Alexandr Stal
One of my favorite books is a novel ‘Hard to Be a God’ by Arcady and Boris Strugatskiy. It describes a distant future. The human race discovered the space and found a lot of inhabited planets. One of it is inhibited by people with technical, intellectual and mental levels about the Earth Middle Age. The nobeles there are cruel, arrogant. greedly and thoughtless. They force peasants to serve, they humiliate and kill intellectuals for religious reasons. The earthmen are worried and sad about it but they understand they can’t do anything. If they had brought more food to that planet then the nobles would have captured all of the goods. If they had killed nobeles then the most powerful humble would have become nobeles and continue to force others. If they had controlled everyone to protect people they would have stopped the mental evolution of that civilization. Disputable conclusion of the novel is that it is not impossible to make people’s civilization intellectual and progressive from outside. The people should grow themselves - it is a hard, cruel process with lots of victims, but if you force people to leave perfectly they will be perfect slaves but they will not grow their human qualities. The novel suggests the communist idea ‘Force humanity to perfect word’ and criticize it subtly. However, a lot of readers disagree with such point of view and think that ‘laissez-faire policy’ was shown by novel authors as a mistaken choice. I think the authors do not give a single correct answer and just indicate ethical problems. The book is very popular in Russia (I think it is comparable to ‘Strange in a stranger word’ in the US) and it has several movie adaptations but for me no one film is as good as the original novel.
Feb 24, 2021 8:33 PM
Corrections · 1
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One of my favorite books is a novel called ‘Hard to Be a God’ by Arcady and Boris Strugatskiy. It describes a distant future. The human race discovered space and found a lot of inhabited planets. One of them is inhibited by people with technical, intellectual and mental levels about the same as Earth'sMiddle Ages. The nobeles there are cruel, arrogant, greedy and thoughtless. They force peasants to serve, they humiliate and kill intellectuals for religious reasons. The earthmen are worried and sad about it but they understand they can’t do anything. If they had brought more food to that planet then the nobles would have captured all of the goods. If they kill nobles then the most powerful humble would have become nobles and continue to force others. If they controll everyone to protect people they would have stopped the evolution of that civilization. The disputable conclusion of the novel is that it is not possible to make people’s civilization intellectual and progressive from outside. The people should grow themselves - it is a hard, cruel process with lots of victims, but if you force people to live perfectly they will be perfect slaves but they will not grow their human qualities. The novel suggests the communist idea ‘Force humanity to perfect word’ and criticizes it subtly. However, a lot of readers disagree with such point of view and think that ‘laissez-faire policy’ shown by novel authors is a mistaken choice. I think the authors do not give a single correct answer and just indicate ethical problems. The book is very popular in Russia (I think it is comparable to ‘Strange in a stranger word’ in the US) and it has several movie adaptations but for me no one film is as good as the original novel.
Sounds like a very interesting book
February 24, 2021
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