Red Star
Page 3
In the scene depicting a workers’ meeting, Bogdanov discloses some of the elements of his theory of “proletarian culture.” Like the Bolsheviks with whom he had just parted company, Bogdanov (through the voice of Netti) teaches a doctrine of sacrifice of the few in the present time for the welfare of the many not yet born; unlike them, he also insists upon fairness in all human relations, including the treatment of enemies. Bogdanov believed in the inherent egalitarianism of all workers (who address each other as “brothers”), but also was painfully aware that the intelligentsia and the more politically and socially aware workers, while able to represent the aspirations of an entire class as a species, rise above the proletariat and become detached from them. The problem of the elite who know and the masses who are constrained to believe is poignantly illustrated in the moving lament of the bewildered worker at the meeting. Bogdanov’s answer—again voiced by Netti—is the creation of a unified science of organization that will link all the sciences, currently fragmented, to the processes of labor and life. And in the debate between Menni and Netti, father and son, the author presents his own sociology of ideas and feelings and an original gloss on the Marxian philosophy of history.
How were these novels received in Russia? The moderate Populist journal Russian Wealth dismissed Red Star as trendy, derivative, and unmoving. Neither wing of Russian Social Democracy reviewed it. On the other hand, a Bolshevik reviewer of 1918 recalled, as we have seen, how inspiring the novel was to rank-and-file party workers even after the revolution had subsided. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Red Star became very popular and was reprinted at least five times inside the Soviet Union, including once as a supplement to a very widely read popular science magazine, Around the World “The first utopia embellished with proletarian pathos,” as one critic has called it, was well received in Party circles after the Revolution. A writer in Messenger of Life, a journal for proletarian culture, announced that Bogdanov’s Utopian vision contained scientific laws and features of life already discernible in the revolutionary Russia of 1918.
The most incisive review of Red Star was written by Lunacharsky just as it came out. He praised the poetry and prophecy of innovation and the scientific insight of Bogdanov’s futurology, defending the author from literary purists who might object to his pedestrian style. Bogdanov’s art was in his contrasting of the “crystal atmosphere of rationality that reigns on Mars,” its lack of drama, color, and passion, with the stormy scenes of Earth’s contemporary life. Lunacharsky saw the brutally analytical speech of Sterni, the would-be destroyer of Earthlings, as the high point of the novel.
Bogdanov’s predictions of 1908, put into the mouth of Sterni, are eloquent indeed. Like the American socialist Jack London, whose Iron Heel was written in the same year, Bogdanov warns of the coming time when capitalists and ruling classes would use the latest technology to persecute and provoke the proletariat into a premature uprising which the provocateurs would then crush. On the militaristic revanchisme of the day Sterni says:
Patriotic fervor intensifies and becomes extremely acute after military defeats, especially when the victors seize a part of the loser’s territory. The patriotism of the vanquished then takes the form of an intense and prolonged hatred of the victors, and revenge becomes the ideal of not just the worst groups—the upper or ruling classes—but of the entire people, including the best elements, the toiling masses.
Bogdanov also perceived the growth of what Lenin would call “social patriotism” in 1914, the desire of European Marxist Social Democrats, in defiance of their allegiance to internationalism, to fight off and defeat the national enemy. Socialists, says Sterni, in reference to a Terrestrial-Martian war, “would start a bitter and ruthless war against us [Martian liberators], because they would never be able to reconcile themselves to the killing of millions of their own kind to whom they are bound by a multitude of often very intimate ties.” The most striking of all these passages, one that must have jolted both Lunacharsky and Bogdanov in later years, referred to the possibility of a revolution and the establishment of a few islands of socialism surrounded by a hostile capitalist sea. These would be beleaguered by the capitalist states. “It is difficult to foresee the outcome of these conflicts,” says Sterni, “but even in those instances where socialism prevails and triumphs, its character will be perverted deeply and for a long time to come by years of encirclement, unavoidable terror and militarism, and the barbarian patriotism that is their inevitable consequence. This socialism will be a far cry from our own.”
Engineer Menni attracted less attention than had Red Star, coming as it did in 1913, when hopes for revolution were not high. The Populist journal Testaments was very negative and considered it dry, schematic, and contrived. Lenin wrote to Gorky in 1913: “Just read his Engineer Menni. Another case of Machism and idealism, but obscured so that neither the workers nor the silly editors at Pravda understood it.” The Bolshevik reviewer of 1918 referred to above recalled that the mood of skepticism and pessimism was so deep among his people when Menni came out that they could not apprehend its extravagant picture of the socialist victory on Mars. But he also suggested that Menni’s dream of bringing proletarian culture to the masses was now within reach of the new regime. In later years both Red Star and Menni were criticized for placing too much emphasis upon the “progressive” technocracy—that is, the engineers—and not enough upon the creative role of the proletariat. Yet contemporary Soviet critics recognize Bogdanov as the authentic founder of Soviet science fiction. He was, in the words of one historian of the genre, the “first writer of Russian science fiction to combine a well written technological utopia with scientific Marxist views on communism and the idea of social revolution.”*
Bogdanov’s works pointed the way to an enormous blossoming of revolutionary science fiction in the 1920s, a period that saw the publication of about two hundred works of this kind, most of them dealing with the two main themes of Bogdanov’s work: capitalist hells, militarism, frightful weapons, greed, and exploitation leading to catastrophe; and communist heavens adorned with life-easing technology and complete social justice. Eugene Zamyatin’s We (1920), called by Ursula LeGuin the greatest of all science fiction novels, was, in its pervasive imitative irony, an emphatic repudiation of Bogdanov’s utopia—its technology and its rationalism, as well as its version of socialism. Yakov Okunev, a popular Soviet science fiction writer of the 1920s, borrowed Red Stars computerized society for his The Coming World (1923). Alexis Tolstoy’s once famous Aelita (made into a classic silent film) again featured two planets, Earth and Mars, and two revolutions, though with a political premise about Mars opposite to that of Bogdanov’s. One writer, Innokenty Zhukov, even incorporated Bogdanov’s title into his fantastic tale: Voyage of the Red Star Detachment to the Land of Marvels (1924). The “land of marvels” is Earth in the year 1957, after a communist revolution has transformed it into a unified planet resembling that of Bogdanov’s Mars. Examples of Bogdanov’s influence on the golden age of Soviet science fiction are legion. Soviet critics proclaim it, in spite of residual hostility to Bogdanov as a thinker. It is no exaggeration to say, as the foremost Western authority on Soviet science fiction, Darko Suvin, has said, that Bogdanov was the progenitor of this genre in Soviet literature.
By the time he finished Engineer Menni in 1913, Bogdanov had abandoned the active political struggle and was devoting himself to research and theorizing on a wide range of subjects, scientific, philosophical, and cultural. During World War I—whose horrors he had foreseen—he returned to Russia and served as a military physician at the front. After the Bolsheviks came to power he threw himself into the Proletkult, the proletarian culture movement that he had helped to found before the Revolution, and established thousands of cells and studios all over Soviet Russia and issued a huge number of publications with enormous circulations. Bogdanov did not rejoin the Communist (formerly Bolshevik) Party but held several high posts in academic and economic institutions. After 1921, with the
dismantling of the independent Proletkult movement at the behest of Lenin, Bogdanov devoted himself fully to scientific work and experimentation. In 1926 he founded the Institute for Blood Transfusion as a way to realize his dream, first described in Red Star, of performing the “comradely exchange of life.” He gave his own life in this cause, so characteristic of the Utopian experiments generated by the Revolution: in 1928, while carrying out a transfusion on himself, he died.
