THE HORIZONS OF the poet’s eye were significantly widened by spell-binding advances in technology and an outright revolution in cosmology in the 20th century. In a mere half a century man was able to accelerate his new ability to be airborn, courtesy of the Wright brothers, to space-flight itself. With the way paved by Sputnik, “glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven” were soon to become accessible to ordinary mortals. Once Percival Lowell observed what he considered to be “Martian canals,” the powers of astronomical observation fueled alternate paths for unchartered flights of fancy. Contact with new worlds and heretofore unknown civilizations became one of the most popular topics for an exploding literary and cinematic genre—Science Fiction—and the planet Mars was to be of particular importance in this regard, since proof of such an alien civilization seemed to have been offered by science itself. When in 1902 in France a substantial prize was offered to the person who could establish proven contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, the competition’s rules specifically excluded Mars, as the existence of Martian civilization was deemed too close to an established fact.
Before close-range pictures were sent back to Earth by Mariner and the two Viking probes, the fictional allure of Mars as a setting was overwhelming and Martian novel-writing had been extremely productive ever since H. G. Wells published his classic The War of the Worlds in 1898. Except for those envisioned by Ray Bradbury, most western fictional Martians modelled after Wells by less well-known writers were nearly always hostile and horrific. However, their counterparts as portrayed by two important Russian writers introduced in this section, Alexander Bogdanov and Alexei Tolstoy, were humanoid and quite attractive. Bogdanov’s and Tolstoy’s writings are each alloted a single entry—from the Red Planet and Aelita respectively—containing excerpts from these major works devoted to Mars. It is hoped that inclusion of these self-contained episodes and chapters will stimulate the reader to seek out full texts of these novels available in English. The regrettable fact is that neither Bogdanov nor Tolstoy, (nor Platonov, for that matter, who follows them here) rated a mention in the popular Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,1 although less accomplished authors did. Hence the justification for this section: to be both informative and enticing. In fact, each writer represented here had an admiring readership and exercised considerable influence in Russia. And each imagined space-flight to new frontiers in a unique way. In addition, each was born in Imperial Russia and died in the Soviet Union. A companion volume of authors born after the revolution is, we hope, a future project.
The concept of space flight certainly had its antecedents in past fiction, especially in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865), but modern advances in aviation technology gave it an entirely new dimension, and scientists themselves responded to earlier predictions of science fiction writers. Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky for example, evolved his concept of a multi-stage moon rocket from an inverted design of the propelling force of Verne’s cannon. In addition Tsiolkovsky, in Beyond the Planet Earth (1898-1920), predicted artificial satellites and worked on detailed descriptions of space-stations. Despite Tsiolkovsky’s penchant for Menippean satire with respect to his own ideas, his writings were hardly ground-breaking from a literary point of view. Bogdanov and Tolstoy were far more accomplished writers of fiction. Bogdanov’s novel was strongest in its elaboration of space-flight itself, whereas Tolstoy’s adventure sci-fi novel was especially successful with its readers in describing the Martian terrain and romances with blue-skinned Martian women. We offer our selections with these strengths in mind.
A number of minor science-fiction writers too numerous to list here appeared on the literary scene in post-revolutionary years. We submit newly translated selections from only two other Russian authors of the period—Andrei Platonov and Ivan Efremov. Platonov is best known for his novel The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan), completed in 1930 but published for the first time in the west in 1973, over two decades after his death. It is a dark novel reflecting Platonov’s disillusionment with the notion of a glorious socialist future. We offer here a sampling of his earlier fiction. The loosely connected triad of separate stories Descendants of the Sun, The Lunar Probe, and The Ether Trail is still animated by enthusiasm for the coming “electric century.” In it advanced technology and space travel transform both man and his world, ushering in a utopian age. But even this triad, which forecasts a glorious future for man as he overcomes Nature with incredible technological and scientific advances, already hints at the author’s doubts regarding their desirability. It is not for nought that each of Platonov’s protagonists—”giants” propelling mankind to new leaps in technology—is an engineer whose emotional life is either tragic, or absent altogether. Their romantic and domestic failures implicitly qualify the “glorious” life created by technological progress and socialism as not necessarily conducive to individual happiness or emotional fulfillment. Upon learning that one of these engineers is married, a colleague exclaims: “Married, hell! You’ve gotten used to sentimentality. As for me, brother, work is a more lasting legacy than children!” It is clear that Platonov, in the initial stages of his writing career undeniably enamored of science and technology, already entertained real doubts as to their benefits and their human cost. This hesitancy engendered stories like Makar the Doubtful (1929), for which Platonov was persecuted by the regime. Such persecution, renewed after WWII, made it impossible for his larger works, in which the author’s attitude toward “socialist enthusiasm” became clearly satirical, from appearing in the USSR. Eventually Platonov’s name, like Zamiatin’s, was erased from the official history of Soviet literature.
Of the writers cited so far, only Efremov survived significantly beyond the year 1957, which heralded the Sputnik era. His influential, large-scale utopian novel, Andromeda Nebula (Tumannost’ Andromedy), set in the far future of interstellar travel, was in fact published in book form the same year that Sputnik flew into space. Perhaps chiefly on this account he was the first post-war Soviet writer to reach legendary fame among younger Russians, ensuring that the space-travel theme would become the prevalent subject of post-war Soviet science fiction. So far his novel has existed only in a pedestrian English translation, and in offering two of its chapters we hope to remedy his near obscurity among English readers. Like Bogdanov’s novel, Andromeda justifies the tenets of communist doctrine though space exploration. In Bogdanov’s case that doctrine is unambiguously glued onto Mars, shown to have dialectically evolved into a rational society based on love of labor and gender equality, which provided an inspiring example to the visiting Earthling. In Efremov’s novel, mankind itself is shown to have achieved space travel precisely because it has embraced the rational, scientific principles of communist doctrine—which, as it turns out, have universal appeal. As an intergalactic transmission from the humanoid civilization on 61 Cygni has it: “Separated by space and time we are united by intellect.” But if one forgets about the doctrinaire messages of both, there is much to admire in these works. There is Bogdanov’s skilled use of androgyny to confirm his belief in the equality of the sexes, and his anticipation of automated production and atomic fission, and there is Efremov’s ability to project the vastness of space itself. When read to the accompaniment of Sputnik’s orbital beeps, Andromeda—with its skilled use of authentic and imagined scientific concepts—was Russia’s first readable work celebrating the fantastic possibilities inherent in mankind’s leap into space.
However tantalizing such possibilities were, a society governed solely by intellect was doomed to failure, just as Dostoevsky had predicted. About three decades after Efremov’s novel, Russian society celebrated the millennium of its existence as an organized state and of its acceptance of Christianity. By that time there were signs that communist doctrine had already exhausted itself, and since then vast numbers of Russians have once again embraced the metaphysical, finding it principally in the belief system of the Orthodox church. But the seeds were there earlier. In 1963—six years after Andromeda—Efremov produced The Blade’s Edge, a novel whose interest in eastern religion and yogic meditation ensured its rejection by the regime censors. The book became an underground best-seller and copies of it sold for approximately a month’s salary for the average Russian, the same price as a copy of the quintessential banned classic, The Bible.