“A masterful, highly organised, carefully crafted offensive by the present on the past.” This is the central theme we will analyse on a book banned for over twenty years and now boasting a turbulent publication path. I’m talking about Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugastky.
Let’s get this book undone.
Hello everyone, and welcome to Books Undone. I’m your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today I bring a curiously absurdist and highly allegorical book to discuss: Snail on the Slope by the Strugastky brothers, Arkady and Boris. I found this book on a secondhand bookstore and purchased it because these authors had been on my to-read list for a long, long while. Reading it was a ride, and I want to share my analyses with you.
Yet before we get started, allow me to tackle the usual disclaimers:
First, there are spoilers in this episode; I found it very hard to explain the theme of the book without diving into its setting and plot. We will do a summary on that first, then establish a few related concepts, then move onto the analysis.
Second, in his Afterword to the SF Masterwork Edition, Boris Strugatsky pointed out that, although the Administration/Forest allegory has one clear intent, there have been many other sensible explanations out there. Ultimately, that’s the power of allegories—that each reader can add meaning to it. Therefore, if you don’t resonate with the idea I’m presenting here, then that’s okay. We can all have different interpretations.
Trivia: The Authors & The Book
Now, for those who don’t know the Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris, they were born in 1925 and 1933 respectively. Their writing style is considered to have emerged from the period of Soviet rationalism in their contemporary literature, and rapidly evolved to social criticism masquerading as science fiction. They started writing in the mid-1950s, and published at least twenty-six novels, in addition to short-stories, plays, and a few works written individually. There is a 1967 poll claiming that four out of the top-ten works of science fiction in the Soviet Union were by the Strugatskys1… so you can imagine they were incredibly famous.
Their most renown novel, Roadside Picnic was adapted in 1979 into the film Stalker directed by Andrei Tarkovsky; it is often considered to be the greatest science fiction film ever made—that is not small praise. Likewise, their novel Hard to Be A God (1964) was also adapted into a highly-praised film, this time by Russian filmmaker Aleksei German.
Something interesting about them, is that their writing prior to 1964 was informed by the post-Stalinist “thaw”—a period which included a general liberalisation of Soviet life, leading to a political and cultural openness when it seemed like the socialist dream might still be possible. During this period, the Strugatskys’ work was somewhat optimistic. However, that changed in 1964, when Leonid Brezhnev displaced Nikita Khrushchev as Soviet leader, reversing most of his reforms. They published Hard to Be A God in that year (which I mentioned before)… and this was actually a novel replete with themes of terror and political repression.
Their books grew darker from there, to the point the Strutgastkys became dissidents of the Soviet regime, using literary science fiction as a way to slip by the censors and publish books that would otherwise be banned. Their work was so critical that, when Boris (the younger brother) died in 1991, the New York Times called him “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.”2
It was during Brezhnev’s period that the Strugastkys published Snail on the Slope… or at least attempted to. They began working on it during March 6-20th (1965), but then it was significantly rewritten. In 1966, the USSR published only the chapters set in the Forest, and the remaining bit (set in the Administration) in 1968—but they were later pulled from libraries and put into a restricted-access collection. The book was banned from then on, and only published entirely for the first time in 1972 in Germany. The first English translation (by Alan Myers) was released in 1980, and—funny as it sounds—it was not published (as a whole!) in the USSR until 1988, exactly twenty years after it was originally banned.
Why was it banned? We’ll dive into the meaning soon, but something to know is that the Strugastky brothers became known for writing highly allegorical literary science fiction in an attempt to circumvent Soviet censors. It became their signature style, using figurative and symbolic meaning to express their philosophical vision while crafting stories that were incredibly relatable but subtle at the same time. That highly allegorical and volatile style led to its censorship.
Allow me to read an excerpt from the Afterword the the SF Masterwork edition, written by Boris Strugastky himself:
[…] The multitude of possible readings didn’t do The Snail on the Slope much good. The novel didn’t get destroyed, per se, but for many years it was forbidden. In May 1969, a certain V. Aleksandrov […] devoted the following remarkable lines to our novel: “The authors do not state where the action takes place, […] [but] the entirety of their narrative […] makes it absolutely clear what country they mean."
