A number of minor science-fiction writers, too numerous to list here, appeared on the literary scene in the mid-twenties and science fiction began to be published in such special science-fiction journals as Bor’ba Mirov, Mir prikliuchenii, Vokrug sveta, Vsemirnyi sledopyt, and Znanie—Sila. It is interesting, however, that the period did not produce a great number of utopias par excellence. In fact only a handful, such as Ya. Okuniev’s Future World or Nikol’sky’s In a Thousand Years, can be mentioned. The great majority of futuristic fiction at the time featured the fantastic adventure story in the form of a scientific or pseudo-scientific romance. This trend was heralded by Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita, a humorous return to the Martian theme begun in Russia by Bogdanov. Perhaps for its description of love affairs with blue-skinned Martian women, the novel was an instant success and served as a model for the adventure-type science fiction prevalent in those years, particularly the so-called Red Detective (Krasnyi detektiv) popular in the second half of the twenties. V. Shklovsky’s and V. S. Ivanov’s Iprit, M. Shaginian’s Mess-Mend or Yankees in Petrograd may serve as illustrations of the latter. In such fiction the socialist state was invariably threatened by the futuristic imagination of representatives of capitalist societies. Perhaps ironically, the period also allowed for numerous translations of Western science fiction titles (over a hundred of them, as counted by V. Liapunov, appeared in translation between 1923 and 1930) with Verne and Wells by far the most popular.
While many pro-Soviet writers produced some samples of futuristic fiction at the time (Ruler of Iron by V. Kataev, Trust D.E., by I. Erenburg; etc.), the second half of the twenties was dominated particularly by Alexander Beliaev who introduced as his common literary material the phenomenon of biological change in human beings. His protagonists are usually scientists, surgeons capable of adapting men to unusual biological environments such as water (The Amphibian Man) or air (Ariel); they also succeed in adjusting the human brain to various forms of ESP and in performing cranial transplants.
With the beginning of the thirties and the rise of the “cult of personality,” it became increasingly more dangerous to “err” in any predictions of the future, and until the mid-fifties the former élan for science-fiction writing subsided, with periods of total disappearance of science-fiction books from circulation. Yet there were almost heroic attempts in the thirties by major Russian writers to question Soviet present-day reality and its future. Among these, M. Zoshchenko’s Youth Restored (Vozvrashchennaya molodost’, 1933), is an interesting attempt to combine fantastic fiction with the format of a scientific treatise and “scholarly” footnotes. The work provides a tongue-in-cheek treatment of the “elixir of life” theme revolving around the elderly protagonist’s attempt to regain his youth. M. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, first published in an excerpted form almost thirty years after its completion (1966-67), is perhaps the most provocative and pioneering work of this period. Certainly one of the masterpieces of 20th-century Russian fiction, it is related to both More’s and Gogol’s fiction in being a merciless satire of Soviet reality, as well as in using duplex settings for its plot development. Unlike earlier attempts, however, Bulgakov complicates his plot by shifting the plane of narration from present-day Moscow to the time of Christ’s crucifixion in Jerusalem and finally to the eternal, metaphysical plane, a re-working of More’s “no-place”, where his major protagonists finally find peace from their earthly troubles. Bulgakov sees no possible utopia in physical reality, filled with the greed and pettiness which he so deftly portrays. In this sense, Bulgakov’s novel is also a return to the philosophical precepts of Dostoevsky.
The first post-war Soviet writer of almost legendary fame among younger science fiction buffs was Ivan Efremov. His Andromeda Nebula (Tumannost’ Andromedy, 1956) a large-scale utopian novel set in the far future of interstellar travel, not only provided impetus for the cosmic theme to become the prevalent subject of post-war science fiction, but in itself started the period of the “THAW” for science fiction. At the same time Efremov is one of those writers who express an unwavering view that societies of the distant future cannot have any other than the Communist form of social organization. At times, as in his novelette The Heart of a Serpent, Efremov takes up a situation formerly explored by a Western writer and transforms the plot to fit his preconceived idea of a more advisable resolution of the problem stated. Efremov also began in a serious way to explore another facet of post-Stalin futuristic fiction, namely that of contact with an alien civilization. Invariably, as opposed to the fears frequently posited by Western writers in their stories, such contact has a happy resolution for Efremov.
