A Russian Sci-Fi Classic with Jewish-Gentile Relations at Its Forefront

The Doomed City, composed in the 1970s by the Soviet science-fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky was—unlike the brothers’ other works in the same genre—kept secret and unpublished until the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev. Recently released in English translation, the novel tells the story of two protagonists in a mythical “experimental” city, the story of which is a compressed and twisted version of Soviet history. In his review, Marat Grinberg construes this deeply anti-totalitarian work as a commentary on Plato’s Republic, which the Strugatskys read in the manner of the 20th-century philosopher Leo Strauss. Thus it has an “Athens” component, embodied in the character of the idealist-turned-Nazi-collaborator Andrei, and a “Jerusalem” component, embodied in his Jewish counterpart, Izya: