Russian science fiction and fantasy

Russian science fiction arguably had its Golden age in the 1960s [ [http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/gerou31.htm Daniel Gerould. On Soviet Science Fiction] , in: Science Fiction Studies #31 = Volume 10, Part 3 = November 1983] , when also majority of English translations were made.

History

Early period

Though secular literature was forming gradually in Russia since XVII century, it was not until the late XVIII century that European rhetoric genres were transplanted to native ground, with narrative fiction techniques open to complex interaction with new scientific and social ideas.

The first work which is indisputably proto science fiction is Fedor Dmitriev-Mamonov's "A Philosopher Nobleman" («Dvoryanin-filosof», 1769). [Darko Suvin. Russian Science Fiction and Its Utopian Tradition, in: Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Yale UP, 1979).] It's a voltairean "conte philosophique" influenced by "Micromégas".

The first generic utopia is a short prose piece by Alexander Sumarokov, "A Dream of Happy Society" (1759). Two early examples of utopias in form of imaginary voyage are Vasily Levshin's "Newest Voyage" (1784, which is also the first Russian flight to the Moon) and Mikhail Shcherbatov's "Journey to the Land of Ophir" (written the same year but published in 1896).

Pseudo-historical heroic romances in classical setting (modeled on Fenelon's "Telemaque") also have a strong utopian element: "Misfortunes of Miramond" (1763), "Adventures of Themistocles" (1763), and "Letters of Ernest and Doravra" (1766) by Fyodor Emin, "Numa" (1768), "Cadmus and Harmony" (1789), and "Polydorus, Son of Cadmus and Harmony" (1794) by Mikhail Kheraskov, "Russian Pamela" (1789) by Pavel Lvov, "Arphaxad" (1793) by Pyotr Zakharyin.

"Ancient Night of the Universe" (1807), an epic poem by Semyon Bobrov, is the first work of Russian Cosmism.

Some of Faddei Bulgarin's tales are set in a more or less distant future, others exploit themes of hollow earth and space flight. In the same entertaining vein Osip Senkovsky's enormously popular "Fantastic Voyages of Baron Brambeus" are written. Aleksandr Bestuzhev with his Gothic stories with German "couleur locale" also was a bestselling author. Other writers to acquire a Gothic mode were Sergey Lyubetsky, Vladimir Olin, Aleksey Tolstoy, Elizaveta Kologrivova, Mikhail Lermontov ("Stoss").

Closer to mid-XIX century a notion of imaginary voyage into outer space became trivialised enough to be used in popular chapbooks ("Voyage to the Sun and Planet Mercury and All the Visivle and Invisible Worlds" (1832) by Dmitry Sigov, "Correspondence of a Moonman with an Earthman" (1842) by Pyotr Mashkov, "Voyage to the Moon in a Wonderful Machine" (1844) by Semyon Dyachkov, "Voyage in the Sun" (1846) by Demokrit Terpinovich).

Authors of popular ("commercial") literature often used fantastic motifs like magic demons (Rafail Zotov's "Qin-Kiu-Tong"), invisibility (Ivan Shteven's "Magic Spectacles"), shrinking men (Vasily Alferyev's "Picture").

Hoffmann's fantastic tales caused great impact upon many Russian writers including Nikolay Gogol, Antony Pogorelsky, Nikolay Melgunov, Vladimir Karlgof, Nikolai Polevoy, Aleksey Tomofeev, Konstantin Aksakov, Vasily Ushakov.

Folklore supernatural tall-tales are stylized by Orest Somov, Vladimir Olin, Mikhail Zagoskin, Nikolay Bilevich.

Alexander Pushkin's The Queen of Spades (1834) was called "a masterpiece of fantastic art" by Dostoyevsky.

The central figure of the early 19th century is Vladimir Odoevsky, a romantic writer influenced by E.T.A. Hoffmann, who combines his vision of the future with faith in scientific and technological progress. ["The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture" by James Billington. Vintage Books (Random House), 1970.] He was also an author of many Gothic tales.

