Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
Slezkine is an ex-Russian Jewish historian who now works in the United States. And this is a fascinating heterodox piece of 20th-century history which has annoyed some people quite a lot. That’s because he says our sense of 20th-century Jewish history has been distorted by the eventual success of the American Jewish experience as the main metropolitan one – that, he says, was not true for most of the 20th century.
Your third book is actually Russian sci-fi. This is Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Yes, Roadside Picnic is the single greatest work of sci-fi fiction, written by these two scientist brothers. It is what Tarkovksy’s great and weird film Stalker is based on. The story, like a lot of Soviet science fiction, is set safely outside the Soviet Union in a capitalist wasteland, where interesting things can happen that you can talk about!
Some aliens that are incredibly powerful arrive briefly on earth and then bugger off again leaving some ambiguous and very frightening objects behind them, which the book says are rather like the wrappings and empty bottles left at the side of the road after people have stopped their car for a picnic and gone on again. Around these mysterious objects, which may or may not have the power to grant wishes, a whole desperate shanty town of prospectors and chancers has grown up.
The thing about Soviet science fiction is that it was actually far freer than Soviet literary fiction to do interesting, bold, satirical, avant-garde things. Roadside Picnic is, among other things, a wonderful indirect metaphorical reflection on everything about Soviet Russia – from its terrible scrappy industrial texture, through to the way that the possibility of miracles kept bobbing on through the wasteland like will-o’-the-wisps. It’s about the way that industrial grime and decay always coincided with promises that at any moment things could be radiantly wonderful.
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Francis Spufford is an award-winning writer and a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London. His latest book Red Plenty is about Russia in the 1950s and 1960s, and the economists who tried to make good on Khrushchev’s impossible promise that Soviet citizens would shortly be richer than Americans.
