Hard to Be a God is the 1964 novel in which Arkady and Boris Strugatsky sent a man from a peaceful, rational future Earth to live undercover in a kingdom that is sliding from the Middle Ages into something much worse. His name at home is Anton. In the kingdom of Arkanar he is Don Rumata, a swaggering nobleman with two swords who has sworn never to kill anyone, and his orders are to watch, record, and not interfere.
It opens like a swashbuckler and turns into one of the darkest Soviet science-fiction novels of its decade. It’s also the sharpest statement of a question the Strugatskys kept returning to: if you know how history is supposed to go, and you have the power to push it, do you have the right?
Below: the setup and the cast, how a Three Musketeers romp turned into a book about the fate of the intelligentsia, how it was read in its day, the two very different films, the length, and which of the two English translations to buy.
The wider science-fiction shelf it belongs to is sorted in my best science fiction books list.
Fiction by René Rehn
What Hard to Be a God Is About
Somewhere far from Earth there is a planet whose people are human in every way that counts. Their history has reached roughly Europe’s late Middle Ages: castles, barons, plague, peasants and a thin layer of scholars and poets. Earth, which in this future has done away with money, war and want, has quietly planted a handful of its own people there. They work for the Institute of Experimental History, and they live in disguise among the locals.
Anton has been Don Rumata of Estor for years. He drinks with the court, duels when he has to, and keeps his real feelings behind a nobleman’s arrogance. What he’s there to study is going badly wrong.
Don Reba, a colorless official who has made himself the king’s first minister, is building a regime of his own out of shopkeepers and thugs, the gray stormtroopers, and he has started hunting down anyone who can read. Poets, doctors, astrologers, and anyone who owns a book are disappearing into Reba’s prison tower. Rumata’s private task is to get as many of them as he can out of the country alive, starting with a learned physician named Budach who has vanished somewhere in Arkanar.
The theory behind the mission, which the book calls basis theory, says history moves through fixed stages and that outside interference only makes it worse. Rumata believes it. He also has to stand in the crowd and watch what Reba’s men do in the street.
Who’s Who
- Anton, known on the planet as Don Rumata of Estor: a historian from Earth, a formidable swordsman who refuses to kill.
- Don Reba: the king’s first minister, a gray, careful man whose ambitions nobody took seriously in time.
- Kira: a young woman of Arkanar, a commoner, whom Rumata loves.
- Doctor Budach: a scholar and healer from the neighboring Irukan duchy, the man Rumata is trying to find.
- Baron Pampa: a huge, cheerful, hard-drinking nobleman and Rumata’s friend, who has no idea who Rumata is.
- Don Kondor: a senior observer from Earth, older and more cautious, who keeps the rules.
- Don Gug: another Earth observer, working in Irukan, and Anton’s friend since childhood.
- The Holy Order: a militant religious order whose presence in the story grows as the book goes on.
The book opens with a short prologue on Earth, set years earlier, in which three children play in a forest. It seems to have nothing to do with anything, and it’s worth reading closely.
From Three Musketeers to the Twilight of the Middle Ages
The Strugatskys finished the novel in 1963 and it came out in 1964 in Far Rainbow, a collection from the Moscow publisher Molodaya Gvardiya. The prologue had been written separately in 1962 and was folded in later.
The first idea, as Boris Strugatsky later told it, was light: an adventure in the spirit of Dumas, with a hero from Earth among dukes and duels, under working titles like Seventh Heaven and The Observer. Then came the Manege affair of December 1962, when Khrushchev visited an exhibition of modern art in Moscow and publicly abused the painters, and a wave of official attacks on writers and artists followed. The brothers took it as a sign of which way things were going, and the book changed shape. It became, in Boris’s phrase, a story about the fate of the intelligentsia sunk in the twilight of the Middle Ages.
One small detail shows how close to the bone it was. The minister was first called Don Rebia. Ivan Yefremov, the senior figure of Soviet science fiction, reportedly advised them to change it, because Rebia was too plain an anagram of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police. It became Reba.
What the Novel Is About Underneath
On the surface the Strugatskys set the story on another world and dressed the villains in medieval clothes, and readers in the 1960s saw straight through it. A regime that hunts the educated, a secret police rising from nowhere, informers on every corner, a leader whom everyone underestimates: none of that needed to be translated for Soviet readers. The gray stormtroopers are at the same time a picture of fascism, which was the permitted reading.
But Hard to Be a God is not only a coded protest novel, which is why it has lasted. The deeper subject is the observer himself. Rumata comes from a society that believes it understands history scientifically, and the novel keeps testing that confidence against the smell of burning. His power, which the locals half suspect is supernatural, is exactly what he isn’t allowed to use. And the longer he stays, the more the masquerade starts to become the man.
There’s a famous conversation with Budach in which Rumata asks the scholar what he would do in God’s place. The answers Budach gives, and Rumata’s replies, are a compact version of every argument about imposing progress on people from outside. The title comes from that dilemma, and the book refuses to settle it.
The Noon Universe and the Progressors
The novel belongs to what readers call the Noon Universe, the Strugatskys’ shared future history, named after their 1962 book Noon: 22nd Century. Earth in these stories is a communist utopia in the literal sense: no scarcity, no states at war, people free to do whatever work fascinates them. Hard to Be a God takes that bright future and sends it somewhere dark.
The word the brothers later coined for people like Rumata was Progressors, agents of Earth who work secretly on less developed worlds to nudge their history forward. The term itself arrives only in Beetle in the Anthill at the end of the 1970s, and it’s explored further in Prisoners of Power (also published as Inhabited Island) and The Waves Extinguish the Wind. Rumata is the prototype, though his own mission is only to watch.
How It Was Received
The novel went through the censors without any recorded trouble. The criticism came afterward, from other writers and critics who accused it of abstractionism, surrealism and even pornography. Yefremov published a defense. It became one of the Strugatskys’ most loved and most reprinted books, and FantLab, the Russian science-fiction database, counts translations into more than thirty languages.
In English, Theodore Sturgeon called it one of the most skillfully written, heavily freighted science-fiction novels he had ever read. When the new translation appeared in 2014, Publishers Weekly praised how its unadorned prose cloaks rich ideas.
The Soviet writer Isay Davydov openly acknowledged taking the idea of progressorship from this book for his own novel I Will Return in a Thousand Years.
Hard to Be a God on Screen and Stage
Peter Fleischmann made the first film, Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein, released in 1989 as a West German and Soviet coproduction with French and Swiss partners. It was shot in German, largely near Kyiv, with a medieval town built at Yalta and further location work in Tajikistan. The Polish actor Edward Żentara plays Rumata, and Werner Herzog appears in the cast. It’s rarely revived.
The same year the Strugatskys wrote their own stage version of the story, a play called Without Weapons.
The adaptation people know is Aleksei German’s. He wrote a first screenplay as early as 1968 and was ready to begin, but the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that August made a story about an armed takeover unfilmable, and the project was shelved. Pre-production finally started in 1998. Shooting began in the Czech Republic in 2000 and went on, on and off, for years afterward at Lenfilm in St. Petersburg, and editing and sound took years more. German died in February 2013 with the film unfinished, and his family completed it.
The result premiered at the Rome Film Festival in November 2013 and opened in Russia in February 2014 as Hard to Be a God. It’s three hours long, in black and white, with Leonid Yarmolnik as Rumata, and the camera wades through mud, rain and filth as if it lived there. Peter Bradshaw gave it five stars in the Guardian, and it scored 93 on Metacritic. Reviews at home were more mixed, and its density drives some viewers away. It keeps the novel’s situation and throws away almost all its plot.
There is also a game. Hard to Be a God, an action role-playing game from the Russian studio Burut and the publisher Akella, came out in 2007, with the French company Nobilis handling it in the West. It uses the novel’s world rather than retelling its story.
Where It Sits Next to Roadside Picnic
The Strugatskys’ 1964 novel came eight years before Roadside Picnic, and the two show the brothers at different moments. The earlier book still believes in the bright future, and its horror comes from sending one of that future’s best people into the past and watching him break. By Roadside Picnic the future has gone quiet. There’s no utopian Earth behind the hero, only a small town, a fence and a black market.
The novel of the Zone and the stalkers has a page of its own in my Roadside Picnic guide.
How Long Is It?
It’s short. The Chicago Review Press edition runs to 256 pages including the front and back matter, and the old DAW paperback was barely over two hundred. The unabridged audiobook of the Bormashenko translation lasts a little over eight hours.
Which Translation of Hard to Be a God to Read
There are two English versions, and one of them was never translated from the Russian at all.
Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press, 2014)
The one to read. Bormashenko, who also translated Roadside Picnic, worked directly from the Russian, which made this the first English translation to do so. It’s clear, modern English. The edition has a foreword by the novelist Hari Kunzru and an afterword by Boris Strugatsky on how the book grew out of the events of 1962 and 1963. It’s published in the Rediscovered Classics series.
Olena Bormashenko (Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2015)
The same translation, published in the UK in Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series. Choose whichever edition is easier to find where you live.
Wendayne Ackerman (Seabury Press, 1973)
The first English version, also issued as a DAW paperback. Ackerman worked from a German translation instead of the Russian original, and the publisher of the new version describes the old one bluntly as full of errors. It’s a collector’s item now, worth having for the Kelly Freas cover on the DAW paperback, but not the version to read first.
Questions About Hard to Be a God
Do You Need to Read the Other Noon Universe Books First?
No. The novel stands alone. The prologue gives you all the future Earth you need, and the later Noon books make more sense after this one than before it.
Is the German Film Faithful to the Book?
To the situation and the mood, not the plot. Read the book first, because the film assumes you know who everyone is.
Where to Go Next
The Russian shelf, from Pushkin to the last Soviet decades, is on the Russian books hub. The Polish neighbor, the science fiction of Solaris and The Cyberiad, and which Lem book to start with, is covered on my Stanisław Lem books page.