Another fantasist par excellence was Alexander Veltman whose best works are pseudo-historical romances set in Old Russia and heavily peopled by fairy-tale characters ("Koschei the Immortal", 1833) and modern day hoffmanesque tales blended with satiric moralising ("New Yemelya or, Metamorphoses", 1845). His "Ancestors of Kalimeros" (1836) borders on science fiction when the author describes his flight on a hippogryph through the ages to Alexander the Great's court and spending some time there till receiving a creditor's note from Saint-Petersburg. "Year 3448" (1833), a Heliodoric love romance set in the far future, is his worst work.

Late XIX-early XX centuries

The second half of the century, particularly the 1860-80s are marked by dominance of open hostility to fantastic in literature. Literary fantasies with scientific rationale by Nikolai Akhsharumov and Nikolai Vagner stand out amid mundane fiction of that period, as well as Ivan Turgenev's "mysterious tales" ("Specters", "Strange Story", "Dream", "Song of Triumphant Love", "Klara Milich") and Vera Zhelikhovsky's occult fiction.

Mikhail Mikhailov's story "Beyond History" (published posthumously in 1869), a pre-Darwinian fantasy on the descent of man, is the second work of prehistoric fiction in the world literature. Later fictional accounts of prehistoric men were often written by anthropologists and popular science writers ("Prehistoric Man", 1890, by Wilhelm Bitner, "The First Artist", 1907, by Dmitry Pakhomov, "Tale of a Mammoth and an Ice-Man", 1909, by Pyotr Dravert, "Dragon's Victims", 1910, by Vladimir Bogoraz).

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's satires tend to fantastic grotesque ("The History of a Town" and prose fables).

The plot of "Animal Mutiny" (published 1917) by historian Nikolay Kostomarov is built on the same assumption as Orwell's "Animal Farm".

Some Fyodor Dostoevsky's shorter works also use fantastic: "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (a story about the corruption of the utopian society on another planet), a doppelgänger novella "", mesmeric "The Landlady", a comic horror story "Bobok". Two dreams in his masterpieces are marked with science fictional imagination: an axe orbiting Earth in "The Brothers Karamazov", and an intelligent species of microbes turning all of mankind into raging zombies in "Crime and Punishment". Dostoevsky's magazine "Vremya" was first to publish Russian translation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in 1861; three other stories by Poe were published with Dostoevsky's own foreword (defining Poe's method as "material fantastic").

Many prose works of Valery Bryusov, one of the leading Symbolist writers, may be classified as science fiction.

Voluminous "A Created Legend" (1914) by another Symbolist Fyodor Sologub is a freaky utopia full of science fictional wonders close to magic.

Andrei Bely's Petersburg (1914) depicts a fantastic atmosphere of imperial city full of mists, dreams and illusions. In his "The Moscow Eccentric" (1926) Professor Korobkin theoretically deduces a method of nuclear fission. In his short prose piece "Argonauts" an expedition to the Sun takes place in the XXIII century.

Prose of Alexander Kondratyev who was close to Symbolism included "mythological novel" "Satyress" (1907) and collection of "mythological stories" "White Goat" (1908), both based on Greek myths. "Journeys and Adventures of Nicodemus the Elder" (1917) by another minor Symbolist Aleksey Skaldin is a Gnostic fantasy.

Utopias

Nikolai Chernyshevsky's immensely influential "What Is to Be Done?" (1863) included an utopian dream of the far future, which became a prototype for many socialist utopias. Perhaps, the most noted example of them is a duology by Marxist philosopher and Lenin's adversary Alexander Bogdanov, "Red Star" and "Engineer Menni". Some plays of another eminent Marxist, Anatoly Lunacharsky, propone his philosophical ideas in fantastic disguise (collection of his plays was called "Ideas in Masques"). Other examples of socialist utopias include "Diary of André" (1897) by pseudonymous A. Va-sky, "On Another Planet" (1901) by Porfiry Infantyev, "Spring Feast" (1910) by Nikolay Oliger. Alexander Kuprin's pathetic short story of the same kind, "Toast" (1907), became very well known.

