Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (70 page)

Although Anglo-American science fiction is better known throughout the world, not to mention (naturally) in North America, Russian and East European science fiction has played a significant role in the development of SF for more than a century. Russian and East European SF differ enough to be treated separately here, but they have been closely interrelated thanks to mutual translation as well as geographical proximity, especially in the socialist era (1917–1991 for the USSR and roughly 1947–1991 for most of the rest of Eastern Europe).

For many reasons, SF has long been a popular genre in Eastern Europe and Russia. Many early SF works were acceptable even to socialist censorship, because the future or interplanetary societies they depicted were essentially socialist; many authors (H. G. Wells and others) were Fabians or some other variety of leftist. Jules Verne and Wells were translated frequently, so their works were easily available and widely enjoyed. Readers of SF in Russia and East Europe today are much more familiar with the best western SF—from classics to the present day—than Western readers are with Russian and East European SF.

RUSSIAN AND SOVIET SF

Russian SF sprang from a utopian chapter of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel
What Is To Be Done?
(“Vera Pavlovna’s Dream”) and from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s story “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” (a chapter from the 1880 novel
The Karamazov Brothers
) as much as from the perpetual favorites Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. The stories of rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) and Old Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov’s 1908 novel
Red Star
, among others, founded the genre. Tsiolkovsky was strongly influenced by philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov (1827-1903), who felt it was mankind’s duty to pursue science until we could resurrect “the fathers” (our dead ancestors); he urged development of space travel as a way to find new planets, so all those reincorporated human beings would have room to live. Bogdanov’s
Red Star
posits a more advanced utopian society on Mars (the conveniently red planet); the novel’s earthling hero marvels at the economic and social achievements of the highly developed civilization there, though troubled by his lover’s sexual past. Bogdanov (1873-1928) was one of many Marxist SF authors who depicted aliens as humanoid; according to scientific Marxism, humanity must be the pinnacle of evolution. Bogdanov’s belief in the salubrious effects of exchanging blood led to his (accidental?) death after a botched transfusion. Many other literary figures of the Russian fin-de-siècle dabbled in SF; Symbolist poet Valerii Briusov’s decadent dystopia “Republic of the Southern Cross” (1905) is one striking example.

Given the flowering of radical social theories after the Russian Revolution, SF’s popularity in the early Soviet years is no surprise. The best-known works at the time were written by authors who wrote in other genres too; there are elements of SF in most of the Russian Futurist poets, especially Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky (his 1929 play “The Bedbug” has a petty bourgeois from the 1920s defrosted in a sterile socialist future). There are echoes of Fyodorov even in high Modernists like poet Osip Mandelshtam or Boris Pasternak. Evgenii Zamyatin (1884-1937) was educated as a naval engineer and joined the Bolsheviks before the 1905 Revolution; his political interests led to years in provincial exile, which sparked his career as a writer. His classic dystopian novel
We
is perhaps still the best known work of Russian SF. Written in 1919-21,
We
was one of the first literary works banned in the Soviet Union and, oddly enough, was first published in English translation in 1924. (It was first officially published in the USSR only in 1988—three years before the USSR itself ended.)
We
had a formative influence on Huxley’s
Brave New World
(1931) and Orwell’s
1984
(1948); it depicts a regimented society whose members have numbers rather than names, and where a brain operation ultimately “saves” the mathematician hero D-503 from the wiles of revolution.
We
is often read as a prophetic anti-Bolshevik dystopia, but in fact many negative elements in the novel are drawn from Zamyatin’s experience of English society, where he lived during WWI, designing icebreakers for the Russian navy. Zamyatin was unable to publish under Stalin; he was allowed to emigrate in 1931 and died in Paris after years of literary silence.

