The Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris, were Soviet-era writers best known for their science fiction novellas and novels who wrote about fifty short stories and other short-form works between 1955 and 1963. The first completed work by Arkady Strugatsky whose manuscript has survived is the short story How Kang Died, written in 1946. Boris Strugatsky's first literary experiments date to the mid-1950s. Around 1955, the brothers attempted to develop a technique for working together, resulting in the short story Sand Fever, which was only published in 1991. Subsequently, the Strugatsky brothers worked in parallel on major-form works (novellas and novels) and continued to write short stories, with the plot idea typically developed by one of the co-authors and joint work occurring at the final stage.

The first published short story, From Beyond, was written in 1957 and printed in 1958 in the magazine Tekhnika Molodezhi. Almost immediately, it was expanded into a novella in three stories, which appeared two years later. Some short-form works from the late 1950s formed the novel (also defined as a novella or cycle of stories) Noon: 22nd Century (1962). Certain stories, especially Six Matches, were popular, frequently reprinted, and translated into foreign languages.

By 1963, the co-author brothers, in their own words, realized that writing short stories was "no longer interesting" to them, and they never returned to the genre. Previously published short-form works were rarely and irregularly reprinted in the 1970s–1980s. In the 1990s–2000s, many archival texts not intended for publication or "rejected" by the co-authors appeared in collected works. Some sketches and plots were used in other their works; in the autobiographical novel Lame Fate, the writers' early stories are presented with extreme self-criticism and harsh self-irony. The history of the creation of most stories is described in Boris Strugatsky's Comments on the Past.

Early works

Arkady Strugatsky's first literary experiments According to B. N. Strugatsky's memories, his brother Arkady (eight years older) wrote a "jaw-breaking" science fiction novel titled Major Kovalev's Find in Leningrad before the start of the Great Patriotic War. The manuscript was handwritten in two school notebooks and was irretrievably lost during the Siege of Leningrad (according to another version, it was "torn up" by school friends). Arkady Strugatsky also tried composing poetry and even published a "literary magazine" at school — in the form of a notebook with illustrations by the author-publishers. These activities continued during his studies at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages of the Red Army after 1943 in Moscow.

How Kang Died The earliest A. N. Strugatsky's preserved work is the short story How Kang Died. The manuscript is a homemade 14 sheets notebook, the text written in black ink and supplied with the author's illustrations. The story is dated May 29, 1946, a time when the 20-year-old cadet of the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, Arkady Strugatsky, was seconded to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Tatar ASSR in Kazan as a Japanese interpreter for the investigation in preparation for the Tokyo Trial. On April 27, 1946, A. N. Strugatsky wrote to his brother from Kazan that he was strongly impressed by A. Kazantsev's story "Взрыв" (Explosion), which prompted him,"using free moments, to dash off something similar". A. V. Snigirev suggested that the pretext was H. G. Wells' story The Sea Raiders.

The story remained in the writers' archive until 2001, when it was first published in the Stalker publishing house collected works. It was later reprinted and in 2010 released in a Czech language translation.

The text concerns a huge deep-sea predator — Kang (in Arkady Strugatsky's illustrations, it looks like an archaic reptile — something between a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaurus). An incomprehensible force, at the level of instinct, compels Kang to rise to the surface and intervene in the battle between a submarine and a destroyer. Kang damages the submarine but perishes from the destroyer's guns. The plot was apparently inspired by pre-war books about the underwater world (Secrets of the Deep Sea by William Beebe and Traces on stone by William Maxwell Reed) and inspired by the grim conditions of interrogations and detention of suspects. According to the biographer of the Strugatsky brothers , "...the story is very naive, student-like, but already quite well-made, literate, easy to read...". Its theme—"a rush for freedom, for light, beyond the hated gloomy world"—defined the Strugatskys' work for many decades afterward.

The First Ones During his service as a divisional interpreter in Kamchatka, A. N. Strugatsky attempted to write a major science fiction novella. Traces of work on it remained in a "sketch" known as The First Ones. Later, the plot idea and text itself were used in The Land of Crimson Clouds. It concerned the crew of Soviet cosmonauts sent to Venus to reach the shores of Golkonda. Due to the death of the starship, the wounded Commander, Engineer, and Doctor, deprived of the possibility of return, decide to complete their expedition's task. Both handwritten versions were published in 2005 in the anthology The Unknown Strugatsky. The early, completed version in a separate notebook is dated March 1953. Its ending is grim but optimistic: although the crew perishes entirely, the story concludes with the phrase"The fortress fell, but the garrison won".

Creations of Youth A folder under this title contained handwritten materials written by Arkady Strugatsky during his studies and service in Kamchatka. In addition to Arkady Natanovich's own works, the folder includes the beginning of a translation of R. Kipling's novella Stalky & Co. (three draft chapters and one and a half fair-copy chapters) and a translation of W. W. Jacobs' story The Tiger-Skin. The materials are very diverse—for example, in Arkady Strugatsky's correspondence from October 1952–1953, a plan emerges for a novella about a "new Tarzan" named Rumata. From February 1953 onward, ideas and notes appear for a large-scale artistic canvas about Venus, which later formed the basis of The Land of Crimson Clouds, including The First Ones.