Other utopias:
* Vladimir Solovyov's "Tale of the Anti-Christ" (1900) is an ecumenical utopia.
* "Earthly Paradise" (1903) by Konstantin Mereschkowski is an anthropological utopia which pays no attention to technical progress or social justice.
* "Great War Between Men and Women" (1913) by Sergey Solomin and "Women Uprisen and Defeated" (1914) by Polish writer Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski (written and published in Russian) tell stories of a feminist revolution. Other "feminist utopias" are short farces "Women on Mars" (1906) by Victor Bilibin and "Women Problem" (1913) by Nadezhda Teffi.
* "In Half a Century" (1902) by Sergey Sharapov is a patriarchal Slavophile utopia.
* "Land of Bliss" (1891) by Crimean Tatar educator İsmail Gaspıralı is a Muslim utopia.

Genre fiction

Entertainment fiction adopts international popular themes like resurrecting an ancient Roman ("Extraordinary Story of a Resurrected Pompeian" by Vasily Avenarius), global disaster ("Struggle of the Worlds", 1900, by N. Kholodny; "Under the Comet", 1910, by Simon Belsky), mindreading devices (a recurring theme in works by Andrey Zarin), Antarctic city-states ("Under the Glass Dome", 1914, by Sergey Solomin), elixir of longevity ("Brothers of the Saint Cross", 1898, by Nikolay Shelonsky), Atlantis ("Atlantis", 1913, by Larisa Reisner).

Spaceflight remained a central science fiction topic since the 1890s in "In the Ocean of Stars" (1892) by Anany Lyakide, "In the Moon" (1893) and "Dreams of Earth and Skies" (1895) by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, "Voyage to Mars" (1901) by Leonid Bogoyavlensky, "In Space" (1908) by Nikolay Morozov, "Sailing Ether" (1913) by Boris Krasnogorsky with its sequel, "Islands of Ethereal Ocean" (1914, co-authored by prominent astronomer Daniil Svyatsky).

In the 1910s Russian audience grew interested in horror fiction: "Fire-Blossom", a supernatural thriller by prolific writer Alexander Amfiteatrov, passed unnoticed in 1895, but it became an immediate success after being republished in 1910. Vera Kryzhanovsky's occult romances combining science fiction and reactionary elitist utopia enjoyed enourmous popularity at the time. Bram Stoker's Dracula was imitated (by pseudonymous "b. Olshevri" (= "more lies" in Russian) in "Vampires", 1912) even earlier than translated into Russian (1913). Early Alexander Grin's stories are mostly psychological horror (he borrowed much from Ambrose Bierce), though later on his writing drifted to less conventional and more literary kinds of fantasy.

Possible miracles of technical progress were regularly described in form of fiction by scientists (very close to Hugo Gernsback's concept of "scientifiction"): "Wonders of Electricity" (1884) by electric engineer Vladimir Chikolev, "Automatic Underground Railway" (1902) by Alexander Rodnykh, "Billionaire's Testament" (1904) by biology professor Porfiry Bakhmetyev.

Future war stories (indistinguishable from their English, German, and French analogues) were produced mostly by the military ("Cruiser "Russian Hope", 1887, and "Fatal War of 18..", 1889, by retired navy officer Alexander Belomor; "Big Fist or Chinese-European War", 1900, by K. Golokhvastov, "Queen of the World" (1908) and "Kings of the Air" (1909) by another retired navy officer Vladimir Semyonov; "War of Nations 1921-1923" (1912) by Ix, "War of the "Ring" with the "Union" (1913) by P. R-tsky, "The End of the War", 1915, by Lev Zhdanov).

"Threat to the World" (1914) by Ivan Ryapasov (who styled himself "Ural Jules Verne") is very much alike Jules Verne's The Begum's Fortune, but the arch-enemy is an Englishman. Jules Verne was so widely read that Anton Chekhov has written a very witty parody on him, and Konstantin Sluchevsky produced a sequel - "Captain Nemo in Russia" (1898).

Soviet science fiction

See also social science fiction in the Eastern Bloc.