Other early Soviet authors produced important SF. Alexei N. Tolstoy (1883-1945), “the Red Count,” wrote the novel
Aèlita
, the basis of one of the first (perhaps
the
first) full-length SF films, Yakov Protozanov’s
Aelita: Queen of Mars
(1924). Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), now best known for his plays and the novel
The Master and Margarita
, wrote several works of SF, including “The Fatal Eggs” (1925) and the novel
Heart of a Dog
(written 1925; officially published in the USSR in 1987). In ”The Fatal Eggs” a scientist’s discovery plus political interference cause disaster, as a mysterious Red Ray turns reptile and ostrich eggs into super-fertile monsters—but the tale also depicts the devious mechanism of celebrity in a very near future (it is set in 1929, imagining that Lenin’s New Economic Policy continued). By 1929, censorship was clanging down on Soviet writers; Bulgakov’s request to emigrate was denied. Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) wrote SF where passionate Bolshevik scientists alter the physical fabric of the world; Marietta Shaginian (1888-1982) included some SF among her many, many socialist realist novels.

Alexander Belyaev (1884-1942) wrote primarily SF—numerous stories, long tales, and novels—but has been largely neglected in the West. His story “Hoity-Toity (Professor Wagner’s Invention)” appeared in English in a 1962 collection edited by Isaac Asimov, and Professor Dowell’s Head (1925) was published in English in 1980. Several of his works have been made into films (Last Man from Atlantis (2011), The Amphibian Man (1962), etc.); always beloved by readers, Belyaev is now becoming more of an object of scholarly interest.

Under Stalin writers had to be as careful as everyone else, but after his death in 1953 SF became a kind of safe zone for writers who did not want to sell out (along with children’s literature, historical novels, and literary translation). Paleontologist Ivan Efremov had great success with the novel
The Andromeda Nebula
(better translated as
Andromeda Galaxy
, 1956); it went through at least thirty editions in the Soviet period. Once Stalinist literary censorship eased, the USSR was a favorable environment for SF. The Party fostered a cult of scientists and supported a large population of scientific researchers, upheld by a planned economy in education that every year turned out this or that many new qualified scientists in every field. (The scientists themselves, of course, might be anything from a Trofim Lysenko, the agronomist whose Lamarckian theories and political machinations hobbled Soviet genetics and agriculture for decades, to an Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who became a Nobel Prize–winning dissident and human rights activist.) Educated citizens enjoyed reading popular science, and SF tended to be some of the best fiction available while socialist realism was still favored by the literary bureaucracy. Soviet citizens read not only SF by Russian (or Ukrainian, Kyrgyz, etc.) authors, but also translations of classics (Verne, Wells) and writers from “brotherly” socialist countries (Čapek, Lem). Some Anglo-American SF writers were widely available and very popular: Isaac Asimov (himself born in Russia), Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.

By the late 1950s a growing Soviet SF scene included gee-whiz magazines for boys and a growing number of writers producing mostly hard SF. The 95% that was bound to be crap was socialist realist crap, more idealist and less sexy than American style pulp SF. (Efremov’s
Andromeda Galaxy
, far from crap, still makes tedious reading today.) Showing a distant future meant that many of the platitudes of socialist realism could be dispensed with, and including characters whose names pointed to many nationalities could suggest either worldwide socialism or a science-based meritocracy of the future. The early achievements of the Soviet space program added excitement to plots of space travel—and honestly, isn’t cosmonaut (meaning someone who navigates the cosmos) a better term than astronaut (someone who…sails into a star and gets vaporized)? SF may have been encouraged because it was another venue where the Soviet Union could compete with the West.

