Definitely Maybe Book

I first read this book twenty-five years ago, but now ... it is no longer the same book ... it is a much better book. For one thing, the old English version was based on a manuscript that was heavily edited by Soviet censors. For another, I have changed, and so the impressions I received were altogether different.

Think of a community of scientists and scholars in Leningrad, all on the point of making breakthroughs. Suddenly, they find themselves being literally driven to distraction by ... by anything. Fake phone calls. By a visit from a sexy friend of your wife, who is currently vacationing in Odessa. By a delivery of booze and caviar supposedly from the vacationing wife. By a warning from the state security services threatening a fifteen years' imprisonment. By even nameless threats.

Definitely Maybe is organized into eleven chapters composed of twenty-one fragments. The fragments in each case seem to indicate that a small excision, as from censorship, has occurred. What's "missing" is in each case a few words, a few sentences, certainly no more than a small paragraph.

Something or somebody does not want the scientists and scholars to make their breakthrough. Vecherovsky and Malianov, two of the scientists, resolve on different after their clear defeat before a "homeostatic universe" that resisted any significant change:He didn't say anything; he shrugged and filled his pipe. We sat in silence. He was trying to help me. Paint some prospects for me, prove that I wasn't such a coward and that he wasn't such a hero. That we were just two scientists; we were offered a project, and due to circumstances, he could work on it now and I couldn't. But it didn't make it any easier for me. Because he was going to the Pamirs to struggle with Weingarten's revertase, Zakhar's fadings, with his own brilliant math, and all the rest. They would be aiming balls of fire at him, sending ghosts, frozen mountain climbers, especially female ones, dropping avalanches on him, tossing him in space and time, and they would finally get to him there. Or maybe not.It is never made clear who or what "they" is -- and this is one of the novels strong points. In any case, it confirms for me the excellence of those two now deceased brothers, Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky who were the great stars of Soviet science fiction.