As I write this in a nation under CCTV, yes, I can admit that Orwell did get some things right. But American readers looking for literature offering some foresight into the direction their country is headed would be better off tracking down Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Hard To Be A God.
I was first introduced to the Strugatskys' work by the excellent 1979 sci-fi film Stalker, an adaptation of their novel Roadside Picnic, which I read last year. While the film's primary merit is as a masterpiece of cinematography, the book goes several layers deeper. The premise remains the same, but the setting is developed far further, resulting in a bitter critique of the empty promises of the USSR's ruling party and the endless mazes of bureaucracy that meant the working classes had no chance of benefiting from them anyway.
I was amazed that a book so critical of the Soviet Union had been allowed to be published at the time, until I read the afterword and found that, in fact, it hadn't been. Instead, the authors had engaged in a relentless process of drafting and censorship by the state before finally conceding a heavily edited version in the 1980s. As per policy, the book's highly cynical tone was blunted, and the result must have been substantially different to the version that I read, approved by the brothers as being the intended original in the 1990s.
Somehow, it seems that Hard To Be A God suffered no such obstacles, despite, in my opinion, being a far more open critique of the direction of Soviet society at the time. This is perhaps due to its plot whereby, in a distant future, envoys are sent from Earth to a planet very similar to our own but which has yet to emerge from the Dark Ages. The result is a fantasy-style adventure story with plenty of sword fighting, castles and wizards.
Despite this, though, the novel's true purpose is clear. Our hero Anton, undercover as nobleman Don Rumata, is tasked with ensuring the planet's societal development into the Renaissance and Enlightenment; preserving art and literature and aiding the advancement of technology without intervening to too great an extent. Instead, he finds himself fighting a relentless tide of wilful ignorance, as gangs of uneducated, untrained mercenary soldiers roam the cities wiping out anything perceived as intellectual. All this under the command of prime minister Don Reba, a man intelligent enough to play the game of politics, but not intelligent enough to do anything worthwhile with his success. Reba was based on Lavrentiy Beria, state security chief under Stalin, but the parallels with Trump are plain to see - surrounded by yes-men and faceless mobs of unflinchingly loyal supporters, he builds insurmountable power over his kingdom as Anton/Rumata battles his conscience over whether to intervene.
The book's conclusion - which I can only assume was allowed to be published thanks to the reversal of Stalinist policies over the 1960s and 70s - is that intervention is essential if society is to develop, whatever the consequences. Don Reba's government is nowhere on the political spectrum, as his society has not yet reached that point, but comparisons are made, both concretely and by allusion, to both Hitler and Stalin. And while comparing Trump to that pair is definitely oversimplifying, there are general lessons to be learned about avoiding the mistakes of the past.
Ultimately, Anton appears to have done the right thing by using his powers for revolution, and that is where this book is more useful than 1984 ever would be - Winston Smith would have had a much better chance had he chosen the sword over the pen.
On a side note, my forays into Russian literature have been limited: Roadside Picnic, Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033, Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog and a handful of (largely failed) attempts at Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky are about it. This is partly because I found in all cases that the translations were very similar - the writers' own styles were masked by the attempts to liven up Russian's grim syntactical efficiency into English with resulting empty prose styles and characters that seemed underdeveloped. Yet Hard To Be A God suffers none of those issues and the fast-paced plot created a complex world that Tolkein and George R. R. Martin would be jealous of in less than 300 pages. So, full marks to Olena Bormashenko on the translation.
5/5
Before the Strugatsky brothers were sticking it to the man with their writing, Dmitri Shostakovich was doing something similar with music. Without going too deep into music theory, his Fugue in A Major for piano appears to be perfectly in line with tradition, but subverts those rules into an increasingly bizarre sequence (under the conventions of classical composition), creating discord where there should be none and sarcastically calling out Stalin's oppressive control of his music.
