The Strugatskii brothers—Arkady and Boris—loom large over the canon of Soviet (and later, Russian) science fiction. It is hard to imagine any other author(s) within the genre of nauchnaia fantastika who commanded the kind of critical interest and populist appeal that the Strugatskiis enjoyed during the Soviet era. The scholarly attention devoted to their corpus is considerable too, with critical appraisals and deconstructions strewn across many languages and disciplines. Kevin Reese, an independent scholar with a long interest in Soviet science fiction, steps into this crowded field with an extended study on what he calls the “cosmological hellscapes” that run through some of the Strugatskii canon.

The principal conceit advanced here is that the Strugatskiis’ work can be understood as meditations on “cosmologies of hell,” ones describing “a universe in which the laws are changed such that certain ‘physical parameters’…mark it as different from the…cosmology inhabited by the author and the reader” (xxi). These universes are always unstable, often fatalistic, and usually worse than the reality we inhabit. In portraying these “cosmologies of hell,” Reese argues, the Strugatskiis were inviting a terrifying disorientation of fictional characters and the reader. The Strugatskiis deliberately sustain and intensify this feeling of “cosmological disorientation” through the use of one of their principal rhetorical tools, what Reese calls the “rejection of explanations” (otkaz ot ob΄΄iasnenii, rendered here in shortened form as otkaz). Reese also introduces a second very different running theme involving allusions and echoes of Pushkin's poetry in the later works of Aleksandr Strugatskii. Reese calls this an “anti-literary cosmology,” (128) one that depends on seeing poets and scientists as part of a similar creative force whose talents are thwarted at every step.

In pursuing the first thread of “cosmological disorientation,” Reese suggests that the early life of both brothers—including the trauma of the blockade of Leningrad—was crucial in informing their later sensibilities. As others have argued, the blockade infused their work with a sensitivity to calamity, distress, and entropy that was striking. There were other circumstances, including Boris's academic work on astronomy in the 1950s at the famous Pulkovo Observatory when the Soviet astronomy community was reconstituting itself after the catastrophe of the Great Purges. Reese notes that “[t]he hells that the Strugatskiis would later construct for their astronomer-protagonists reflect the actual hell through which many Soviet astronomers lived in the years of the Purges…” (20). These threads, unfortunately, are largely abandoned after the introduction.

The bulk of Reese's book—seven chapters—is devoted to detailed explorations of seven major works produced over a roughly thirty-year span, from 1958 to 1988. If the earlier works are more circumspect or limited in their use of Reese's “cosmologies of hell,” in later works, the Strugatskiis’ concerns become more elliptical, less linear, and certainly less optimistic. These particular works share some common tropes: the protagonist or a main character is an astronomer (a scientific authority); individuals are often confronted by phenomena they do not comprehend as their worlds begin to break down; and the search for knowledge itself is counterproductive or often destructive. We see this in Obitaemyi ostrov (The Inhabited Island, 1967), where the inhabitants of a world are cut off from seeing stars in the night sky or Piknik na obochine (Roadside Picnic, 1972), perhaps the most popular novel by the brothers, which formed the basis for the Andrei Tarkovsky movie Stalker (1979), where alien visitors leave behind “zones” filled with artifacts that make little or no sense.

The last three novels—Za milliard let do kontsa sveta (1974), Grad obrechennyi (1972), and Otiagoshchennye zlom (1988)—provide more explicit suggestions of this “cosmology of hell” and here we also find deeper investigation into the question of Pushkin in the Strugatskii canon. This granular analysis is rich, extensive, and lacking some coherence. The extended parallel studies of the language of Pushkin and the Strugatskiis are interesting but despite the length, they curiously feel incomplete, leaving the reader wondering what larger issue is at stake here.

The book is a useful addition to the anglophone literature on the Strugatskiis, and its suggestion of a “cosmology of hell” is a tantalizing one. Yet, its shortcomings may limit its audience. Most crucially, it lacks a proper conclusion, the narrative suddenly ending with the last chapter. The work also seems largely disconnected from much other work on the Strugatskiis, including a stellar special issue of Russian Studies in Literature from 2011 (The work of Irina Kaspe on “false keys” or allusions to other literary traditions in the work of the brothers would be very apropos here). Perhaps the most important disconnect here is the one between “cosmologies of hell” and Pushkin, two independent threads that never fully cohere into a unified whole and leave the reader wondering what any of this says about the larger body work of the Strugatskiis and their place in the Soviet literary tradition.