Strugatsky Brothers

The Aleksei German film of Hard to Be a God is finally appearing in NYC... I take it the novel is worth a read. Their best? Or start w/ something else?

I've read a couple of their novels and find them pretty strange and inscrutable. the hand of censorship does strange things to the creative process.

loads of bureaucracy; totally opaque/unfathomable characters; abrupt jumps in tone, setting, levels of detail; tons of stuff implied to be going on between the lines that is never directly explained or elaborated upon etc.

Start with Roadside Picnic like everyone else.

^^^

I would think you might have to dig a bit to find a lot of their other stuff tbh

I have taken some others out of library, sometimes enjoyed, but never really felt they were must reads, and never really finished either. Some, like the "Tale of The Troika" I sort of enjoyed at some kind of absurd Lewis Carroll, Lewis Padgett level but still felt I needed more background to really get. Now I own copies of the old Macmillan editions of Beetle in the Anthill (I kind of flipped a coin and got this instead of Hard To Be a God) and Definitely Maybe, which is in print now, I think, Melville House or something. You get mixed reactions , some people from that part of the world seem to say some are more entertaining than others, and some are too allegorical, but it is hard to draw a bead on which is which. In other words, what ilx user Οὖτις said.

really the only point of comparison that seems at all relevant that I've read is Lem, who reportedly also loaded some of his books down with allegories and thinly-veiled allusions to local behind-the-Iron Curtain politics & politicians - but the difference there is that with very few exceptions Lem's novels are still completely understandable to the western reader; he was a canny enough writer (with, to be fair, a freer hand than the Strugatskys) and a highly capable stylist that could put across a wide variety of ideas and stories. I don't feel like he was isolated from western lit and the sf genre on the whole the way the Strugatskys are. They write like they're in their own dimension, which is governed by rules that are never spoken of and only partially available to others. The Time Wanderers (the first Strugatsky book I read and one of the last they wrote) is almost impenetrable, just in terms of deducing the motivations of the characters and what is going on. iirc it starts with an investigation of some kind of Lovecraftian mass hallucination event in a village which is then abruptly discarded and replaced by some arcane bureacratic maneuvering on the part of gov't agents, ending with some kind of confrontation with superiors leading to a big "reveal" about how some agents are actually extradimensional beings (this actually sounds more interesting than it is tbh)... you can kinda get some vague sense of what they're trying to say, but it's all so veiled and obscure.

https://silentsplease.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/hard-to-be-a-god-2013-2.gif

Favourite film I saw last year. The movie elides the frame tale from the novel, FWIW - we saw it w/a Russian friend who found it a lot easier to follow than us re: what they decided to subtitle. Οὖτις OTM re: the novels; been meaning to try & read some Chinese contemporaries of the Strugatskys to see if it's an equivalent style.

Yeah, Hard to Be a God is great! I got the book from the library after (a new edition with a movie tie-in cover), and didn't find it hard to follow at all. The book is funnier than the film, and somewhat less manic.

Hadn't realized that existed, thanks.

I discovered my favorite living Russian director (Lopushansky) because he did a Strugatsky adaption. (It turned out to be one of his weakest films, but it was good enough to get me interested.)

I read one of theirs with like ... witches? Baba Yaga was in it. Like Eastern European folklore, was the deal.

"Monday Begins on Saturday"? I haven't read it.

One of the things that's been amusing me recently is just how often Baba Yaga shows up in Soviet flicks. (Including robot Baba Yaga in sci-fi flicks!)

Lopushansky, yes! Russian Symphony is one of my all-time favorites.

I really like Lopushansky's Visitor To A Museum.
It's the only Soviet film I've ever seen that hints at a Jodorowsky influence.

I love that one, too! But, you're right, Ugly Swans is weak.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hard-God-Blu-ray-Gali-Abaydulov/dp/B00ZDJDUPU/ref=pd_rhf_se_s_cp_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1QMZ6R0J2DEH2BN6PZM6

i don't begrudge anyone buying that Blu-Ray (I will!) but that film really ought to be seen on a big screen with a booming sound system

at home i don't think it could conjure the same sort of enveloping hellscape

it kicked the shit out of me in the theater; more of a dream than a film i suppose.

I started watching this yesterday (sadly on my small screen at home with the sound turned down so as not to annoy the neighbours). Okay well this is an odd one indeed. Am I supposed to understand what's going on?

Like watching Monty Python's Holy Grail except all the characters have been replace by the mad jailers from Life of Brian

I wound up pausing to read a plot synopsis. There is a comprehensible story but the movie doesn't do a great job communicating it.

Yeah. My copy is dodgy and I am wondering if it's been translated properly or if that's literally the dialogue. One of the few times I would recommend reading a synopsis and perhaps some reviews.

Not seen film, but a feature of the Strug brothers work is the use of plot ellipses- episodes will follow on each other with significant time elapsed, and with little or no exposition as to what's happened in the meantime (sometimes highly important stuff offstage), and the reader is left to join up the dots. Dunno if that's a factor in the film, affecting its comprehensibility.

Yeah, iirc there's at least one big shift of that kind towards the end that isn't explicitly established. I think another factor is the disorienting effect of its visual style, where you can hardly get your bearings amid the mass of images. The camera's always leading you towards some particular fantastic detail. I mainly remember the film as an amazing work of photography, not so much as a drama.

Whatever it is, it's a work of art.

New translation coming in August:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1613737548.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg