SOURCE: “Parody of Popular Forms in Iskander's Rabbits and Boa Constrictors and Voinovich's Moscow 2042,” in Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 183–97.

In the following essay, Clowes compares the ideological aspects of two popular Soviet-era genres—the fable and science fiction—by contrasting the implied reader/writer relationship in Moscow 2042 with Fazil Iksander's Rabbits and Boa Constrictors.

Throughout the Soviet period two popular genres, the fable and the science fiction novel, have been used as vehicles for legitimizing communist ideology.¹ Maksim Gorky before the revolution and Demian Bednyi after were among the most prolific of writers of political fables, and I. A. Efremov and the Strugatsky brothers wrote a kind of science fiction in the late 1950s and early 1960s that conveyed a youthful optimism about the communist future.² During the 1960s, of course, both forms changed and became a good deal more ambiguous...