THE SNAIL ON THE SLOPE

London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1980. First British and first hardcover edition. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. (29153). Octavo, boards. Signed on the title page by both Strugatsky's. 20 page introduction by Darko Suvin. The novel concerns two protagonists in a world of "The Forest" and "The Directorate" which looks over the Forest, told from alternating viewpoints. In a review written (October 18, 2017) Rachel Cordasco writes: "The Directorate and the Forest stand as two poles of human experience: the former reveals a hyper-bureaucratized state filled with people who have become like robots, while the latter encompasses many forms of constantly-evolving and fluctuating life that is mystical in its mysteriousness. As the Strugatskys themselves have said of Snail: 'The Forest is to be taken as a symbol of the unknown and the alien, a symbol of necessity simplified, of all that is at present hidden from mankind because of our incomplete scientific, philosophical and sociological knowledge.'
[Darko] Suvin, at the end of the introduction, argues that Snail is 'a legitimate continuation of the Gogol and Shchedrin vein of Russian literature, and of the great Soviet tradition of Ilf-Petrov or Olesha, at the borders of SF and satire as in Mayakovsky's late plays. Fusing this tradition with the stimulus of Swift, Kafka, Lem and English fantastic literature such as Lewis Carroll, the Strugatskys offer the reader a brilliant work of word-art- a mimicry of bureaucratese and academese, of philistine and fanatic jargon, irony and parody, colloquialisms and neologisms. Thus, they are polemic at the deepest literary level, making untenable what they called the ‘fiery banalities' of the genre. (p. 19)'
Like Kandid being drawn ever further into the Forest, the reader is drawn into Snail despite its obscurity and unclear storyline, likely because the Strugatskys have mastered the style of creeping, destabilizing horror mixed with the absurd.