Open Letter to Ray Bradbury

Dear Ray Bradbury!

I hope you will excuse me for troubling you. For many years I have wanted to express to you in writing my admiration of your creative work and to tell you what you mean to me and others of my compatriots, my friends and like-minded persons.

I familiarized myself with your books as a young man. This was the bright period of the early 1960s, when the so-called thaw came to the USSR, after the cold and grim Stalin times. I tried to write you many times, after publication in Russian of each new book of yours (I have a special "Bradburian" shelf in my library).

But it was practically impossible to correspond with the West in Soviet times, the more so as I was an employee of the Aircraft Engineering Institute, not of a knitted-goods factory. The Cold War dictated its laws. . . . I tried to contact you, after many efforts to find your address, in the early "Perestroika" years, but apparently our postal service worked badly at those times.

You and I have been colleague-neighbors in the list of editors of Leonardo journal for several years. Many years have passed since I was first delighted with your books, and my youth is far away. The third millennium is dawning in my windows. The world has changed drastically since the 1960s. The Iron Curtain has fallen with thunder, this being very nice! But this fall had bad after-effects for us: walls fell too.

We, Russians, have long ago ceased arguing about who to blame for "Perestroika" and the falling walls: Gorbachev, CIA, masons, KGB. It is clear only that new, unexpected times are in store even for Europe and the U.S.A., as it goes about "Perestroika," i.e. altering, the whole planet. And when our common friend Roger Malina recently sent me e-mail inviting me to take part in discussing "Artists and War," I associated this in a strange way with my long-standing desire to write to you, to try to get your answer to the question worrying me since my first acquaintance with your books.

And I hope you will not be offended with the fact that my letter is an open one. I would like to share my admiration with Leonardo readers. So, let us return in a time machine to the early 1960s . . . Each of your new books--Little Strawberry Window, Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, R Is for Rocket--was an event, a discovery for us. Sometimes I even had the desire to learn some of your stories by heart, as poems, because they were not prose, more precisely they were wonderful prose, shining the inner, warm and tender light of poetry. It should be especially emphasized that you were lucky with your Soviet translators: N. Gal and E. Kabalevskaya preserved and delivered in their Russian versions the finest nuances of your language and style with love and anxiousness. Living an "interdisciplinary" life, I met representatives from art, from science and from technology. And everywhere--in the flats of my engineer acquaintances, when developing aircraft and cosmonautic equipment, in the hostels of military pilots, or in the studios of kinetic artists--the indispensable element in all of the libraries was your books. Maybe it was my destiny to communicate only with members of the Bradbury Order. . . . However, the press runs of your books were such that every citizen of the USSR was apparently able to buy them [1].

Jokes apart, you became for us a kind of plenipotentiary representative of the unknown America, being reliably hidden from us with the Iron Curtain by our powers. The short and simple warning shown on this product: "Dangerous! Sharks of capitalism! Enemy No. 1." And you, Ray Bradbury, did not resemble a shark or an enemy, so you became--as unbelievable as it is--the most Soviet among American writers. What is more, you seemed, to me for example, a guest from the "bright future...