The Soviet sixties witnessed a rapid rise in the quantity of science-fiction stories. Among the most able writers one should mention the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Ilya Varshavsky, Valentina Zhuravlyova, E. Parnov, M. Emtsev, and a host of others. These years also witnessed the appearance of a most impressive twenty-five-volume anthology of contemporary science fiction (Biblioteka sovremennoi fantastiki) which included selections from both Western and Soviet science-fiction writers, a publishing feat perhaps unrivaled in any language in its size and inclusiveness. For some strange reason the Soviet government decreased the volume of science fiction publications in the late seventies by about ten-fold in comparison with the sixties and early seventies. One of the reasons may be that science fiction was used by some Soviet writers for shrewd and often ingenious allusions to the present form of Soviet society, and for implicit criticism of Marxist doctrine. Such is the case with many of the writings of the Strugatsky brothers, whose contribution to science fiction is by far the most productive when compared with any other Soviet writer—as well as being the most satisfying from a literary point of view. On the other hand, even those writers who were seemingly innocent vis-à-vis the Soviet regime found in the sphere of science fiction productive avenues for interesting literary experimentation, often far removed from the precepts of Socialist realism.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, future-oriented utopian fiction began to fare rather poorly. It was supplemented instead by a rediscovery of a pure fantasy realm, especially by rekindling a Tolkien craze promoted both by new translations of his books and by dozens of native novelistic elaborations of the Tolkien universe. Shunning the future, Russian readers began—as their Romantic ancestors had done—to revel in a rediscovery of Russia’s forgotten past, that is those elements of it which were formerly either forbidden by the Soviet censorship or simply not stressed. Russia’s pull toward the non-empirical universe is clearly evident in the revival of its religious faith—a new baptism of Orthodox Russia. Even Vladimir Putin, a former KGB member, often parades on TV with a retinue of Orthodox hierarchs and is consistently shown making the sign of the cross. Others, skeptical of religious fervor, still seem to support the kind of fiction that appeals to deeds based on myth, rather than science. Conan the Barbarian, for instance, exists not only in translation, but also in dozens of native sequels.
Regrettably, we will not be able to cover these developments, as they would require another volume and another setting. Let us just note that the current quest to reunite with the native past was begun two centuries ago by poets like Zhukovsky, one of the principal harbingers of the Romantic sensibility in Russia, and that a volume tracing the developments in Russian literature in the fantastic mode is needed before we can comment on the present. Even such early practitioners of weaving fantasy worlds as Pushkin and Lermontov (whose poetry Russians regard as second in importance only to Pushkin, and who brought Russian Romanticism to a close) are little known to our readers. At the same time, Pushkin and Lermontov are prima facie examples of Russia’s turn to prose as a vehicle for fantasy-making, and their works stand on the threshold of the time when Russian literature did become an equal partner in shaping western literature. Their prose selections are still presented together with their poetry at the outset of the volume, while prose is nearly the exclusive narrative mode of all other authors selec
ted.