The first specimen of alternate history in Russian is "Napoleon's Second Life" (1917) by Mikhail Pervukhin.

"Undress, Man" (1917) by Andrey Rennikov contrasts Venusian biological civilization to corrupt technological one of Earth. His other science fiction novel is "Dictator of the World" (1925).

Post-Soviet period

Among the best known authors of the Post-Soviet Russia are: Sergey Lukyanenko, Alexander Gromov, Kirill Eskov, Nokolay Perumov, Andrey Lasarchuk, Roman Zlotnikov, Vasiliy Golovachev.

References

External links

* [http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/countriesRZ.html#COUNTRIES-RUSSIA Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide]
* [http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-235721/science-fiction Soviet science fiction, in Britannica Online]
* [http://kogni.narod.ru/sfiction.htm Vyacheslav IVANOV. RUSSIAN SCIENCE FICTION. Course in UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and literatures, Winter 2007]
* [http://files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/text/56-1-360.shtml "IN THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY SPUTNIK". Notes on Soviet Science Fiction, Soviet Survey. January-March,1958. I--PAST AND PRESENT By Walter Z. Laqueur; II -- FANTASY AND REALITY By Vera Alexandrova; III - EAST AND WEST By Zeev ben Shlomo]

Anthologies

* "Soviet Science Fiction", Collier Books, 1962, 189pp.
* "More Soviet Science Fiction", Collier Books, 1962, 190pp.
* "Russian Science Fiction", ed. Robert Magidoff, New York University Press, 1964.
* "Russian Science Fiction, 1968", ed. Robert Magidoff, New York University Press, 1968.
* "Russian Science Fiction, 1969", ed. Robert Magidoff, New York University Press, 1969.
* "New Soviet Science Fiction", Macmillan, 1979 , ISBN 0-02-578220-7, xi+297pp.
* "Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction": An Anthology (Seven Utopias and a Dream), ed. Leland Fetzer, Ardis, 1982, ISBN 0-88233-595-2, 253pp.
* "Worlds Apart" : An Anthology of Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Alexander Levitsky, Overlook, 2006, ISBN 1-58567-819-8, 740pp.

Literature

* Darko Suvin. Russian Science Fiction, 1956-1974: A Bibliography. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1976.
* J. P. Glad, Extrapolations from Dystopia: A Critical Study of Soviet Science Fiction Princeton: Kingston Press, 1982. 223 p.
* Scott R. Samuel, Soviet Science Fiction: New Critical Approaches. Ph. D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1982. 134 p.
* Nadezhda L. Petreson, Fantasy and Utopia in the Contemporary Soviet Novel, 1976-1981. Ph. D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1986. 260 p.
* Karla A. Cruise. Soviet Science Fiction, 1909-1926: Symbols, Archetypes and Myths. Master's Thesis, Princeton University, 1988. 71 p.
* Matthew D. B. Rose, Russian and Soviet Science Fiction: The Neglected Genre. Master's Thesis, The University of Alberta (Canada), 1988.
* Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. Oxford UP, 1989.
* Richard P. Terra and Robert M. Philmus. Russian and Soviet Science Fiction in English Translation: A Bibliography, in: Science Fiction Studies #54 = Volume 18, Part 2 = July 1991
* Anindita Banerjee. The Genesis and Evolution of Science Fiction in fin de siecle Russia, 1880-1921. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2000. 324 p.
* Vitalii Kaplan. A Look Behind the Wall: A Topography of Contemporary Russian Science Fiction, Russian Studies in Literature 38(3): 62-84. Summer 2002. Also in: Russian Social Science Review 44(2): 82-104. March/April 2003.
* Science Fiction Studies #94 = Volume 31, Part 3 = November 2004. SPECIAL ISSUE: SOVIET SCIENCE FICTION: THE THAW AND AFTER.
* Park Joon-Sung. Literary Reflections of the Future War: A Study of Interwar Soviet Literature of Military Anticipation. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2004. 198 p.

ee also

*Science fiction in China
*Science fiction in Croatia
*Science fiction in Japan
*Science fiction in Poland
*Science fiction in Serbia