THIS BRIEF SUBSECTION, just as the previous one, devoted principally to the poets, cannot even pretend to convey the period’s true thematic richness. Yet even those who initially shared neither apocalyptic apprehensions nor Symbolist sensibilities eventually came around to the conviction that the future unfolding of the century heralded doom for their homeland. Perhaps the best example of this kind of transmogrification is represented in the writings of Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870-1938). Kuprin, then a rising star in literature and an associate of the politically conscious Knowledge (Znanie) group, was a writer whose best-known works exposed and dissected social ills. In the heat of events surrounding Russia’s 1905 revolution he illustrated the hopes of contemporary Russians in a brief magazine piece, The Toast (1906), in which technology, social engineering and enlightened anarchy are shown to have made the Earth a paradise, thriving even in the harshest conditions for life—at the Earth’s poles. The piece is saved from outright propaganda on the benefits of social engineering by the emotional tribute, voiced at the end of the story, to the visions and sacrifices of early 20th-century revolutionaries. Yet, Kuprin was prescient in one regard: the reader should be struck by his description of global festivities, eerily reminiscent of the round-the-clock, satellite-assisted celebrations of Y2K.
But such festivities were hardly in view in the years immediately following the aborted success of the 1905 revolution, and Briusov’s The Republic of the Southern Cross, offered in the previous subsection and describing the fall of another circumpolar society, might have been written in response to this work by Kuprin. Kuprin’s own disillusionment with futuristic dreaming is reflected in the story Liquid Sunshine (1913), generally regarded to be the first Wellsean work of science fiction produced in Russia. The protagonists of writers like Chernyshevsky, Bulgarin and Odoevsky had been usually no more than devices allowing the author to describe future political or scientific transformations. In contrast, Kuprin strikes a more human note. His characters (just as those crafted by Wells) are individuals, and the narration is much more concerned with their particular personal response to events as they unfold. The Wellsean theme of global cooling and its attendant catastrophes also makes its appearance in Liquid Sunshine, and once again Kuprin seems prescient—this time in describing the destructive power of a tsunami, which we have witnessed quite recently indeed. The story recalls Dostoevsky as well: the most enlightened, altruistic man of science will in the end find himself at the mercy of his own self-destructive emotions. Human nature at its irreducible core is the true enemy of any utopia.
But the “tsunami” produced by the arrival of Bolshevik rule in 1917 was unlike any natural catastrophe Russia had witnessed earlier, and Remizov, Zamiatin and Pilniak, the last three writers chosen to represent the Modernist period—just as all those listed in the previous subsection—suffered from its mindless terror: Remizov and Zamiatin were forced into emigration and Pilniak died in a concentration camp. None of them was a Symbolist but each represented the very best the Symbolist school spawned. Of these three Evgeny I. Zamiatin (1884-1937) is best known in the west, and his dystopian novel We, together with Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky and Petersburg by Bely, forms a trio of requisite readings in Russian fantasy. Zamiatin is represented here by the initial chapters of We (which project an embodiment of the Grand Inquisitor’s society into the future), and by two shorter works. One is the prose-jewel The Dragon which testifies to Zamiatin’s full control of a fantastic scape in a miniature, and the other, a powerful short story The Cave—with an embedded text from Plato—in which the once-proud capital Petersburg is engulfed by a true apocalypse. We may recall that Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman begins with Peter the Great standing on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, and takes the reader on a whirlwind time-journey forward, to the same spot a century later—site of the glorious city that Peter’s imagination and will had called into being. Peter’s creation survives a flood, just as Noah’s Arc does in the biblical story: Pushkin may mourn the cost of his poor protagonist’s life, but in a way that celebrates the city’s magnificence nonetheless. Zamiatin takes his reader on the reverse journey—in which the formerly modern city exists only in memories—backwards in time, to the frozen wasteland of the ice age. No archangel sounds his horn here; the apocalypse is heralded by the trumpeting of a wooly mammoth, emblem of a society reduced to primeval savagery whose inhabitants see death as a longed-for privilege. Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice, written two years before The Cave, was chosen by us to serve as a prescient summation of Zamiatin’s apocalyptic vision.
Alexei M. Remizov (1877-1957), another giant of Russian fantasy predating Zamiatin, shows very convincingly the apocalypse about to engulf Russia in his superb early story The Blaze, in which the role of the mystical monk is just as enigmatic as that of any Symbolist protagonist. What is clear in the story is that Russian folk culture had degenerated by Remizov’s time to a set of debased superstitions, richly challenging those represented in Sologub’s far better known novel, Petty Demon. Remizov’s art is in lifting his readers from the common perspectives of the everyday world, and even from the conventional representations of a fairy-tale world. In his exquisite story The Bear Cub, a child’s power of fantasy-weaving is given free rein as a young girl associates a snowflake with the constellation Ursa Major. Russia in a Whirlwind (1927) clearly shows that the old Russian culture whose richness Remizov so keenly embraced is doomed to destruction under the new regime, and his Orison (1917) is a mournful reflex of its medieval prototype (cited in Section I). Finally, the “meaning” of Petersburg gets an interesting and profound alternate expression in Remizov’s novel In A Rosy Light (1952) from which we give the Prologue just as we have done with an excerpt from Bely’s novel.
Old Russia and its former customs are given a nuanced portrayal by Boris A. Pilniak (1897-1937?) from whose writing we choose one prerevolutinary work, a realist-impressionist tale A Year in their Life (1915, an echo of the bear motif in Russian culture), and one post-revolutionary sample from his famous novel The Naked Year (1921). The latter serves as a mini-representation of Pilniak’s newly found and unique telegraphic style in prose fiction (enabling him to create an entire chapter in three phrases, for instance); it also shows the disintegration of folk-culture. The author obviously holds the Russian countryside as dear as Remizov does; alas, he also clearly shows that its legendary hero, Ilia of Murom, no longer inhabits Rus’ and that the Russian forest awaits in vain for his return.