The Palimpsestic Timescales of Russian SF

Abstract

380 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) REVIEW-ESSAYS Caroline Edwards The Palimpsestic Timescales of Russian SF Anindita Banerjee, ed. Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader. Boston, MA: Academic Studies, 2018. 400 pp. $119 hc, $39.99 pbk. Cementing her reputation as a leading scholar of world sf, Anindita Banerjee’s edited collection Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema introduces readers to the rich tradition of sf in Russia, from the pre-Wellsian period to the present day. The collection includes a carefully selected range of scholarship previously published in books and journal articles over the past few decades. The proliferation of nauchnaya fantastika [scientific fantasy] in Russia suggests that it is more than merely a genre of popular literature. At one time it was part of a vibrant national conversation that kept abreast of advances in rocketry, space exploration, and astronautics. Illustrated magazines popularized the latest technological developments for a scientifically literate populace that eagerly engaged in what Richard Stites has called an “abundance of star-gazing” (9). By opening the collection with the iconic image of Sputnik, Banerjee not only invokes the apogee of scientific achievement during the golden age of Soviet Russia’s space program, but also suggests the palimpsestic timescale in which Russian sf tends to be read. Russia’s Space Age enacted the contradiction of a largely unindustrialized country accelerating its own historical development. As Louis Althusser suggests, paraphrasing Leon Trotsky, Russia “was at the same time the most backward and the most advanced nation” (qtd. in Smith 6; emphasis in original). The organization of Banerjee’s Critical Reader is thus informed by the way in which, as she suggests, the Space Age enables “critics to simultaneously reach backward and forward in time” (xii), like the noncontemporaneous nature of Russian utopian dreaming that stretched backward into peasant utopianism and forward into glittering technological revolution. Darko Suvin’s essay “The Utopian Tradition of Russian Science Fiction” (1971) reminds readers of the “ubiquitous dream of a land of Cockayne” (1) that informed traditional Russian fairytales and endured into modern Russian literature, from Pushkin and Dostoevsky to Tolstoy and Chekhov. Suvin’s essay (which later became a chapter in his influential Metamorphoses of Science Fiction [1979]) remains a compelling reading of the palimpsestic timescale of Russian sf, which, as he writes, “blended the rationalist western European strain of utopianism and satire with the native folk longings for abundance and justice” (1). Traditional tales of peasant struggle against serfdom become allegorized in the estranging landscapes of subterranean 381 PALIMPSESTIC TIMESCALES OF RUSSIAN SF worlds (Vladimir Odoevsky’s unfinished hollow Earth narrative, Year 4338), Fourierist tales of utopian socialism (Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? [1862]), and anticipatory daydreams of the future (Valery Bryusov’s Symbolist play Earth [1904]). Although, as Suvin notes, Russian sf was “written at great cost by exceptional, heroic, and isolated figures,” it is a testament to Suvin’s influential analysis that we now think of pre-revolutionary and early Russian sf as a clearly defined tradition that stretches from novels about Mars, such as Alexey Tolstoy’s Aelita, or the Decline of Mars (1923) and Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908) to Alexander Kuprin’s popular stories “A Toast” (1913) and “The Liquid Sun” (1913). Suvin’s reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin introduced Anglophone readers to an important dystopian precursor to Huxley and Orwell while also insisting on the utopianism of Zamyatin’s shining futuristic city. Despite its terrifying surveillance and draconian technocracy, D-503’s narrative suggests that “the new utopian world cannot be a static changeless paradise of a new religion, albeit a religion of steel, mathematics, and interplanetary flights” (14). Suvin argues that from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, Soviet sf became “a second-rate crossbreed, neither really artistic nor scientific” (20) until the “second great age of Soviet science fiction”—exemplified by texts such as Ivan Yefremov’s Andromeda: A Space Age Tale (1957)—emerged toward the end of the 1950s after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. Suvin’s authoritative essay is followed by Mark B. Adams’s “Red Star: Another Look...