Hard to Be a God (30 page)

It's amazing that this novel went through all the hurdles of censorship without any particular difficulties. Either the liberalism of the then-leaders of the Young Guard played a role, or the careful maneuvers of our wonderful editor, Bela Grigorevna Klyueva, or maybe it was actually just that there was a certain retreat after the recent ideological hysteria— our enemies were catching their breath and complacently looking around the newly captured lands and beachheads.

Although on the book's release, a reaction of a certain sort followed immediately. This might have been the first time that the Strugatskys were attacked by the big guns. The academic of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Y. Frantsev accused the authors of abstractionism and surrealism, while his venerable fellow writer V. Nemtsov accused us of pornography. Fortunately, that was still a time when it was permissible to respond to the attacks, and I. Efremov stood up for us in his brilliant article “Billions of Facets of
the Future.” And the political temperature outside had by then gone down. In short, nothing happened. (The ideological mutts would still occasionally bark at this novel from their yards, but then we got around to publishing
Tale of the Troika, The Final Circle of Paradise, The Snail on the Slope—
and against that background, the novel
Hard to Be a God,
to the surprise of the authors, even became a work to emulate. The Strugatskys were already being scolded: what's this, look at
Hard to Be a God
—you know what to do when you feel like it, why don't you keep working in that vein?)

The novel, we must admit, was a success. Some readers found in it adventures reminiscent of
The Three Musketeers,
others cool science fiction. Teenagers liked the exciting plot; the intelligentsia the dissident ideas and attacks on totalitarianism. Over the course of a dozen years, the polls all showed that the novel shared the first and second place in the ratings with our
Monday Starts on Saturday.
As of October 1997, it had a circulation of 2.6 million in Russian, and that's not counting the Soviet publications in foreign languages and the languages of the peoples of the USSR. And among foreign publications, it occupies a solid second place immediately after
Roadside Picnic.
According to my information, it has been published in forty-nine editions in twenty-one countries, including Germany (eight editions), Bulgaria (five), Spain (five), Poland (four), France (four), the Czech Republic (three), etc.