The Doomed City
First English translation of suppressed masterwork, 2016
The Doomed City is among the most politically daring novels the Strugatsky brothers ever wrote, which is precisely why it took seventeen years to reach readers. Completed in 1972, the manuscript was shared only with trusted friends and kept hidden through the Brezhnev era. It finally appeared in print in 1989, when Perestroika loosened Soviet publishing controls. This first English translation, by Andrew Bromfield, was published in 2016. The novel follows Andrei Voronin, a young Soviet idealist transplanted into a mysterious city populated by people pulled from different times and nations, all unwitting subjects in an unexplained sociological Experiment run by unseen Mentors. As Andrei rises through successive roles in the city's hierarchy, from garbage collector to counselor to a strongman, his convictions are tested and transformed by each position's demands. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely regarded as the preeminent science fiction writers of the Soviet era. Their novel Roadside Picnic became the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. The book includes a foreword by Dmitry Glukhovsky, author of Metro 2033.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black boards with gilt lettering on spine. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2016. ISBN: 9781613735961. #11263.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket, with slightly bumped corners.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black boards with gilt lettering on spine. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2016. ISBN: 9781613735961. #11263.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket, with slightly bumped corners.
Additional Details
The Doomed City is structured around a simple but devastating idea: that a person becomes what their circumstances require of them. The novel follows Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer from 1950s Leningrad, who finds himself in an unnamed city populated by people gathered from different countries and different decades of the twentieth century. A British colonel from the First World War, a German soldier from the Second, an American professor from the 1960s, and others all coexist here, apparently speaking the same language, their origins dissolved into a common present. They have been placed in the city by shadowy overseers called Mentors, to participate in something known only as the Experiment. No one is told its purpose. No one is told the rules. They are simply expected to work and endure.
The novel is divided into six sections, each named for Andrei's current occupation: Garbage Collector, Investigator, Editor, Counselor, and so on. This structure is not incidental. With each promotion, Andrei absorbs a new set of justifications, a new relationship to power, and a new willingness to do what the role demands. He begins as a fervent believer in the Experiment's ultimate meaning. By the time he is advising a populist strongman, he has long since stopped asking what the meaning is.
His foil throughout is Izya Katzman, an irreverent Jewish archivist and the novel's sharpest intelligence. Where Andrei wants structure, purpose, and belief, Izya deflates every ideology with uncomfortable precision. Their arguments are the philosophical core of the book, and Izya's persistent refusal to be convinced by anything serves as the novel's moral compass, however inconvenient.
The book's most haunting section is the desert expedition in its later pages, where Andrei and a small group venture beyond the city into a vast, barren landscape littered with ruins. What they find suggests that the city is not a unique experiment but a recurring one, that civilization after civilization has passed through this place and left its wreckage behind. The desert is less a plot development than a landscape of implication, a way of extending the novel's critique from the Soviet present into something approaching the whole of recorded history.
The Strugatskys completed the manuscript in 1972 but circulated it only among close friends for the next seventeen years, aware that its allegory was too transparent for the censors. The city's Experiment, with its population of managed subjects, its rotating ideologies, and its Mentors who smile gently and ask for patience, was a portrait of Soviet life precise enough to be dangerous. Yet the novel resists reduction to a single target. The city is not only the USSR. It is any system that substitutes the promise of eventual meaning for the present obligation to explain itself.
Jonathan Lethem has called The Doomed City "an allegorical nightmare metropolis fit for the special atlas that gives home to Kafka's The Castle, Charles Finney's The Unholy City, Rex Warner's Aerodrome, and a very select handful of others." That is the right company. This is a book that operates through accumulation and atmosphere rather than through explicit political argument, and its staying power comes from the fact that Andrei's trajectory remains entirely recognizable. He is not a villain. He is a person who wanted to believe in something, and was given plenty of opportunities to do so.
The novel is divided into six sections, each named for Andrei's current occupation: Garbage Collector, Investigator, Editor, Counselor, and so on. This structure is not incidental. With each promotion, Andrei absorbs a new set of justifications, a new relationship to power, and a new willingness to do what the role demands. He begins as a fervent believer in the Experiment's ultimate meaning. By the time he is advising a populist strongman, he has long since stopped asking what the meaning is.
His foil throughout is Izya Katzman, an irreverent Jewish archivist and the novel's sharpest intelligence. Where Andrei wants structure, purpose, and belief, Izya deflates every ideology with uncomfortable precision. Their arguments are the philosophical core of the book, and Izya's persistent refusal to be convinced by anything serves as the novel's moral compass, however inconvenient.
The book's most haunting section is the desert expedition in its later pages, where Andrei and a small group venture beyond the city into a vast, barren landscape littered with ruins. What they find suggests that the city is not a unique experiment but a recurring one, that civilization after civilization has passed through this place and left its wreckage behind. The desert is less a plot development than a landscape of implication, a way of extending the novel's critique from the Soviet present into something approaching the whole of recorded history.
The Strugatskys completed the manuscript in 1972 but circulated it only among close friends for the next seventeen years, aware that its allegory was too transparent for the censors. The city's Experiment, with its population of managed subjects, its rotating ideologies, and its Mentors who smile gently and ask for patience, was a portrait of Soviet life precise enough to be dangerous. Yet the novel resists reduction to a single target. The city is not only the USSR. It is any system that substitutes the promise of eventual meaning for the present obligation to explain itself.
Jonathan Lethem has called The Doomed City "an allegorical nightmare metropolis fit for the special atlas that gives home to Kafka's The Castle, Charles Finney's The Unholy City, Rex Warner's Aerodrome, and a very select handful of others." That is the right company. This is a book that operates through accumulation and atmosphere rather than through explicit political argument, and its staying power comes from the fact that Andrei's trajectory remains entirely recognizable. He is not a villain. He is a person who wanted to believe in something, and was given plenty of opportunities to do so.
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