Arkady Strugatsky - The Dead Mountaineer's Inn

Every man wears the face he deserves. Or put another way, the mournful cry of Luarvik L. Luarvik! from within the besieged Dead Mountaineers Inn might as well be the mating call of some obscure species of Alps-dwelling penguin. Who is this Mr. Luarvik? Do we believe his version of dire events, or do we believe the hypnotist/motorcycle enthusiast? How about the physicist? Surely a scientist is more objective than a magician! But how can you be sure when dealing with preternatural events that might just be very imaginative lies? This is the dilemma facing the earnest but sometimes stumbling detective Peter Glebsky who narrates the novel you hold in your hands. Poor manhe just wanted a vacation away from the family, and instead has to not only solve a crime but also parse varying versions of reality. Back home, hes a cop who covers bureaucratic crimes, embezzlement, forgery, fraudulent papers. Not exactly someone who deals with murder. Much less metaphysics!

Also: Avalanche! Ghosts! Pranks! A lot of creeping around at night!

Confused? Dont be. Think instead of the movie Clue or any number of British slapstick mystery-comedies. Perhaps with a hint of The Twilight Zone. Because not only does every man wear the face he deserves, but in The Dead Mountaineers Inn the Strugatsky brothers, creators of the Forbidden Zone in their classic science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic, give every reader the farce they deservewith possible infernal devices thrown in to spice up the recipe.

I came to Russian literature through absurdism and dark humor; my encounters with Mikhail Bulgakovs The Master and Margarita and Nikolai Gogols The Nose are two of the pivotal experiences of my early adulthood. The idea of a standard, garden-variety realism doesnt figure into this sort of fictional equation. When the Devils cat in The Master and Margarita begins to talk to the corrupt businessman and the businessman argues with the cat for a while before realizing I am arguing with a talking cat!, what were seeing is not just interspecies communication at its most subtle, but one of the classic absurdist scenes in all of fiction. Even in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, you can sometimes see this quality, and the reason it rises again and again in the work I admireRussian and not-Russianis that the absurd admits to the illogic of our lives. To the internal inconsistencies that we try to keep in check. When they pile up, that is when comedy or tragedy occurs, as well as the unpredictable. When, in fiction, they spill over into the surreal or fantastical, this is just a psychological extension of what we know to be true in a more mundane sense in our daily lives. Whether we admit it or not.

If Glebsky is upset that he must be on the job, then in part it may be that he had hoped that the irrationality and absurdity of his normal workweek might be suspended or kept in abeyance while on vacation. But the world doesnt work that wayrealitys porous and strange, and we cant ever quite escape it.

The Dead Mountaineers Inns finest moments occur at those points where the detective knows less than he thinks he knows, where clues do not add up, where people are acting irrationally and impossible doppelgngers proliferate. Writing explanations is hard, but creating convincing mysteries that are true to the world is more difficult. The Strugatsky brothers as good as tell us this through the inns owner, Alek Snevar, who says to Glebsky, Havent you ever noticed how much more interesting the unknown is than the known? The unknown makes us thinkit makes our blood run a little quicker and gives rise to various delightful trains of thought. It beckons, it promises. Its like a fire flickering in the depths of the night.

In support of this treatise, the novel contains one of the better scenes in fiction about waiting in line to use the shower, and not only because there arent many such scenes in fiction. Glebskys train of thought as he decides whether or not to wait is a lovely little reverie of indecision. When he realizes theres something odd going on in the shower, its both comic and unnerving because hes been lost in his own thoughts: Hes just here, I remembered. He doesnt drink, he doesnt eathe just leaves footprints.

The he is probably the dead mountaineer, a figure given such a loving and complex mythology by Snevar that even the guests become complicit in propping up the stories. The spirit of the dead mountaineer and the hints of sentience given to the dog thats survived him are just two of the early elements of the novel that delight the reader. (And offset the off-putting weirdness of Glebskys obsession with the gender of the hypnotists child and the appearance of the one hackneyed character, a promiscuous maid.)

The Strugatsky brothers clearly loved writing these moments, loved creating a profusion of stories and tales about the stories. Theres a jewelers precision applied to the staging and execution of such scenesa flair for expressing the foibles of human interaction. Executions the key; in lesser hands, the legend of the dead mountaineer put forth by the inns owner would be drab. In lesser hands, the almost Noises Off shenanigans on display throughout The Dead Mountaineers Inn would be sad, unconvincing, louche. Its tough to stage this kind of production. You might spend as much effort on the timing of the inspector Ping-Ponging down corridors to question different suspects as you do mapping the internal logic of a Forbidden Zone. To the writer, all enclosed spaces pose unique challenges, and when youre creating a riff on classic elements like the eccentricities of an inns staff or the even deeper eccentricities of its guests, your success lies less in originality than in the clarity of the writing.

So: An uncanny moment in a shower. A missing watch. A suitcase that contains what? Do these elements as they assemble capture our imaginationseem most luminouswhen mysterious or when explained? Perhaps it depends on the type of tale being told. A mystery with no solution is an irritation to a reader, usually. A science-fiction story with some things left unexplained is to be expected.

When the avalanche roars down, cutting you off from the world, its just you and characters, and in a sense, you get to choose how to interpret the story

All writers have a border around them: the constraints they have to work against and the way theyre perceived by readers. In the case of the brothers, the historical context of their development created an automatic barrierboth for us as English-language readers and for them, existing as they did within a repressive system.

Arkady Natonovich Strugatsky (19251991) was born in Batumi but grew up in Leningrad, leaving only during the siege of 1942. He served in the Soviet army, and it was in the Military Institute of Foreign Languages that he became proficient in English and Japanese. From 1955 on, he worked as a writer, and in 1958, he started to collaborate with his brother. Unlike Arkady, Boris Strugatsky (19332012) stayed in Leningrad during the siege and then became an astronomer and computer engineer. During the course of their careers, the two brothers would become icons of Russian science fiction, but also of Russian literature in general, although mostly known in Europe. Theyve never been well known in the United States.