Just another roadside picnic

In an effort to kickstart this blog again, I recently received a copy of Roadside Picnic, which inspired Tarkovsky's Stalker. I saw the movie years ago, and quite frankly couldn't make heads or tails of it, so am hoping that the book will help me put together some of the pieces before doing another viewing. It was interesting to read that I wasn't the only one interested in the classic Soviet sci-fi novel. WGN bought the screen rights to it and is planning a television series based on the novel. A video game has also been designed around the theme.

Neither of the Strugatsky Brothers are with us anymore, but for decades they were kind of like the Coen Brothers of Soviet science fiction, turning out a great number of novels in the genre dating back to 1958. They were mostly collaborative efforts, but there were a few solo novels as well, with Boris penning the last work in 2003.

Soviet sci-fi is what propels Victor Pelevin, one of my favorite writers, although he fuses it with contemporary thoughts and observations as was the case in Generation $π$ , or Babylon as it has been retitled in English.

There's quite a bit of Soviet and Russian science fiction translated into English. Here's a sampling. Yevgeny Zamyatin is the most well known writer on the list. We was the basis for another Tarkovsky movie, Solaris, which was also adapted into an American film.

It was more the existential aspect than the science fiction element that attracted Tarkovsky to these novels. In Stalker, you get more a post-Apocalyptic feeling in which everything has been reduced to ruins and persons are left to interpret what it all means. I gather the Strugatsky Brothers were more upfront in their novel, so very curious to read what it meant in their minds.

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Ward No. 6

Ward No. 6 is a short story written by Chekhov in 1892. It has appeared in various collections of Chekhov short stories, including The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories translated by Constance Garnett in 1921. In this story, Chekhov explores the inner working of a run-down lunatic asylum in a provincial town. He introduces the readers to a coarse porter who speaks mostly with his fists, various patients, a doctor who presides over this ward, and expresses his thoughts with a local postmaster. It was recently made into a movie , featuring Vladimir Ilyin. Here's a clip . There's also this very recent short film (30 min.) by Suzana Purkovic, with English subtitles.

Myshkin's dilemna

Wrapped up Part II the other night and have to say that Dostoevsky certainly has a comic's eye, although one senses the potentially tragic undertones. For Dostoevsky the aristocracy seems to be one largely made up of capricious souls more obsessed with good manners than any profound sense of their being. This is particularly true for the Epanchins, who comically wrestle with their emotions in one scene after another as he places them in very odd and unnerving situations that test the limits of poor Lizaveta Prokofyevna's endurance. Of her daughters, Aglaya, is the most interesting. A real beauty much along the same lines as Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, who likewise seems to have a hold on Prince Myshkin's emotional strings. Part II ended with Lizaveta demanding to know the extent of the Prince's interests in her youngest daughter. The Prince insisted his feelings were Platonic, but one senses there is more to be said on the matter in later chapters. ...

Roadside Picnic: Life inside the Zone

If you're like me and wondered what the hell Stalker was all about, I would suggest reading Roadside Picnic , the book on which it was nominally based. Tarkovsky took his idea from the character, Redrick Schuhart, a laboratory assistant and Harmont Branch of the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures, leaving the rest up to the imagination. The names were changed to protect the innocent. While Tarkovsky chose to shroud the story in mystery, the Strugatsky Brothers lay it out pretty clearly in their science fiction classic. Redrick, the Stalker, has gone into the zone countless times but each time represents a new set of challenges, especially with the Harmont Branch cracking down on the plundering of alien objects left behind by a visitation to a small rural town in Canada. I suppose setting the story in a place outside Russia, allowed the Strugatsky brothers more room to explore new ideas and avoid heavy censhorship, but according to Boris in t...

Chekhov's Gun

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