Snail on the Slope has a turbulent history, but the Strugastkys themselves considered it as “the most perfect and the most valuable of [their] works”.
There must be something there, in a book so highly regarded and so consistently banned. Don’t you think?
To get us started in its analysis, let me summarise the setting of Snail on the Slope. Half of the chapters happen in the Administration and the other half in the Forest:
The Administration is an administrative compound set high in the mountains. It has a number of divisions, such as: The Forest Eradication Team, the Armed Guard of the Forest Team, the Penetration of the Forest Through Engineering Team, and the Scientific Guard of the Forest Team. All of this is led by the Director, and—apparently—people need a visa to reach the Administration and stay there. They have shared cantines, eat all at the same time, are given buttermilk quite often, and have a cliff that oversees the Forest itself. There is not much of an explanation as to what else is beyond the Administration.
The Forest, on the other hand, is on the valley down the slope… and it is messy. The villages there are generally quite primitive, and stalked by deadlings—some grass-made plant-like beings (very vaguely described) that can be killed with grasskiller and often steal women. At completely unplanned moments, the villages undergo something called the Surpassement, a somewhat undefinable event which may be a flood, a wildfire, or even something else; there are plenty of in-book myths about the Surpassement. There are other places in the forest, such as the Clay Meadows, the kook village, the Reeds, the Anthills… but nobody really knows where they are and how to get there; they all know the Forest is dangerous. To top it, within the villages there is an unnamed old man that goes into people’s houses uninvited (!), eats their lunch (!!), and everyone seems okay with this, feeding him and never complaining about it.
Not long ago, I mentioned this novel was written during Brezhnev leadership (1964-1982)… a period in Russian history that later became known as the Era of Stagnation. It wasn’t truly totalitarian (not in the Stalinist sense), but it was hostile to free thought, suppressing dissent through means that were not mass terror—but bureaucratic absurdity, with rules nobody understood, goals nobody questioned, and structures nobody believed in.
That context is somewhat reflected in the book. The Administration is clearly a bureaucratic behemoth with Teams that make no sense (they have both Eradication and Guard of the Forest), processes that are illogical, a chain of command that’s never clarified, and places within the buildings that are physical mazes (as if echoing the labyrinthine processes it harbours). Likewise, the Forest is utterly confusing; there are all these places that nobody knows where they are exactly (just that they are, somewhere), deadlings with no purpose or goal, people that will somewhat connect to something and become a living radio… It is sheer nonsense. Intended nonsense.
Within those settings, we follow two distinct (and seemingly unconnected) storylines:
Peretz’ story happens in the Administration. He is a philologist and historian that arrived in a visa to the Administration, and works for a man named Kim… basically copying numbers every day. However, he came to this odd place from somewhere outside of it (someplace unnamed) just to visit the Forest—something he cannot do because he’s on a visa. Which soon expires, but nobody cares. Peretz is always carrying his luggage whenever he goes (although he never opens it), and always complaining he wants to visit the Forest and is not allowed to. He’s also haunted by a man called Bootlicherson who works on the Eradication Team.
Candide’s story happens in the Forest. Candide was actually a helicopter pilot that used to work for the Administration in the Scientific Guard Team. One day, during his flight above the Forest, he crashed into some sort of invisible barrier and fell to the ground. He was rescued by some villagers, taken to their village, and married to a young woman called Nava. The story begins three years after that, with Candide still trapped there. He’s trying to convince a cripple called Crookleg to tell him how to get to the City—aka, the Administration atop the slope.
The two plot lines never cross, except for whenever Administration people tell Peretz about Candide’s accident. However, everyone there seems to consider that Candide is dead even though no body was found, and no efforts made to rescue him.
There is something curious about the characters’ names.
In Russian, Peretz (Перец) literally translates to ‘pepper’, perhaps suggesting some spice in the author’s social takes of the Soviet Union. However, Peretz (פרץ) also has a meaning in Hebrew: it translates to ‘breach’ or ‘breakthrough’, thus adding into the overall allegory. This hidden meaning can also be read within the plot—namely, we rapidly notice that the Administration is a bureaucratic behemoth and, given Peretz status as a visitor, we could think he brings some quote-on-quote ‘spice’ that will lead to a ‘breakthrough’… but there is more than that.
The other character is Candide, and that name also has two meanings:
The word itself translates to ‘innocent’ or ’naïve’ in English, and through the story, we see a lot of innocence on Candide’s part.
It is a reference to Voltaire’s magnus opus Candide, ou l’Optimisme—a French satire published in 1759, during the Age of Enlightment. It was subjected to both great scandal and great success, since Voltaire’s character is a progression from blind faith to disillusionment and to a somewhat pragmatic resignation. While the Strugatsky’s Candide shares the optimism, he focuses on procedure and order while living in a maze of incompetence and vagueness.
Into The Theme
Regardless, to assume the Administration/Forest duality is just a parody of Russian bureaucracy somewhat falls short of the potential of this book’s allegory. Granted, you can read it like so… but in my subjective opinion, there are far more interesting (and spicy!) takes. As Adam Roberts said in his Foreword:
What the Forest represents, then, is reality’s resistance to reduction, the way things are always more complex, always larger and more baffling, than can be accommodated with our descriptions of them.
How can the Forest be, quoting, “reality’s resistance to reduction”? Let me walk you through the clues I gathered while reading the book.
Snail on the Slope starts with Peretz sitting in the edge of the cliff before being assessed by Bootlicherson for seemingly deviant behaviour—namely, wanting to visit the Forest. After a strange conversation, the pair walks through the maze of buildings towards the cantine, while Peretz thinks that:
You couldn’t see the Forest from here, but the Forest was present, although you could only see it from the cliff. If you were anywhere else in the Administration, it was obscured by something.
We can take that cliff:
Literally as the edge that divides the Administration from the Forest, being un-climbable from below, and promising certain death if you drop from above.
Or allegorically, as the small space in which the clutter and nonsense of the Administration (of daily life) are not present. A private (to some extent) enclosure where Peretz had time to think and wonder outside the chaos of his life.
Yet that fragment also hints that the Forest looms over the Administration, always present and surrounding although not visible. Wherever you go, you know the Forest is around, even when not visible. Since the Administration houses a lot of people, I began thinking that the Forest had to be something that affected more than one person—an abstract concept, maybe; something that exists but is intangible.
But what could that abstract concept be?
I held onto the question as the chapter followed Peretz into the office—a chaotic mayhem of people coming and going, and a boss that requested calculations for an opaque process—and it reminded me of something.
Think of your daily life; those days at your 9-5 job in which there is just so much happening that you cannot even spare a moment to think about how you feel; hell, sometimes you can barely scramble a moment to rush to the toilet! You can forget about the whole world—even those pressing concerns that won’t let you sleep at night—but in those few precious moments of peace, your feelings, concerns, and ideas will slip back in like a breath of fresh air. That is exactly what happens to Peretz: whenever he’s busy in the Administration he forgets about his intention to visit the Forest, but then when he has a moment of peace he remembers it.
From there, my premature interpretation was that the Administration actually symbolises the present; if so, the Forest quote-on-quote ’looming over’ had to be the past.
What happens shortly after that revelation (and after the first quote) was actually quite pepper-ish—if I dare say—and helped me refine this idea. Let’s move on with the plot.
Still following Peretz, we find out that his visa has expired and that he’s being expelled—at midnight!—from the hotel where he stays; this can be a metaphor of the uncertainty that arrives at the most unthinkable moment. Thus, our now-homeless protagonist is thrown into a cold night (at the mercy of the uncontrollable weather), loses his suitcase (there is more to it than you can imagine), tries to find it again and gets lost in the darkness (things keep happening to us), and then falls to the ground (where, figuratively, he’s now at his lowest point).
All of those events, those little metaphors I was pointing out, can be an allegory of life being awful at a given moment—something that, unfortunately, has likely happened to all of us at some point. Yet when everything stabilises, Peretz realises he is now at the cliff where the Forest looms.
If we are reading the Administration as the present and the Forest as the past, the cliff is the edge upon which the present looks at the past: namely, recalling memories—and this is exactly what we all do when life is hitting us badly. We start pondering “How did we get here?” and thus revisit our previous choices and the prior events that brought us here. Doing so is pretty common—we all try to either: (a) ask what-ifs such as “if I had done this differently” of “if I had studied a different career”, or (b) try to find reassurance that our current situation was inevitable or not our fault.
Yet doing that… is almost pointless. We can learn from our mistakes, but we can’t change the past. As Peretz himself thinks, finally sitting near the cliff: “But the Forest remained indifferent. It was so indifferent it wasn’t even visible. There was nothing but darkness beneath the cliff.”
No matter how hard we think, we can’t really change the past… or can we? That is a question we must ponder in order to continue reading and analysing Snail in the Slope.
After that quaint statement, Peretz seemingly forgets his misadventures and goes into a monologue aimed at the Forest. He says:
“Wake up. Look at me just this once. […] I don’t know what you’re like. No one knows that, least of all those who are absolutely certain that they know. You are the way you are, but I can still hope that you are the way I’ve wanted you to be my whole life: wise and good, tolerant and long-memoried, observant and maybe even grateful. We have lost all these things […]. We only build monuments, bigger, taller, cheaper monuments, but memories—we no longer have any memories."
Focus on “I don’t know what you’re like. No one knows that […]” which is true for the past… but most of all, it is true for the collective past which we call history.
History is uncertain; it is made up of clues (blurrer and blurrer the further behind you go), and if we know anything with certainty it is mostly because there is a single source for it. The more we uncover (for example, through archeology or anthropology), the less certain we become of our own history. As Prof. Mark Damen wrote for the University of Utah, “History is not just what-really-happened-in-the-past, but a complex intersection of truths, biases, and hopes.”3 This intersection has actually led to plenty of problems with historians embedding their own biases on the interpretation of whatever they found4.
Yet the following sentence, adds to this. Peretz says: “No one knows that, least of all those who are absolutely certain that they know.” You can read ’that’ as conspiracy theories, or people that parrots a so-called truth without having a basis for it, those who explain everything through faith, or even those who simply lie so convincingly everybody believes them. Take it to the extreme and consider why we need fact-checkers—because nowadays, many public figures twist past events to their convenience (and whatever ideology they belong to); coupled with the internet providing us with so many truts, finding out The Actual Truth is almost near impossible5.
Now consider that this book was written during the Russian Era of Stagnation—which although not totalitarian it sought ideological conformity. Historically, and without getting into details, as David K. Shipler explained for The New York Times6, Brezhnev’s era “tried to impose [a] tougher internal order, reversing some of the liberalising intellectual and political tendencies of Khrushchev” and even putting “a growing pressure against artistic and political expression that deviate[d] from the party view.”
With that, we may start noticing the pepper in all of this. Like Orwell wrote in 1984, “who control the past controls the future” because by doing so one government can: (a) hide the fact that ‘before’ may have actually been better than ’now’, (b) create a muddled record that actually serves their purposes, and (c) reframe historical figures out of sheer convenience to squash dissident voices.
But it doesn’t stop there!
In the next bit, Peretz says to the Forest: “You are the way you are, but I can still hope that you are the way I’ve wanted you to be my whole life: wise and good, tolerant and long-memoried, observant and maybe even grateful.” I think each of us has, at least once, met someone still bedazzled about the good ole days. Whether those were the fifties, the sixties, the eighties and their amazing music—there is always someone thinking that prior times were better because, quote-on-quote “these things didn’t happen back then”.
There is also another well-known truth: time smooths the edges of imperfection, and so we tend to forget the rough parts of our past, often minimising it because now (in the present) they do not remain as important as they were before. This is known as idealisation: “a mental process in which a person exaggerates the positive qualities and minimises the imperfections in themselves or others.”7 We tend to do that to the past quite often—even to our own personal past—thinking that ‘we were better before’ simply because we forgot how awful some things actually were.
But Peretz doesn’t stop there, telling the Forest that: “We only build monuments, bigger, taller, cheaper monuments, but memories—we no longer have any memories.” So, history exists (namely, the Forest continues to loom over), but the present (namely, the Administration) doesn’t really have memories of it.
If we backtrack a bit from that scene—before Peretz’ visa ended abruptly—we can review a strange conversation between our protagonist and his boss, Mr Kim. Kim asks:
“Why do you want the bitter truth? What are you going to do with it? And what are you going to do in the Forest? Weep for a dream that has become fate? Pray for everything to be different?"
There are a few clues there, but pay attention to this bit: “Why do you want the bitter truth? Pray for everything to be different?”
Let me ask you something. What would happen if something that we believed to be true our whole life—especially something about the past, like an event, or a public figure—is demonstrated, irrevocably, to be a lie? Say, that someone demonstrates that this past event or figure was not really as good or as moral as we were made to believe? Chances are one of two things would happen (or both maybe):
We despair, because this fundamental belief is now markedly wrong, and we have evidence for it.
We turn the blind eye, ignoring the truth and continuing to live the lie, while making some mental gymnastics to explain the unexplainable for one simple reason: the temptation of comfort over clarity, narrative over truth, and the participation in delusion over the shame of waking up.
Peretz actually says this to the Forest in his monologue! He says that those believers: “are only missing one thing: the capacity to understand. They always found substitutes for understanding: faith, atheism, indifference, contempt.” Remarking that: “It is easier to believe than to understand.”
If you take it that way, everyone taking path two (namely, ignoring the truth and choosing the lie) becomes guilty of perpetuating the lie—and here is where the Strugatsky’s pepper comes. Unlike Orwell’s 1984 or Moore’s V for Vendetta or many other dystopias, Snail on the Slope was not blaming the government but the people: not as villians, but as agents of the normalisation. Whatever type of government it is, people prop up systems not because they believe in them fully, but because it hurts too much to admit they never did and thus recognise they were wrong.
In my opinion, that is far more subtler and unsettling than a top-down critique.
But there is more to this, and to keep uncovering the meaning we must jump to the Forest and follow Candide’s storyline for a bit.
He wakes up to the stranger—that old, unnamed man—arriving to his house to eat his lunch because that’s what he does. After exchanging a few words (and without trying to expel the intruder), Candide departs his own house while repeating that he’ll leave “the day after tomorrow”… even though he’s still in the village after three years. Thus, he goes to talk to Crookleg, a cripple who had his adventures in the Forest. Crookleg explains the path to take like so:
“The Ciiiity!…. That’s where you’re heading […] But, Silent Man, there’s no way to get to the City. If you wanted to go to the Clay Meadow, say, that’s no problem: go past the stones, […] through the kook village, and the Clay Meadow will be right there. […] You should’ve told me right away that you want to go to the Reeds. […] But I can make it to the Anthills. I’ll make it there myself, and I’ll take you there, too. […] But you aren’t going to the Anthills. […] You’re going to the Reeds. But I can’t go to the Reeds, I won’t make it”.
That excerpt is actually a heavily summarised version of a meandering conversation that happens across four pages!
It goes on and on and on, and it doesn’t matter how many times Candide repeats he wants to go to the City (namely, the Administration), Crookleg keeps deviating and seemingly forgetting what the other man requests . Do you know what’s worse? Candide’s patience. He doesn’t seem irritated, frustrated, or anything—he simply, patiently, tries to redirect Crookleg to remember he wants to go back to the Administration.
“So you’ll take me to the City? You told me no one but you knows the way to the City. Let’s go to the City, Crookleg. Can we make it to the City, you think?"
Yet Crookleg keeps meandering about until Candide departs, visits two other people, and the chapter (and day) end up with Candide reminding himself:
That is what I have to remember: the day after tomorrow. The day after tomorrow, he thought. The day after tomorrow, the day after tomorrow.
Not a very productive conversation, and certainly not one that speaks highly of Candide himself… yet the meandering and confusing nature of everything that happens in the Forest is part of the allegory. Something that takes another meaning when we start considering our Present/Past duality.
In the next chapter, Candide finally (!) goes to the Forest by himself. He begins walking through the main path and, after a few ours, he realises what the reader experimented in his previous chapter: that while he’s on the village his thoughts are rambly and vegetative. His narrator begins to change, the sentences become more structured, and Candide finally thinks: “Maybe it was the effect of this drowsy way of life—not even primitive but downright vegetative—that he’d been forced to lead.” He recalls how his helicopter crashed and how he was rescued, eventually having an epiphany:
If I hadn’t been thrown out, I would have drowned in the swamp […], so it was actually a good thing I was thrown out… It suddenly dawned on him that these were deductions and he was delighted.
Allow me to re-read that last sentence: “It suddenly dawned on him that these were deductions and he was delighted.”
In other words, while being around the rambly villagers, Candide slowly lost his ability to reason (and thus make deductions). Once he was out of the village—even for a moment—his old self seemed to return. There is no magic here, and certainly not a disease.
What’s happening to Candide is a key part of Snail on the Slope: a phenomenon called social assimilation. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, social assimilation is “the process by which two or more cultures or cultural groups are gradually merged, although one is likely to remain dominant”8. Within this context, an individual’s assimilation can be understood as “the process by which an immigrant to a new culture adopts the culture’s beliefs and practices”9.
Namely, Candide was giving up to the nonsense, and slowly adopting to the villagers’ ways… even though it made no sense. Allow me to quote Orwell’s 1984 again: “A lunatic was simply a minority of one” and does it matter whether this quote-on-quote “lunatic” actually believes the truth? No, it doesn’t, really. What matters—what always, unfortunately, matters—is the perception of the majority.
Yet that lunatic is never suddenly converted into the majority—the change happens every so slowly, accepting one belief, then another, then replacing what we believed was true until we start believing we always thought in this way. This is not a loss of intelligence, but a loss of context due to the social assimilation.
In this case, the Forest’s meaning as the collective past (namely, a society’s history) is not just what happened (the actual facts), but also the consequence of forgetting, where nothing makes sense and everybody keeps wandering about not to admit they stopped paying attention—to how others twisted history, to how records were rewritten, to how new truths scattered.
Yet while Candide begins to assimilate into the villagers (whether he wants it or not), Peretz seems to resist this process.
He secures an appointment with the Director of the Administration to beg for him to be allowed to leave the Administration. Of course, Peretz attends the appointment alongside his trusty luggage. Cue in several pages of mayhem as he goes from meeting an impostor-Director, to be thrown into curling corridors (all while screaming he wants out); amidst thr darkness he’s forced to sign a document, then expelled from a building and hurled into a car with his colleagues—travelling to the outpost of the Scientific Guard of the Forest. After a few moments, they realise Peretz has no permit to visit the Forest, and so they conduct an absurd test to grant it… and, upon arrival, nobody assesses that permit.
Yet the point here is not only how nonsensical everything is… but how little everyone (except Peretz) worries about those strange events in the Administration. The absurdity is not concealed—it is routine. In a system that has severed its ties to a coherent past, people complete their daily rituals (and accepts those that happen around them) because they have always been there and that is the norm. Remember: the Strugastkys were criticising the people as those who normalise this twisted, nonsensical state, allowing the past to be now just a mess.
Peretz’s inner debacle and confusion marks him as Orwell’s “lunatic”: the only one aware of the nonsense (the Administration’s ‘present’) everyone has adapted to.
His point of view, along his resistance to be assimilated, becomes a bit clearer when he finally arrives to the outpost of the Scientific Guard of the Forest. Once out of the van (and with his luggage at hand), Peretz thinks:
But the most impossible objects in this thicket were people. […] They walked with ease, never stumbling, instantly finding where to step, and they pretended not to notice the Forest, to be at home in the Forest—and they probably weren’t even pretending; they really did feel that way. Meanwhile, the Forest loomed over them, shaking with silent laughter, pointing at them with myriad mocking fingers, cleverly pretending to be familiar, obedient, and simple.
There is so much to unpack here.
The Administration employees in the outpost “walked with ease, never stumbling” because they had been socially assimilated. If you think that the Administration is not only the present but the current narrative of the past, the quote-on-quote “walking around the outpost” becomes “repeating the speech they were taught.” Thus, “they pretended not to notice the Forest, to be at home in the Forest” can be read as those moments in which believers of a lie will repeat it over and over because that’s what they’ve learnt.
But notice the specific wording here: “they pretended not to notice the Forest”. As we mentioned before, agreeing to these beliefs is not a loss of intelligence, but a loss of context. Plenty of times, and in a myriad of situations, we can witness something that is happening and disregard it entirely simply because we don’t have enough context or knowledge to understand what we’re looking at. That is what Peretz meant when he added: “they probably weren’t even pretending; they really did feel that way.”
Nothing is easier to believe than a lie everyone shares—especially when the truth would shatter not just certainty, but the comfort of belonging.
Yet here comes the ironic bit: “Meanwhile, the Forest loomed over them, shaking with silent laughter, pointing at them with myriad mocking fingers.” While you can read this as the Forest being alive, this sentence can actually mean far more in the context of the censored history.
What if—because it happened across history and will keep happening—plenty of people, now dead or extricated, warned that if things were to continue, then the Administration was the only destination? Could we read this as those who issued warnings now “laughing from their graves” in a sad, ironic, “I told you so”?
While I will not tell you what happens to Peretz (it could be an episode of its own), allow to me to briefly resume Candide’s story.
After his journey through the Forest, Candide finally witnesses one the mysterious Suparssements reaching a specific village. What actually happens is that water comes in from nowhere, sinks the settlement, and literally erases all traces of it until only a lake remains. After watching that, and finally on his way back, Candide thinks the following:
But I don’t know what the Surpassment is. I’m afraid of it, I’m disgusted by it, but that’s merely because it’s alien to me, and perhaps the correct phrase is […] “a masterful, highly organised, carefully crafted offensive by the present on the past,” and maybe even “a recently matured and invigorated present attacking an obsolete, rotting past” at that. Not depravity but a revolution. A law of nature.
What Candide seems to be grappling with is the possibility that the Surpassement is not a mistake—but a deliberate erasure of what was and no longer serves a purpose for the Administration. Namely, the settlement within the Forest would be a specific past event that’s now being deleted and rewritten as a lake (aka, as something acceptable to the Administration).
Yet he is specific on his feelings: “I’m afraid of it, I’m disgusted by it” but pulls back and rephrases that “carefully crafted offensive” into “a recently matured and invigorated present attacking an obsolete, rotting past”.
In other words, Candide is doing a bit of mental gymnastics, trying to find a way to justify what feels truly unjustifiable because otherwise the moral crisis would be too high and costly for himself. He thinks that perhaps it is not a corrupt Administration erasing the bits of history that doesn’t serve it… maybe it is just a system renewing itself by violently discarding the past (the Forest) in order to define the present. In his own words, “Not depravity but a revolution. A law of nature.” What looks like depravity may have actually be ideological necessity—namely, history rewritten as “rot” and memory cast as “obstacle.”
This is Candide, just like so many other people, reaching for a frame that explains the systematic erasure of our history, even if it means giving up on truth and morality entirely.
Other Themes
I will leave it there, but there are a few other themes to mention that I did not have time or space to cover in this podcast episode:
Peretz’s luggage can be read as his sense of self and purpose—the last piece of him that insists he’s not part of the Administration. He clings to it while he refuses to be assimilated, but once he does… the luggage simply vanishes.
There are a lot of echoes and contradictions between the Strugastky’s Candide and Voltaire’s, and you could analyse his arc only based on the differences and similarities.
You could also analyse each of the character arcs—namely, Peretz’s and Candide’s—in terms of how they relate to the social assimilation of their relative contexts.
I only mentioned the unnamed old man that visits the villages and eats people’s food. You could read that as laws or customs that make no sense but that people keep accepting them because, quoting, “they have always been there.” There is even something worse: the old man criticises everyone, and that can also be studied.
A quaint detail is that the Administration has a patriarchal structure, while the forest is Matriarchal. There is a whole storyline around the deadlings and Nava—Candide’s child-wife—and how her mother became a Maiden, changing the Forest for plans obscure to everyone but the Maidens. You can make a whole read on this based on the inequalities that Soviet women faced despite the professed ideals of gender equality. Actually, there are a few interesting papers on this, and I’ll link one in the transcript.10
If any of these topics interest you, feel free to let me know in the comments. I’d definitely consider doing a second episode about Snail on the Slope!
The Intended Meaning
Before we go, do you want to know what was the Strugatsky’s intended meaning?
The imagined the Forest as the unknown future. Kim hinted at it on the very same excerpt I quoted: “And what are you going to do in the Forest? Weep for a dream that has become fate?” We can easily consider that as the many times we spend wanting something to happen. For example: when I purchase the house, when I finish the degree, when I get married, or when the kids finish college…
We are always, constantly dreaming of the future even though there is no way we can make sense of it (hence, why Crookleg’s indications are muddled).
