The Snail on the Slope by Boris Strugatsky

First published: 1980 (“Kandid” in Ellinskii sekret, 1966; “Pepper” in Baikal, 1968; as Ulitka na sklone, 1989)

Type of work: Science-fiction satire

Time of work: The near future

Locale: A great forest on a foreign planet

Principal Characters:

• Pepper, a linguist, once fascinated by the forest, who now tries to leave the Directorate
• Kandid, a scientist, marooned in the forest among primitive villagers, who sets out to find a way home
• Nava, Kandid’s child-wife
• Claudius-Octavian Hausbotcher, the worst bureaucrat of them all
• Acey, a driver at the Directorate and a dedicated sex maniac
• Alevtina, a woman who tries to become Pepper’s mistress

The Novel

The Snail on the Slope actually consists of the two largely independent stories of Pepper and Kandid, which are nevertheless brought together by the forest, their continentwide silent antagonist. Whereas Pepper tries to understand this primal mass of foliage from the outside and is entrapped by the Kafkaesque superbureaucracy of the Directorate, Kandid is trapped inside the forest and tries to find a way back to his civilization. On a political level, both protagonists stand for the struggle of the intellectual to find his place in a bureaucratic mass society bent on progress and knowledge; in the end, each arrives at a different solution.

Pepper’s story begins with his unsuccessful attempts to leave the Directorate, an institution which has been set up to explore and exploit a gigantic forest. Pepper persuades driver Acey to smuggle him out of the compound after he is caught by the obnoxious, ever-snooping Claudius-Octavian Hausbotcher while sitting on a precipice and lobbing pebbles down into the green mass. Back at work, Pepper is again confronted with the hilarious meddling and inefficiency of a monstrous, self-sufficient bureaucracy, the work of which, like Pepper’s multiplications on a faulty machine, produces utterly meaningless results.

At night, Pepper is thrown out of his hostel because his visa has expired. He finds refuge in the compound’s library, where he is discovered by Acey and Alevtina, who unsuccessfully tries to entice him to come home with her. Spending a night in Acey’s parked truck, Pepper is awakened by the cheerful manager of the garage, who tells him of Acey’s punitive relocation to a biostation and keeps him busy with games of chess, until an address by the Director to all personnel distracts the manager. Because his office has been moved, Pepper is the only man without a telephone to hear the address; he is desperate to leave when he meets his superior, Kim, from Science Security, who promises to organize a meeting with the Director for the forlorn linguist.

In a scene reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s work, Pepper is ushered through a door labeled no exit, but instead of meeting the mysterious Director he is sent on his way in a truck leaving for the biostation, where the office workers receive their paychecks. Entering the forest for the first time, Pepper finds everything nauseating. Together with Stoyan Stoyanov, the head scientist, and reunited with Acey, Pepper sets out for a brief exploration of some of the forest’s wonders. Returning too late, Pepper is picked up only to find himself in the middle of a nighttime alarm: Back at the Directorate, a machine has escaped and everyone is sent searching for it.

After an exhausting night, Pepper finally succumbs to the charms of Alevtina. The next day, he is shooed off the precipice again by Hausbotcher, who chases him all the way to the Director’s empty, palatial office. Suddenly, Pepper realizes that he is the next inhabitant of the office. Settling down, he dreams of instituting radical change by means of drastic reorganization and the encouragement of constructive criticism. These dreams are shattered when Alevtina enters and demands his daily directive. Jokingly, Pepper orders the members of the Eradication Group to eradicate themselves and watches in horrified disbelief as his secretary translates this into the serious order to the eradicators to “commit suicide with the aid of firearms today before twenty-four hundred hours. In charge—Hausbotcher.”

Kandid’s story begins in the forest, where he crashed in his helicopter and is now trapped in the timeless, mildly absurd world of the primitive villagers. He finally rallies his energies for an effort to leave for “the City,” village folklore’s term for the outside world. Accompanied by his child-wife, Nava, Kandid stands up to the fantastic dangers of the forest and narrowly escapes robbers who are waiting in ambush to abduct Nava. Led by Nava, Kandid arrives at a strangely desolate village. At night, he is awakened by the zombie-like figure of Karl Etinghof, a supposedly dead surgeon from the biostation, who warns off Kandid and Nava, as the villagers suddenly emerge from the forest.

The next morning, Etinghof’s village, like others before it, is destroyed by a flood, called “the Accession” by the forest people. Pocketing the surgeon’s scalpel, Kandid continues with Nava on their search for “the City.” They arrive at a mystical spring shrouded in lilac fog, the place of an otherworldly metamorphosis of the forest’s creatures into “deadlings,” masses of protoplasm shaped in human form. To his surprise, the “deadlings” are the products of a band of female Amazon-bioengineers who have been responsible for the flooding of the villages in the name of a progressive transformation of the forest. Nava’s mother appears and takes back her child; like her two female companions, she hardly takes notice of Kandid, whom they all regard with the arrogant indifference they deem appropriate for dealings with a dumb “lamb,” as they call all males.

Killing a “deadling” with Karl’s scalpel, Kandid flees and returns to his village alone, where he accepts his fate as a prisoner of the forest—a status he prefers to the company of the female harbingers of a merciless progress.

