by Adam Roberts
Skvorecky presently lives in New York with his American wife and their young child. He has applied for US citizenship.
Wikiquote has a selection of material relating to the work of Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There is a great deal of evidence of Stalin’s interest in UFOs, as indeed there is for his interest in a wide range of cranky and peculiar things. On 19 November 2002, Pravda published an article (an English translation is available at a number of online sites) detailing Stalin’s abiding interest in extraterrestrials and the possibilities of alien contact, as well as the many military and scientific bodies set up by the Soviets to secretly investigate the phenomenon. The figure Frenkel gives in the novel (‘Seven research institutes and eleven departments. All of them are attached to a secret wing of the KGB created specifically for this purpose by Andropov’) is taken from Pravda, and is evidence of, at the very least, an enduring Soviet interest in the phenomenon. The alleged 1947 retrieval of an alien artefact during archeological digs in Kiev (at a site very near the present day location of the internationally renowned Kiev Tchaikovsky Conservatory) is attested from several sources, and is a hardy perennial of UFO literature. The strange events at Petrazavodsk on 20 September 1977 have likewise been debated widely in the UFO community. Many thousands of eyewitnesses saw radiation aliens (‘radiating pulsating beams of light’, ‘huge jellyfish of light’) and tens of thousands of military personnel were mobilised.
The kernel of this novel is an attempt to suggest a way of reconciling the two seemingly contradictory facts about UFOs: that, on the one hand, they have touched the lives of many millions of people, often directly; and that, on the other, that they clearly don’t exist. I have sought to suggest one possible explanation for this odd paradox of contemporary culture. Those interested in the UFO phenomenon who would like an uncranky and balanced account are advised to read Bryan Appleyard’s Aliens: Why They Are Here (Scribner 2005). I would like thank Jane Brocket for sharing her reminiscences of youthful visits to both Kiev and Moscow in the mid-1980s. Thanks also to Rachel Roberts for reading the whole MS and making many helpful suggestions, and to my editor Simon Spanton, whose input on this novel has been unusually important.
1
The Cyrillic letter Г, sometimes transliterated into the Roman alphabet as ‘Gh’ and sometimes as an aspirated ‘H’, is idiomatic Russian slang for ‘shit’.
