Everything you need to understand or teach Hard to Be a God by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
Although not unique to their works, or even to the Russian culture, several binary oppositions can be said to dominate the brothers' writings, among them: east versus west, individualism versus state, humanism versus Utopia, and past versus future. In the words of one Western critic, these themes "are given a particular slant by vicissitudes of Russia's twentieth-century history: the massive social upheaval of the revolution; Stalinism with its cultural amnesia and falsification of...