Bogdanov’s works circulated in hundreds of thousands of copies in the 1920s, including several editions of Red Star and Engineer Menni in huge printings. Though he ceased to wield political or philosophical influence, Bogdanov nonetheless remained a major figure in the intellectual landscape of the early Soviet years. Nicholas Bukharin, still a prominent communist political leader and a disciple of Bogdanov, wrote his obituary in Pravda, stressing Bogdanov’s personal courage and revolutionary boldness in giving his life “as a victim” and praising his intellectual breadth and influence. Bukharin called Red Star “one of the best socialist ‘utopias.’” When the novels were reissued after the author’s death, discussion of them came into vogue once again as the Soviet Union entered that fatal and frenetic period of its history known as the Pyatiletka (Five-Year Plan), the Great Break, or the Revolution from Above. During the debates and reports at the outset of the Five-Year Plan, G. M. Krzhizhanovsky, an engineer and one of the architects of the plan, made oblique reference to Bogdanov’s great canal projects on Mars. In 1929, the famous city planner L. M. Sabsovich likened the plan to “the great projects” of Red Star. Indeed the atmosphere had become filled with revolutionary utopianism once again, with its frantic energy and wild dreams of the refashioning of cities, of Earth, and of mankind. But this last burst of utopia soon gave way to a massive despotism undreamed of even in the most extravagant fantasies of Alexander Bogdanov.
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*Quoted in Kendall Bailes, “Alexeî Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–24,” Soviet Studies, 29/3 (July 1977), 380.
*Xarma, the Martian socialist philosopher in the story.
*A. F. Britikov, Russkii Sovetskii nauchno-fantasticheskii roman (Leningrad: Nauka, 1970), 55.
RED STAR
A Utopia
Contents
Prologue: Letter from Dr Werner to Mirsky
Leonid’s Manuscript
PART I
1. The Break
2. The Invitation
3. Night
4. The Explanation
5. Takeoff
6. The Etheroneph
7. The People
8. New Friends
9. The Past
10. Arrival
PART II
1. Menni’s Apartment
2. The Factory
3. The Children’s Colony
4. The Museum of Art
5. The Hospital
6. Hallucinations
7. Netti
PART III
1. Happiness
2. Separation
3. The Clothing Factory
4. Ennoloo
5. Nella
6. The Search
7. Sterni
8. Netti
9. Menni
10. Murder
PART IV
1. Werner’s Clinic
2. Reality or Fantasy?
3. The Revolution
4. The Envelope
5. Summing Up
Epilogue: From Dr. Werner’s Letter to Mirsky
To my colleague
THE AUTHOR
Prologue
Letter from Dr. Werner to Mirsky
Dear Comrade Mirsky,
I am sending you Leonid’s notes. He wanted them published, and you, as a man of letters, can arrange that matter better than I. He himself has gone into hiding. I am leaving the clinic to try and trace him. I think I shall probably find him in the mountains, where the situation has lately become critical. By exposing himself to the dangers there he is evidently indirectly trying to commit suicide. He is obviously still unstable mentally, although he impressed me as being near complete recovery. I shall inform you the moment I learn of anything.
My warmest regards,
N. Werner
24 July 190? (illegible: 8 or 9)
LEONID’S MANUSCRIPT
PART I
1. The Break
It was early in that great upheaval* which continues to shake our country and which, I think, is now approaching its inevitable, fateful conclusion.
The public consciousness was so deeply impressed by the events of the first bloody days that everyone expected a quick and victorious end to the struggle. It seemed as though the worst had already occurred, that nothing more terrible could possibly happen. No one had realized how tenacious were the bony hands of the corpse that had crushed and still crushes the living in its convulsive embrace.
The excitement of battle quickly spread throughout the masses. Souls opened selflessly to welcome the future as the present dissolved in a rosy mist and the past receded somewhere into the distance and disappeared. All human relationships became unstable and fragile. During these days something happened that radically altered the course of my life and separated me from the rising tide of the people’s struggle.