If we remember that the Strugastky’s Candide is a reference to Voltaire’s Candide, then we can get even more. Maybe faith in progress (Voltaire’s original target) was replaced here with blind faith in systems—a blind trust that someone (the Director or the Maidens, maybe) knows what is going on, even as everything clearly doesn’t. This would also link back to Candide’s final reflection in which he does those mental gymnastics precisely to reinforce his trust on the leadership.
Furthermore, very early at the start, the Proconsul tells Peretz: “What a marvel the Forest is, my friends! […] It elevates us, it awakens our loftiest sentiments. It encourages progress. It is like a symbol of progress itself.”
And isn’t that what propaganda ultimately is? Loads of promises of action to be taken (of whatever type) as a mean to achieve an idealised version of the future. What those actions are and what that promised future looks like will depend on your time, on your country, and on what your biases and beliefs are.
Yet the allegory, as either the past or the future, stands nonetheless.
That is the precise problem of Snail on the Slope. If you read literally—just taking what’s happening in the page without wondering what were the Strugastky’s hiding from the censors—it can be quite nonsensical.
But the moment you give a meaning to the Administration/Forest duality and start reading everything under that lens… it becomes quite an incendiary book. The type of book that often gets banned. As a fake-Director said to Peretz, this book was “[…] destroyed, of course, as befits a work of art that cannot be allowed to have ambiguous interpretations.”
Before We Go…
A final word of advice—the Strugastky’s wrote this book in Russian, and so if you’re picking it in English, the translation matters. Myers’ was a bit more lyrical, but Bormashenko’s is actually a more truthful translation of the many odd idioms used by the Strugastkys. If you can, procure the SF Masterworks version; it includes both a Foreword by Adam Roberts an d the Boris Strugastky’s Afterword, which I quoted in this episode.
That said, if you liked this episode, please like and subscribe, review the podcast, and let’s continue the discussion in the comments.
If you want bite-sized deep-dives, prose analyses, and updates on my own writing, please subscribe to my newsletter through Substack, at liviajelliot.substack.com. As a bonus for subscribing, you’ll get the free ebook of my novella titled The Genesis of Change; it is grim, dark, and its magic system is based on philosophy. I’ll leave a link to subscribe to my newsletter the description.
Thanks for listening, and happy reading~
The Paris Review has a great biography of the Strugatsky brothers, which I highly recommend: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/05/11/give-me-that-old-time-socialist-utopia/
“Boris Strugatsky, Wrtier Who Slyly Criticized Soviets, Dies at 79” by The New York Times (Andrew Roth): https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/world/europe/boris-strugatsky-who-critiqued-soviets-in-fiction-dies-at-79.html
This is actually a very interesting piece published by the University of Utah, in its course USU 1320; Section 1 is titled “History and What-Really-Happened”. You can read the archive here: https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/01hist.htm
An excellent read here is “Bias in Historical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation” by C. Behan Mccullagh, published in History & Theory (a Wiley Journal) in 2002. https://doi.org/10.1111/0018-2656.00112
This is known as “the post-truth world”, and I discussed that a bit in my group discussion on The Escher Man. Although somewhat relevant to Snail in the Slope, I’ll not touch the theme here since it could be an essay of its own.
An interesting read (and less dry than a paper) is “Brezhnev Leadership: Bureaucracy Ascendant” by David K. Shipler for The New York Times, and published 1977. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/05/archives/brezhnev-leadership-bureaucracy-ascendant.html
“What to Know About Idealization and Mental Health”, clinically reviewed by Dr. Don Gasparini. Read at: https://www.charliehealth.com/post/what-to-know-about-idealization-and-mental-health
The APA is the American Psychological Association, and its dictionary is considered an essential resource for anyone involved in psychology or related fields. The definition of social assimilation is here: https://dictionary.apa.org/social-assimilation
The APA’s definition of assimilation is here: https://dictionary.apa.org/assimilation At the moment of writing this, I am quoting meaning two.
“Male and female in The Snail on the Slope by the Strugatsky brothers.” by Diana Freene, Modern Fiction Studies (Vol. 32, No. 1), 1986, pp. 97-108. https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.0.1226
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