At first, I was looking forward to using this afterword to tell the story of publishing the Picnic: naming once-hated names; jeering to my heart’s content at the cowards, idiots, informers, and scoundrels; astounding the reader with the absurdity, idiocy, and meanness of the world we’re all from; being ironic and instructive, deliberately objective and ruthless, benevolent and caustic all at once.
And now I’m sitting here, looking at these folders, and realizing that I’m hopelessly late, and that no one needs me – not my irony, not my generosity, and not my burntout hatred.
They have ceased to exist, those once-powerful organizations with almost unlimited right to allow and to hinder; they have ceased to exist and are forgotten to such an extent that it would be tedious and dull to explain to the present-day reader who is who, why it didn’t make sense to complain to the Department of Cultural of the CC, why the only thing to do was to complain to the Department of Print and Propaganda, and who were Albert Andreevich Beliaev, Pyoty Nilovich Demichev, and Mikhail Vasilyevich Zimyanin – and these were the tigers and elephants of the Soviet ideological fauna, rulers of destinies, deciders of fates! Who remembers them today, and who cares about those of them who are still among the living?
So then why bother with the small fry – the shrill crowd of petty bureaucrats of ideology, the countless ideological demons, who caused untold and immeasurable harm and whose vileness and meanness require (as they liked to write in the nineteenth century) a mightier, sharper, and more experienced pen than my own? I don’t even want to mention them here – let them be swallowed up by the past, like evil spirits, and disappear….
- Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, afterward
Roadside Picnic was the source material for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker. This film, inspired the Cacophony Society to go on Zone Trips. Zone trip #4 was a visit to Black Rock Desert. This turned into the annual event Burning Man.
The maize kernel for a cultural revolution was sown so many years ago, half way across the world.