A retrospective of a «picnic by the roadside».»

Le Regard Libre N° 72 - Guillaume Moix

Very few works have made it through the Iron Curtain. Soviet science fiction writers Arkadi and Boris Strougatski succeeded, mainly thanks to their novel Picnic by the Roadside. A look back at a science-fiction classic and the mark it has left on culture.

*Picnic by the Roadside* first appeared in 1972 in the famous Leningrad literary journal *Avrora*. It then took the authors eight years of battling Soviet bureaucracy and nearly two hundred forced revisions before the novel was published by Editions La Jeune Garde. A Pyrrhic victory, then, but one that has allowed *Roadside Picnic* to become, over time, one of the Strugatsky brothers’ most popular novels; it has been published in dozens of languages, with several fo