The Characters

When Acey and Alevtina find Pepper in the library, Alevtina calls him “pathetic,” which is not an inappropriate characterization of the protagonist of The Snail on the Slope. It is not that Pepper lacks insight—quite to the contrary. In the beginning, lobbing pebbles into the “living and silent,...all-enveloping indifference” beneath, Pepper is not only frustrated by his personal failure to come to terms with the mysterious collective entity of the forest, which has evaded all of his attempts at understanding, but he is also upset with the Directorate, the other collective life-form. Although he came expressly to study the forest, he has never been able to obtain a permit until he rather accidentally stumbles into the biostation; his talents are wasted by the bureaucracy.

Pepper is exhausted because he sees so clearly the futility, even maliciousness, of the efforts of scientists and engineers, who fail to accomplish even their foolish directives to “eradicate” in the name of progress that which evades their intellectual grasp. He accuses the library books of not helping humankind to make any real intellectual progress because they are either stuffed with comfortable lies or lack any use in the alien reality of the forest, which calls for intuitive idealism instead of bureaucratic fumbling and bone-dry scholarly instructions. Describing his ideology as “emotional materialism,” Pepper has the intellectual capacities to become a scientist-hero. Like no other character, he shows compassion when he sympathizes with the escaped machine; he equates it with himself and believes that the robot “probably couldn’t stand it.... They made it do stupid things,...and in the evenings they left it, tortured, drained of strength in a hot dry cubicle.”

What does make Pepper “pathetic” is his final sell-out and the novel’s merciless demonstration of his limitations. In the bitterest moment of The Snail on the Slope, the tormented Pepper longs for “people”—“clean, shaved, considerate, hospitable. No high-flown ideas necessary, no blazing talents... somebody [who] can run and fill the bath...and put the kettle on.” Alevtina’s luring offer—a hot bath and a warm bed—is the trap through which Pepper falls right into the Director’s chair. In Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s novel, plain human goodness is obviously not good enough: It is a trap for those willing to lower their standards in a moment of human weakness.

Kandid, on the other hand, makes the conscious choice to stay with the primitive villagers rather than succumb to the dubious promise of comfort and progress. What triggers this decision is his detection of the total lack of compassion in the female bioengineers, as he witnesses it in their destruction of villages and forest wildlife in order to create their strange protoplasmic homunculi. Nauseated at their “clouds of controlled viruses, columns of robots,” Kandid is willing to put his abilities—his skill with Karl’s scalpel—to use to defend his village from the engineers’ living machines of destruction, the “deadlings,” who abduct the villagers’ women in order for them to be educated by the Amazons.

Among the minor characters at the Directorate, there are the bureaucrats such as Hausbotcher and Proconsul, who impede everybody, and the specialists, who could do better if they had better directives. The workers do not care and try to cope by avoiding all stress and having as much crude fun as possible; characters such as Acey and driver Voldemar provide for the most humorous moments of The Snail on the Slope. In the forest, too, the villagers are drawn with a heartfelt touch of the absurd, thus complementing their civilized counterparts with great irony.

Critical Context

The Snail on the Slope was published at the end of the mid-1960’s “thaw” in Soviet intellectual life and was made possible by the Strugatskys’ successful careers as writers of such science-fiction stories as are collected in Putna Amalteiu (1960; Destination Amalthea, 1962). Set in the near future on a planet that resembles their home country more than anything else, The Snail on the Slope falls into the science-fiction category of the thinly disguised cautionary tale and thus continues the tradition founded in Russia by Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose novel My (1952, written 1920-1921; We, 1924) was never published in the U.S.S.R., although it is well-known there. Similarly, Kandid’s and Pepper’s stories first were published separately, and the only complete Russian edition of The Snail on the Slope was published in the Estonian Republic in 1972.

The Snail on the Slope combines caustic satire, wonderful humor, and fascination with the alien landscape around a carefully eked-out gray bloc of bureaucratic “normalcy.” The Strugatskys’ novel is powerful because it mercilessly points out human error and arrogance, while, on the other hand, it never loses touch with its unfortunate, obstinate subjects. There is some small hope left that people such as Acey and the villagers will survive despite all attempts to eradicate them, yet bitterness is not diluted in The Snail on the Slope’s survey of human scientific achievement. Bureaucrats and technocrats will continue to fail when their work is not coupled with idealistic heroism, but instead gives in to the human predilection for pettiness and the desire to overregulate and suffocate genuine understanding.

Bibliography

Greene, Diana. “Male and Female in The Snail on the Slope by the Strugatsky Brothers,” in Modern Fiction Studies. XXXII (Spring, 1986), pp. 97-108.

Griffiths, John. “Retreat from Reality,” in Three Tomorrows: American, British, and Soviet Science Fiction, 1980.

McGuire, Patrick. “Forbidden Themes and Devices (II): The Cautionary Tale,” in Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction, 1985.

Pike, C.R. “Kandid Thoughts,” in The Times Literary Supplement. November 7, 1980, p. 1264.

Suvin, Darko. “The Literary Opus of the Strugatskii Brothers,” in Canadian-American Slavic Studies. VIII (Fall, 1974), pp. 454-463.