I just read the recently-translated SF novel HARD TO BE A GOD, by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky (best known in the US for ROADSIDE PICNIC, which became the basis of Tarkovskys film STALKER. I found HARD TO BE A GOD to be a poweful novel -- the protagonist is one of several people from an enlightened full-Communism future Earth who are observing events on another planet, where human society has only reached a feudal/medieval state of development. The operatives from Earth are allowed to help the cause of enlightenment surreptitiously, but are not supposed to overtly reveal themselves or to interfere directly (there is a no-kill directive, among other things). The novel veers between the grimly comedic and the outright horrific, as the protagonist cannot escape feeling implicated in and dragged down by the gruesome violence and oppression of the society he is observing and trying to help. We have religious persecutions and fanaticism, exploitation and outright murder of peasants and the poor, tortures inflicted on the few learned people and on members of opposing factions by the rulers, drunken and callous abuse of everyone who gets in their way by the self-entitled aristocrats, and so on. The book was published in 1964, and could be read as a satirical description of Stalinism as a kind of feudal regression. (In his afterword, written shortly before his death in 2012, Boris Strugatsky says that it also refers to an anti-modern-art campaign initiated by Khrushchev under the instigation of Brezhnev (who had not yet overthrown him) in 1963. HARD TO BE A GOD has also just been released as a film. It is the final work of the great Russian director Aleksey German. The only film I have seen by German is KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR!, about Stalins late round of purges in the early 1950s -- a film which was utterly incomprehensible plotwise, but nonetheless a stunning audiovisual masterpiece in the way it relentlessly immersed the viewer in its grotesque, horrific atmosphere. It sounds like the movie of HARD TO BE A GOD is similar -- 3 hours long, in black and white, with full immersion into the dirt, squalor, and violence of its medieval world -- my friend William Kennedy, who just saw it at the Seattle International Film Festival, described it to me as IDIOCRACY with a lot more bodily fluids. Sounds about right; I cant wait.
Posted on: Tue, 20 May 2014 15:49:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015