Besides the Strugatskys (see below) there were many popular and enjoyable SF authors in the USSR during the Thaw (1956–64) and the subsequent period of Stagnation: Chingiz Aitmatov, Genrikh Altov, Vladlen Bakhnov, Dmitrii Bilenkin, Kir Bulychëv, Anatolii Dneprov, Mikhail Emtsev, Sever Gansovsky, Gennadii Gor, Mikhail Greshnov, Vladimir Grigoriev, Georgii Gurevich, Aleksandr Kazantsev, Viktor Kolupaev, Vladislav Krapivin, Isai Lukodianov, Eremei Parnov, Aleksandr Poleshchuk, Vladimir Savchenko, Viktor Separin, Vadim Shefner, Nikolai Toman, Ilya Varshavsky, Evgenii Voiskunsky, Roman Yarov, and Valentina Zhuravleva all have at least one work of SF available in English—sometimes rendered by superb translators such as Antonina Bouis and Mirra Ginsburg. I have slowed your reading with this list to make clear how many Soviet SF authors were worth translating. The list also shows that it was mostly men who wrote SF in the Soviet period (and almost solely men who were translated into English)—and mostly Russians, rather than other Soviet nationalities, whose work made it across the border. Some stories even made digs at corruption in the Soviet system, always a thrill for readers. For all the tight control over literature in the USSR, censors often seemed to miss irony and even out-and-out sarcasm in SF, especially in short stories (the Strugatskys had more trouble because they wrote novels, because their work was so widely popular—and no doubt because they were Jews). Like the other permitted “marginal” genres, SF gave writers considerably more freedom than socialist realist fiction, as long as it observed certain conventions (“the Party in space”). In 1970, the Strugatskys were invited to the International Science Fiction Writers’ Symposium in Tokyo (but not allowed to go). Four other Soviet SF authors were sent (including one Ukrainian!); Brian Aldiss describes one of the writers, Vasilii Zakharchenko, being treated like a rock star at the Expo Soviet pavilion.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are the best-known SF writers in Russian after Zamyatin. Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky (1925–1991) was trained in artillery and graduated from the military foreign language institute in 1949 as a specialist in translation from Japanese and English. Boris (b. 1933) graduated from high school with honors in 1950 but was not admitted to the physics department at Leningrad State University because of quotas on Jews. He studied mathematics and mechanics instead and graduated in 1955, specializing in astronomy. The brothers wrote together and always insisted their work should be read as the creation of a single author; their first story was published in 1958, and their first novel in 1959. Before long, their take on the universe became more pessimistic (in the end of
Distant Rainbow
, for example, everyone dies and the planet is trashed by research carelessly pursued), and they encountered some trouble with the literary establishment. They published 27 novels, a play, and two books of stories; several works were adapted as films, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Stalker
(from
Roadside Picnic
). The Strugatskys’ popularity extended far beyond SF fans: every member of the intelligentsia felt obliged to read works like
Hard to Be a God.

Around the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western SF that had not previously been available came flooding into Russia (along with porn and pulp of all kinds), but local SF has continued to flourish alongside fantasy. Despite copious current production, however, the SF most available in English translation is by writers who write not only SF: Viktor Pelevin (
OMON Ra
), Vladimir Sorokin (
Ice
and others), Tatyana Tolstaya (
The Slynx
). Olga Slavnikova’s
2017
combines a dystopian, globalized capitalist Russian future with the legends of Ural miners. At the same time, the web (where SF-loving geeks got a head start on everyone else) makes it possible to find all kinds of SF works with some thoughtful searching. The post-Soviet SF scene in Russia is varied and exciting: some authors to check out include Marina and Sergei Diachenko, Aleksandr Gromov, Sviatoslav Loginov, Sergei Lukyanenko, Genri Laion Oldi (Dmitrii Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhenskii), Nik Perumov, Viacheslav Rybakov, and Vladimir Vasil’ev. The prolific Lukyanenko (b. 1968) may be the most popular SF author in Russia today; his fantasy novels
Night Watch
(1998) and
Day Watch
(1999) were made into movies (2004 and 2006) that did well in North America, and he is increasingly well represented in English translation.

EAST EUROPEAN SF

Eastern Europe includes more than fifteen countries and languages (if you count Belarus and Ukraine). Before WWI, it was almost all under one or another empire, Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, or Russian; local cultural production tended to favor the protection of the national language and folklore. After WWI, however, SF appealed to many aspiring writers who sought an audience and started to build the new national literatures. The best-known interwar East European SF writer was the Czech Karel Čapek (1890–1938), inventor of the word “robot” (or at last first user: he said it was his brother’s idea). It comes from the Czech word robota (the kind of unpaid work serfs would do). Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) is still regularly performed—and the nefarious Rossum Corporation makes an appearance in Joss Whedon’s series Dollhouse. Much of Čapek’s writing was not SF, but the 1936 speculative novel War with the Newts is both delightfully funny and pointedly critical of the flaws of human societies, which all exploit the newly discovered sentient newts until the newts take over. When the Nazis entered Czechoslovakia in 1938 Čapek was #2 on their list of enemies, but he thwarted plans to arrest and intern him by dying of pneumonia on December 25, 1938.