These include Gogol, whose surreal universe easily represents the single greatest achievement of Russian fantasy; Turgenev, the first Russian writer to use the term fantasy as a generic label in his story The Phantoms; and Dostoevsky, generally known for his ability to fashion some of the bulkiest tomes in Russian literature, yet who is a master in the realm of short fiction, far less well-known in the West, and offers splendid examples of fantasy-making. The collection includes neglected works of some less well-known but excellent writers, such as B. A. Pilniak, A. M. Remizov, and A. P. Platonov, who have productively contributed to the formation of the fantastic realm in Russian literature. Also represented are the Russian Symbolists, whose ouevre can be considered equally as a reflex of Russian Romanticism and as a harbinger of an entirely new literary consciousness—Modernism—which privileges fantasy as one of its key vehicles of expression. Russian authors are represented here, unlike in other anthologies, by at least two selections. Each will be introduced in his respective section, with the founders of Modern Russian Literature given a separate foreward. This rich sampling gives the reader an unmistakable sense of each writer’s individual literary voice as they set about their task, and thereby give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
—Alexander Levitsky, Providence, 2007
PART I
Russian Early-Modern Fantasy and Utopian Thought
SECTION A:
From Folk Myth to the Fantastic in Early-Modern Russian Literature:
1. Foregrounding Travel in Space: Fantastic and Utopian Scapes of Bygone Years;
2. The Fantastic in Early Modern Russian Poetry and Prose;
3. Gogol’s Arabesquely Bizarre Universes.
SECTION B:
Early-modern Utopias and Dostoevsky’s Responses to Utopian Thought:
1. Russian Early-modern Utopias in the works of Bulgarin, Odoevsky, and Chernyshevsky
2. Dostoevsky’s Dystopic visions in Bobok, Christmas Tree, and The Diary of a Ridiculous Man.
PART I OF THIS book samples Russia’s leap into the fantastic within its first millennium. With the exception of the first section which surveys the first 900 years of Russian literature, the genesis of nearly all other works in Section A can be traced back to Romanticism. The Neo-Classicist School, preceding it, had idealized and paid obligatory homage to the “unsurpassed” literary achievements of Greece and Rome, but the Romantics found this notion stultifying to the imagination. The very notion of a literary cannon, of compulsory rules, models and genres, was inimical to poets keen on creating new worlds in literature—to explore the individual inner self, rather than a rational or ideal model of Man, to celebrate the rich cultural heritage of nations the Greeks and Romans never knew, or had dismissed as merely barbaric. Adherents of this rising literary sensibility felt that the supreme guarantee of the quality of their craft rested in inspiration, a gift that comes to a small elect cast of men, chosen by Fate, Nature—or even by God Himself, speaking to those few as he did to Moses. Far from embracing the universal, the expected, or the normative forms of art, Romantic poets sought the bizarre, the wild, the exotic, the exceptional, the strange, or simply indescribable. A Romantic poet aspired to create entirely new, intensely individual monuments of verbal art, to render his own unique moment of inspiration paradoxically universal, as he shared with other mortals his vision of the true—though most often hidden—ways our world turns.
G.R. Derzhavin, with whose poetry our immersion into Russian nineteenth-century literature starts, in many ways embodies the Russian literary transition from Neo-Classicism to this new literary sensibility, though he was by no means a Romantic poet himself or an adherent of any “school.” He was, simply put, the first major poet in Russia to channel all life’s impressions through his persona; he valued inspiration and feeling above reason, he was the first to sing of the Russian countryside, its soul and folk customs; but above all else he was Russia’s supreme metaphysical poet. Unlike the Romantics, he did not forsake the idea of God and did not replace him with the worship of Nature. Indeed, no other nineteenth-century Russian writer could ever replicate this organic balance in his relation to his immediate surroundings and to the deity, with which Derzhavin seems to have been blessed. After Derzhavin’s death, the very existence of the divine meaning in human life was progressively put under question until awareness of it gradually dissipated from most works of popular literature.
But even in a world without God, the need to experience the miraculous or otherworldly was as strong as ever and was uniquely answered by nearly every major writer, whatever his teleology, throughout the century following Derzhavin, as is shown in the works selected from the oeuvre of some of the greatest masters of Russian pre-Symbolist literature, such as Pushkin, Lermontov, or Turgenev. They offer examples of confronting the fantastic—either luridly inviting or simply bizarre, in dreams or in worlds alternate to ours—in which protagonists are not offered an easy escape into a socially constructed utopia, or the bliss of never meeting the unknown. Romanticism found an appropriate vehicle for creative thought in poetry, and it is only with late Romanticism that Russian prose comes into its own, principally in the works of Gogol. A separate subsection is devoted to a major sampling of Gogol’s fantastic art in prose.
