![]() ![]() ![]() In one of the brothers’ most famous novels, “Hard to Be a God,” a time-traveling hero trapped in a despotic, violent medieval kingdom must decide whether to topple the monarch or let events run their course. Though they were committed Communists, the Strugatsky brothers used their novels to express growing disillusionment with the Soviet Union after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the end of a relative thaw in Soviet society.īut Boris Strugatsky was celebrated less for his social criticism than for confronting his characters with philosophical quandaries that had no apparent answer. That some of those worlds resembled the Soviet Union was not lost on Mr. ![]() Together they produced rich and often bleak allegorical landscapes that ranged from a dysfunctional institute for the research of magic in “Mondays Begin on Saturday” to a postapocalyptic “zone” littered with deadly extraterrestrial objects in “Roadside Picnic,” later adapted for Andrei Tarkovsky’s revered 1979 film “Stalker.” Strugatsky began collaborating on science fiction with his older brother, Arkady, in 1956. Vishnevsky, said.Įmployed as an astronomer at a state observatory, Mr. Strugatsky, a prolific writer who used the genre of science fiction to voice criticisms of Soviet life that would have been unthinkable in other literary forms, died on Nov. ![]()
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