by Arkady
However, judging from a letter I wrote to Arkady on August 4, 1977:
… Medvedev has been dealt with in the following way: a) Fifty-three stylistic changes from the “Vulgarisms” list have been made—it’s explained in the letter that this is done in respect for the requests from the CC AULYCL. b) Interpretations of corpses as cyborgs for investigating earthlings, and of the Sphere—as some kind of bionic device which detects biological currents—have been inserted; it’s explained in the letter that this was done to be left in peace. c) The letter further states that the remaining demands of the editors (concerning violence and so on) are actually an ideological mistake, as they result in glossing over capitalist reality. Everything has been sent with a request for a notification, and judging from the notification, has been received at the YG on the 26th of July of this year. To hell, to hell …
That was the very height of battle. Much, much more still lay ahead: further paroxysms of editorial vigilance, attempts to break the contract with the authors entirely, our complaints and plaintive petitions to the All-Union Agency on Copyrights (AUAC), CC AULYCL, CC CPSU …
The Unintended Meetings anthology saw the light of day in the autumn of 1980, disfigured, massacred, and pathetic. The only thing remaining from the original plan was Space Mowgli; Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel had been lost on the fields of battle more than five years before, while the Picnic had undergone such editing that the authors wanted neither to read it nor even simply to flip through its pages.
But the authors prevailed. This was one of the rarest occurrences in the history of Soviet publishing: the publisher didn’t want to release a book but the authors forced it to. Experts thought that such a thing was completely impossible. It turns out that it was possible. Eight years. Fourteen letters to the “big” and “little” Central Committees. Two hundred degrading corrections of the text. An incalculable amount of nervous energy wasted on trivialities … Yes, the authors prevailed; there’s no arguing with that.
But it was a Pyrrhic victory.
Nonetheless, the Picnic was and still is the most popular of the Strugatsky novels—at least abroad. It’s possible that this is due to Tarkovsky’s brilliant film Stalker acting as a catalyst. But the fact remains: some fifty editions in twenty countries, including the United States (three editions), the United Kingdom (four), France (two), Germany (seven), Spain (two, one in Catalan), Poland (six), the Czech Republic (five), Italy (three), Finland (two), Bulgaria (four), and so on. In Russia, Roadside Picnic is also fairly highly acclaimed, although it lags behind, say, Monday Starts on Saturday. Roadside Picnic lives on and maybe will even make it to the third decade of the twenty-first century.
Of course, the text of the Picnic presented here is completely restored and returned to the authors’ version. But to this day, I find the Unintended Meetings anthology unpleasant to even hold in my hands, never mind read.