Although I was but 27, I was numbered among the “old” party workers. I had six years of service behind me, the only interruption being a year of prison. I had sensed the approaching storm earlier than many, and I greeted it more calmly than they when it came. I was forced to work much more than previously, but I did not abandon either my scientific pursuits or my literary endeavors. I was particularly interested in the structure of matter and made my living by writing for two children’s magazines. And then I was in love . . . or so it seemed to me.
Her party name was Anna Nikolaevna. She supported another, more moderate current in our party,† which fact I attributed to the mildness of her character and the general political muddle. Although she was my senior, I considered her a not yet fully developed person. There I was mistaken.
Very soon after we became intimate, the consequences of the difference in our personalities began to appear painfully obvious to us both. We gradually became aware of a profound ideological discrepancy in our attitudes toward both the revolution and our own relationship. She had entered the revolution under the banner of duty and sacrifice, while I had joined it under the banner of my own free will. She joined the great movement of the proletariat because she found satisfaction in its supreme morality, whereas all such considerations were alien to me. I simply loved life and wanted it to flourish as fully as possible, and I was therefore attracted to the current which represented the main historical path leading to such prosperity. To Anna Nikolaevna, proletarian ethics were sacred in and of themselves, whereas I considered them a useful appurtenance necessary to the working class in its struggle, but transitory, like the struggle and the system which generated it. According to Anna Nikolaevna, in socialist society the class ethics of the proletariat would necessarily become the universal moral code, while I believed that the proletariat was already moving toward the destruction of all morals and that the comradely feeling uniting people in labor, joy, and suffering would not develop fully until it had cast off the fetishistic husk of morality. These disagreements of ours often gave rise to evidently irreconcilable interpretations of political and social facts.
Our views on our own relationship differed even more sharply. She thought that love implied certain obligations—concessions, sacrifices, and, above all, fidelity for the duration of the union. In actual fact I had no intention whatever of entering into other liaisons, but I was unable to recognize fidelity as an obligation. I even believed that polygamy was in principle superior to monogamy, since it provided for both a richer private life and a greater variety of genetic combinations. In my opinion, it was only the contradictions of the bourgeois order which for the time being made polygamy either simply unfeasible or merely the privilege of the exploiters and pa
rasites, who were all befouled by their own decadent psychology. Here too the future would bring a radical transformation. Anna Nikolaevna deeply resented such views, in which she perceived an attempt to mask a coarsely sensual outlook with intellectual phrases.
None of these disagreements had given me any reason to think of ending our relationship, but then an external factor entered our lives that contributed to such a rupture. At about this time, a young man bearing the unusual code name Menni arrived in the capital. He had with him certain information and messages from the South which indicated that he enjoyed the full confidence of our comrades there. After completing his assignment he decided to stay on for a while in the city. He began dropping in on us rather often and was obviously interested in getting to know me better.
Menni was original in a number of respects, beginning with his appearance. His eyes were so completely masked by a pair of very dark glasses that I did not even know their color. His head was disproportionately large, and although he was handsome, his face was strikingly immobile and lifeless, entirely out of keeping with his soft, expressive voice and well-built, youthfully supple figure. His speech was free and elegant, and his remarks were always pregnant with meaning. He had a broad education and was evidently an engineer by profession.
In conversation Menni constantly tended to reduce all individual practical questions to their general ideological foundations. When he visited us, somehow it seemed that the differences in character and opinions between my wife and myself always emerged so clearly and vividly that we became painfully aware of just how irreconcilable they really were. Menni’s general outlook was evidently similar to my own. His remarks were always formulated gently and tactfully, but they always cut straight to the point. He was so skillful at relating the political disagreements between Anna Nikolaevna and myself to the basic discrepancy between our outlooks that these differences appeared to be psychologically inevitable, and we lost all hope of influencing each other or finding any common ground. Anna Nikolaevna regarded Menni with a mixture of hate and lively interest, while my attitude was one of great respect and vague distrust. I sensed that he had some sort of goal, but I was unable to put my finger on it.