. Disgust. And this is our personal attitude. Quite an exceptional case. Therefore, it is our problem, not theirs. Had we not been born in such a family, do not go through a terrible war, do not crawl over corpses during the blockade, do not freeze with our wet backs to the wall of a frost-baked carriage for evacuation … Maybe they would have treated differently. It is important to understand that the situation is changing. Slogans that labor ennobles, and who does not work, does not eat, in an economically filled society lose their meaning. And if you want to contemplate, think? What if you want to stay at home and raise your children? The concept of work is changing. How all concepts change.

We used to describe the society in which we would like to live. And now - the society we are afraid of.

1990s

Edification for descendants (as it turned out - in the year of the death of Arkady Strugatsky)

It cannot be that we are all complete idiots!

Dont kill.

Honor your father and mother, that your days on earth may be long.

Do not dance from morning to morning.

Take a different purpose in life than to lay your hand on someone else's wealth and on female beauty.

Thousands of years have been looking at us with the hope that we will not be brutalized, we will not become bastards, slaves of godfathers and Fuhrer.