In 1961, the year after Burgess had written his first draft of A Clockwork Orange, he and his wife took a trip to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in what was then the Soviet Union. During that trip, Burgess was appalled and intrigued by the roaming gangs of hoodlums he saw, called stilyaqi. Burgess noted how the police, preoccupied with ideological crimes against the state, had a difficult time controlling these unruly youths. He also noted the similarities of the Russian and British youth subcultures and was inspired to fashion a hooligan character who was a composite of the ways in which youth spoke, acted, and dressed in Russia and England.

Hence, Alex and his droogs—"droog" derived from the Russian word "drugi," which means "friends in violence." The stilyaqi, or style-boys, sprung up in Russia during the 1940s and were roughly contemporaneous with American beats. The stilyaqi listened...