"Arcady And Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора

his head, so that you know what he is thinking and feeling. All the other
characters act outact out what they are thinking and feeling. "Joe felt a
surge of anger and thought what a great joy it would be to smash that
smiling face," while "Sam turned white with rage and menacingly raised his
embroidery-hoop." Well, apparently the Strugatskys don't give a damn what
Teacher said. We repeatedly get inside the heads of many different people,
not all of protagonist stature; but, as in the authors' use of their other
tricks, we never enter through clumsiness, never by accident, never without
a solid reason.
So much for technique; any Strugatsky opus (I think particularly of
Hard to Be a GodHard to Be a God and Roadside PicnicRoadside Picnic) shows
them to be potent and resourceful tellers of tales. But fiction is composed
not only of manner, but of matter, and it is this that is most compelling,
most provocative about their work.
First of all, there is the matter of character development. Here the
Strugatskys obey one of the prime rules of lasting and important fiction:
the central character is changedchanged by the events of the narrative.
There are no exceptions to this in great literature; your protagonist grows,
gains, loses, perhaps dies, but he is not the same at the end as he was in
the beginning, and never can be again. Qt is this which dooms series
television to the minor niches of literature, no matter how beautifully
written; the central character must be the same next week as he is tonight,
no matter how drastic the action.) Maxim is without doubt a species of
superman, and in lesser hands he would sweep aside all obstacles and emerge
predictably triumphant. And Maxim, indeed, does perform many a superhuman
feat. Along with these, however, he commits some horrible blunders, and more
than a few laughable ones. His na(vet( is established early, as is his
humanity. He loses the former the hard way, wherever his innocence is shown
to be, in the matrix of action, just ignorance. The latter, his humanity, he
never loses at all, whether it is shown as falling face-first into a mud
puddle or grieving at the inexcusable death of a friend. His whole being,
however, is work-hardened as the story progresses; placing himself so often
between the hammer and the anvil of events toughens and sharpens him, yet
never even threatens that deep compassion which makes of him such an
engaging person. There are many facets to his personality, but cynicism is
not one of them. Not even when he confronts the bureaucrats.
And here we come to the most delightful, the most penetrating aspect of
the Strugatsky corpus. The brothers have obviously declared war on the
bureaucrats - on their self-perpetuation, their greed, their pomposity,
their prostration before the great god Protocol, their dedication to
climbing the official ladder, and their willingness, in that climb, to forgo
decency, honor, personal loyalty, honesty, even logic and consistency when
expedient. Faced with a bureaucrat, civilian or military, the Strugatskys
resist the temptation to explicate evil, to pile horror upon horror,
vileness upon vileness, in an effort to turn our faces and our stomachs; for
in that Grand GuignolGrand Guignol approach there is a quantum of awe. The
brothers resort rather to ridicule. By deft touches of slight exaggeration,
by swift indications of bad digestion, bad manners, and bad (or atrophied)
consciences, they succeed in making the bureaucrats ridicule themselves.
But it doesn't stop there; for when the self-serving, self-seeking