Section B begins with a sampling of Russia’s influential nineteenth-century utopias by Bulgarin, Odoevsky and Chernyshevsky. Displaced by centuries from present-day realities, these works offer visions of the future, in which quest—one of the principal agents of fantasy-making—is no longer necessary. The section ends with a selection of works by Dostoevsky. Less well-known than his major novels, they are just as intensely powerful in their tragic denial of utopia of any kind on this Earth..
Section A
From Folk Myth to the Fantastic in Poetry and Prose
A1. Foregrounding Travel in Space: Fantastic and Utopian Scapes of Bygone Years
Old Russia may appear static, but in general only to those who, for the comfort of their own cultural and historical assumptions, consign genuine knowledge of the past to a dusty shelf. Even to old Russia’s most rooted people—the peasants—the cycles of the agricultural year, the human narratives of birth, courtship, marriage, and death were dynamic in themselves. They were marked by choral dances and songs, and hedged about with charms, spells and incantations. The whole complex of rituals surrounding betrothal and marriage, for example, was traditionally referred to as the wedding igra, a word suggesting the movements of a play or game. And the one thing that unites old Russia’s skomorokhi—the minstrels who throughout Russia’s vast territories kept alive such folk customs, as well as an entire corpus of heroic songs and verse tales—is that they traveled widely. Most of their songs remain unread by the English reader to this day. With our focus in mind, it should be noted that many of their songs touched the infinite worlds of fantasy-making, replete with dreams, visitations by devils, flights of chariots, miracles, visions, and, most notably, fantastic journeys. Russia itself was at times expressed as an enchanted realm, as can be seen in the following (newly translated) excerpt from what is arguably the most inspired quest of Old Russian Literature, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign:
O Boyan the Seer, elder days’ nightingale, were you to sing of Igor’s campaign, laying your vatic fingers upon the living strings, whilst pouring your Wisdom in the Great Tree, running as a gray Wolf over the land, gliding below clouds as a blue-ashen Eagle and, recalling the feuds of former times, you’d let loose ten Falcons upon a flock of Swans, and the first Swan overtaken would sing a Song to old Yaroslav < …> [to all great men of his kin, and to] Our Igor, who—having looked up at the Sun—saw all his warriors enveloped in darkness, and called on his brethren, summoned his troops to mount their swift steeds in defense of their land, to catch but a glimpse of the blue river Don [saying]: “Far better it is to be slain in the battle than captured.”
Then, weaving Paeans from both halves of time, you’d climb that Tree of Wisdom, and sing, soaring
in your mind up to the clouds, roving the Troyan Trail o’er the meads and hills: “No chance storm has swept falcons over the wide fields—swift jackdaws flock up, racing toward the great river Don; steeds neigh beyond the Sula—glory rings in Kiev; trumpets blare in Novgorod—banners fly in Putivl …” But the Sun blocks Igor’s campaign by darkness, and night, moaning with thunderstorms, awakens the birds, the whistling of the beasts arises, as Div—the bird-god Daeva—flutters up at the top of the Tree and cries out to all the unknown lands by the Volga, the Azov Sea, the river Sula, the cities of Surozh, Korsun and you, idol of Tmutorokan.—The while the Kumans hasten by untrodden paths to the Don, their carts screech at midnight, as dispersed swans.
Igor leads his warriors to the Great Don: The birds in oak forests portend his misfortunes, the wolves in ravines conjure the storms, the eagles’ screeches bid beasts to the bones, the foxes yelp at the vermilion shields. “O Russian land! Thou art now beyond the hills!” <…> Very early on the next morn bloody dawn heralds the light, ebony clouds arrive from the sea, wanting to cover the four Suns, and in them throb blue lightnings: There is to be great thunder—the rain of arrows will come from the great river Don.<…>
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