About the book: 1989 / Roshwald, Mordecai (Marcelius) (Mordecai Roshwald; b. 1921). Israeli prose writer and scientist-philosopher; Recently lives in the USA. Genus. in Drohobych (Poland; now the Lviv region of Ukraine), graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Israel), where he defended his dissertation in philosophy; served in the Israeli army. He has taught at the Israel Institute of Public Administration (in Tel Aviv), the University of Israel, the Israel Institute of Technology (in Haifa), Brooklyn College (in New York), the University of Bath (England) and Simon Fraser University in Burnaby (British Columbia). , Canada); currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Minnesota in Minneapolis; lives there. Roshwald the writer became famous after the publication of the SF novel “The Seventh Level” [Level 7] (1959; Russian 1991 - “The Seventh Level, or Diary of the Last Inhabitant of the Earth”), which, along with the novel “On the Shore” N. Shyuta remains one of the most prominent artists. protests against nuclear war; at the same time, this is an example of a classic dystopia. The totalitarian society that has developed in the microsociety of the anti-nuclear shelter - with strictly regulated private life, numbers instead of names and plans to repopulate the Earth as soon as the radiation subsides - can only delay the outcome: radiation penetrates the most protected “seventh level”, killing those remaining ( including the nameless officer, the author of the diary, from which the reader learns about the tragedy that occurred). Marked by a mood of “total pessimism,” Roshwald’s novel, however, was actively used internationally. movement for nuclear disarmament and was highly appreciated by B. Russell and D. Priestley. Roshwald’s second SF book, “A Small Armageddon” (1962), is also devoted to the danger of a nuclear global catastrophe, this time emanating from “nuclear terrorists” - crew of a nuclear submarine. V. Gakov