Roadside Picnic - Arkady & Boris Strugatsky,Stalker - Tarkovsky, Stalky & Co - Rudyard Kipling - who would have thought they were all linked so closely - one of the most astounding and wonderful discoveries of my reading life. All beautifully knitted together in an afterword written by Boris Strugatsky in my new addition of Roadside Picnic on Saturday, that replaced the old Gollancz version I lost years ago. Cut short, Arkady Strugatsky made a rough translation into Russion of Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co ( a tale of public schoolboys at school and so much more : read it) for his brother Boris, translating Stalky as "Stullky". Then as they began the writing the story of these "prospectors", or "trappers", who raided this strange, dangerous, incomprehensible zone left behind by incomprehensible aliens, long since gone, they invented this new word "stullker" in Russian to describe them, a word whose resonance Tarkovsky picked up on - and so, in english, the film is entitled "Stalker". Read the books, see the film.
This was something of an epiphany for me, the yoking of Kipling with the Strugatsky brothers (and thence Tarkovsky's Stalker), two books and one film that I have reread, rewatched. It's a proof ( for me), well evidence anyway, that Kipling had this wonderful subversive edge - he wasn't all Empire and colonialism, he was a deep and meaningful writer. I only recently read Kim, and that book is a strange and beautiful beast, with a deep love and understanding of India, Afghanistan and its many peoples, and its centre the eponymous Kim, this half Indian, half English boy whose strength and wonder grow throughout the book.
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