Memories of Utopia: The Strange Afterlife of the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic in East Asia

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Decolonization and Geopolitics III: Transnational Flows and the Falsifiable "Center" and "Periphery"

Abstract

Written in 1971, and published in 1972, perhaps no other novel in the late Soviet canon has enjoyed such enduring cultural playback as the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic, which has spawned a vast panoply of multimedia adaptations, allusions, and indirect homages. Tracing the novel’s adaptations in contemporary East Asian media, this paper will seek to explore the post-socialist afterlife of the text’s distinctly socialist set of themes. Literary theorist Frederick Jameson identifies the core of the story’s transcultural pull in its “short circuit[ed]” utopian nature, which sees characters embark into a spatiotemporally warped “space of otherness”—referred to in text as the Zone—that is both site of socialist wish fulfillment and alien alterity. Reversing the utopian polarity of the original, Chinese film director Bi Gan’s 2015 debut Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can), Masayuki Kojima’s 2017 anime Made in Abyss, and Iori Miyazawa’s 2021 lesbian anime series Otherside Picnic (Ura Sekai Pikunikku) instead re-envision the Zone as a product of capitalist alienation. Exchanging Communist stagnation for the curtailed horizons of capitalist post-history, these films redeploy the Strugatskys’ novum to allegorize the discontents of post-industrial age through a set of stories that bring together disgruntled rural labor, monstrous manifestations of the commodity form, and networked egregores into a single continuum of alienated life.

Author

• Sasha Karsavina, Yale U