Overburdened with Evil

Overburdened with Evil (Russian: Отягощённые злом) is a philosophical novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1986–1988, the last major work of the co-authors. It was first published in the magazine Yunost (issues 6–7 for 1988), and in 1989 it was included in the second volume of Selected Works by the publisher Moskovsky Rabochiy. The first separate book edition with illustrations by Yana Ashmarina and an afterword by Sergey Pereslegin was published by the commercial publisher Prometheus. After 1989, the novel was constantly included in all collected works of the Strugatskys. It has been translated into English, Bulgarian, German, and Polish.

The plot is constructed on the principle of a novel within a novel; both plot lines are presented through the perception of the main characters, who exist in many plot and space-time layers. The manuscript OZ, whose formal author is the astronomer Sergei Manokhin, tells of the coming to the late 1980s Soviet Union of the Demiurge, concerned about the fate of the world he created. He is served by the cunning Agasfer Lukich and some other authors of world salvation projects, whom the Demiurge keeps with him. Finally, it is Ahasuerus (in Overburdened with Evil he is also the immortal apostle John the Evangelist, a collector of human souls who was also at the origins of Islam under the name Rakhkhal) who brings to the Demiurge the Man with a capital M — Georgy Anatolyevich Nosov. In the second plot line, events are presented from the diary of G. A. Nosov's student — Igor Mytarin. Nosov is a great pedagogue, practitioner, and theorist who heads a lyceum in the city of Tashlinsk in the first third of the 21st century. Unexpectedly for the city authorities and even his own students, he stands up for a subculture completely alien to everyone, the so-called Flora (in which hippies are recognized), and, defending his ideals, sacrifices himself to the enraged crowd.

The novel was published during the perestroika era and was negatively evaluated by critics, who perceived it as a creative failure: a political pamphlet or paraphrase of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. 21st-century researchers emphasize the misunderstanding of the novel by contemporaries and its milestone character for the Strugatskys' work, as Overburdened with Evil is entirely devoted to utopia and pedagogy as means of saving the world, and to the relations between power and culture.