Factory of the Future: On M. Il’in’s “Scientific-Fictional Literature”

Abstract

In the early 1930s, in the course of the First Five-Year Plan, the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers and the proclamation of Socialist Realism as the new literary doctrine, Maksim Gor’kii and Samuil Marshak tried to establish a new genre of popular science writing, “scientific-fictional literature” (“nauchno-khudozhestvennaia literatura”). This article reconstructs the emergence of this genre in the context of Soviet post-revolutionary euphoria for the scientific transformation of society and the avant-gardist experimental laboratories of dreams. The writer M. Il’in, nowadays mostly forgotten, was the most widely published author and main advocate of this new kind of science writing at the time. In the 1930s, M. Il’in adopted many of the devices and claims of prominent avant-garde artists such as Sergei Tret’iakov and appropriated them for his totalizing and globalizing approach to representation. In unpacking M. Il’in’s prose, this article explores the complex and ambiguous formation of Socialist Realism in the field of popular scientific literature.