Already at that time, A. Strugatsky demonstrated certain literary ambitions: the story Incident in the Guardroom about an attempt by saboteurs to break through the USSR border was sent to the Khabarovsk newspaper Suvorovsky Natisk, as mentioned in a letter dated September 6, 1953. The further events were described in the novel Lame Fate:...I wanted so much to see my name in print, to feel myself being a writer, to display the brand of the favorite of the Muses and Apollo! And what bitter disappointment it was when Suvorovsky Natisk (God bless it), returned my manuscript under the polite pretext that Incident in the Guardroom is not typical for our army! Holy words.The story was first published in the electronic version of the "Complete Collection of Works" (2015), after which it repeatedly appeared in collections of the Strugatskys' early work.

The Fourth Kingdom (On the Edge of the Possible) The Fourth Kingdom (On the Edge of the Possible) is a science fiction novella by Arkady Strugatsky, written probably in spring–summer 1952 while he was on Kamchatka. According to Boris Strugatsky, the work on the novella was carried out by A. N. Strugatsky in spring–summer 1952 on Kamchatka. Only in 2015 did the keeper of the Strugatskys' archive, S. P. Bondarenko, discover the title page of the fair copy, on which the date "summer 1955" was written. In correspondence with his brother, The Fourth Kingdom is mentioned in a letter dated March 14, 1955. Traces of the initial conception are preserved in various letters; at that time the story was called The Blue Cloud of Akadzi. The text, divided into four short chapters, was written in the spirit of near-target science fiction. The main plot line revolves around the exposure of Japanese and American spies who are trying to smuggle samples of non-protein life out of the USSR — life that feeds on products of radioactive decay. The same fantastic premise was later used in the novella The Land of Crimson Clouds. The archive text was first published in the collected works Stalker (2001) and was reprinted in paperback in the series Worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers (2006). In 2015, a small print run of the only separate edition of the novella was released in Saransk. No special studies or literary-critical examinations of The Fourth Kingdom have been conducted.

Doctor of Cultural Studies A. B. Tanaseychuk (Ogarev Mordovia State University) noted the difficulties in genre classification of The Fourth Kingdom, which can be regarded both as a military adventure story and characterized as a spy thriller or detective story. The mixture of a fantastic premise with a patriotic tale about border guards was not original, but typical of Soviet science fiction of the Stalin era; Arkady Strugatsky was fully within the established tradition. At the same time, from Tanaseychuk's point of view, the text of The Fourth Kingdom is of high quality and in literary merits does not yield to — and sometimes even surpasses — the works of the then "masters" of the spy novel (N. Avtokratov, N. Shpanov, Yu. Dolgushin, S. Belyaev). The story features a well-developed intrigue, and the characters are quite vivid, humane, and sincere. "...What should a real Soviet commander be like? In the 1950s he could, of course, only be like Colonel Kryukov: 'servant to the Fatherland, father to the soldiers'. And the chief of the border outpost, Captain Nelyudin? Taciturn, dutiful, reliable, experienced, knowing his subordinates and caring for them. Can the enemies be anything else — vile spies plotting against our Soviet Motherland? Only like the cruel, mercenary, rather dim-witted and (necessarily!) cowardly American Charles Hill and the clever, amoral and (again necessarily!) perfidious war criminal Japanese Major Sunagawa". The sincere pathos of great achievements in practically the same forms was reproduced in the subsequent works of A. N. Strugatsky — Ashes of Bikini and The Land of Crimson Clouds. Biographers of the Strugatskys D. Volodikhin and G. Prashkevich, agreeing with the statement about the stylistic closeness of these works, considered The Fourth Kingdom a drawn-out "unpolished" novella, similar to analogous (and not the most successful) texts from the "Military Adventures" series.

Tanaseychuk called the central image of the novella — Captain Oleshko — a success of the young writer. He was probably modeled on Arkady Strugatsky himself: a tall, awkward Japanese-language interpreter who wore glasses and was not particularly suited to army life. He performs no heroic deeds; moreover, he is wounded, rather due to his own clumsiness, and "cracks" the spy almost by accident. That is, what elevates him above his comrades is only his intellect; otherwise he is full of complexes, because "he never took part in battles against the Germans or the Japanese, no one ever shot at him, and he saw enemies only as prisoners. This depressed him greatly, and he always felt shame and a kind of guilt before his comrades and superiors who had gone through the crucible of war." It is no coincidence that the setting is an island called Kunashu in the story. However, on the real Kunashir Senior Lieutenant Strugatsky never served; in November 1952 he was sent to Paramushir and Shumshu to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami.