The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Strugatskii Brothers

Soviet Russian writers (coauthors).

Arkadii Natanovich Strugatskii was born Aug. 28, 1925, in Batumi. He graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow in 1949.

Boris Natanovich Strugatskii was born Apr. 15, 1933, in Leningrad. He graduated from the department of mechanics and mathematics at Leningrad State University in 1955.

The Strugatskii brothers began publishing in 1957. Their earliest science-fiction short stories and novellas, such as The Country of the Crimson Clouds (1959), focused on the heroes’ inner world and were notable for their humor and realistic descriptions of details.

The Strugatskii brothers have written mainly socially oriented, philosophical romantic fiction, including the cycle of short stories The Return (1962) and the novellas Escape Attempt (1962), Far Rainbow (1964), Predatory Things of the Age (1965), and Prisoner of Power (1971). While their works often have satirical and grotesque traits, for example, The Second Invasion From Mars (1967), the Strugatskii brothers defend the humanist ideal of progress, warn against soulless prosperity, attack oppression, and reflect on the role of the individual in society and on man’s responsibility for the future. Some of the brothers’ works, such as the novella Snail on a Slope (1966–68), have aroused criticism and polemics in the press. The works of the Strugatskii brothers have been translated into several foreign languages.

WORKS

Trudno byt’ bogom. Ponedel’nik nachinaetsia v subbotu. [Afterword by V. Revich.] Moscow, 1966.
“Piknik na obochine.” Avrora, 1972, nos. 7–10.
“Paren’ iz preispodnei.” Avrora, 1974, nos. 11–12.
Polden, XXII vek. Malysh: Povesti [2nd ed.]. Leningrad, 1975.

REFERENCES

Efremov, I. “Milliardy granei budushchego.” Komsomol’skaia pravda, Jan. 28, 1966.
Lebedev, A. “Realisticheskaia fantastika i fantasticheskaia real’nost’.” Novyimir, 1968, no. 11.
Shek, A. “O svoeobrazii nauchnoi fantastiki A. i B. Strugatskikh.” Trudy Samarkandskogo universiteta, fasc. 200, 1972.

A. G. GROMOVA

References in periodicals archive

Similarly, Thomas Grob, in "Into the Void: Philosophical Fantasy and Fantastic Philosophy in the Works of Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatskii Brothers," looks at the works of three influential science-fiction writers of the early Space Age and finds that their most prominent shared central themes are "nothingness, emptiness, and also negation" (43).

How the Soviets explored the cosmic void and found ... nothing

There is no real discussion of the Symbolist novel (with the honourable exception of Belyi), the war novel (Vasilii Grossman?), or the science-fiction novel (the Strugatskii brothers?).

The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel