Red Star Tales Read online

  The story is explicitly set in late July 1942, at the outset of the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest battles in human history.6 The protagonist will experience nothing of this, since he has already been wounded and removed far from the front, to recuperate in a Central Asian sanatorium. The entire story of the magical archeological dig seems to take place outside of time, yet our awareness of the historical events that are unfolding in the devastated background make a difference. It is against this background that we see the beginnings of Yefremov’s belief in the positive pull of cosmic evolution, which will ultimately lead human beings towards communion with other intelligent life. In Yefremov’s groundbreaking 1957 space epic Andromeda Nebula,7 utopian science fictional optimism about this communion is conveyed in complicated plots and intricately drawn far-future protagonists and technologies; in this story, it is condensed into a single transcendent moment, when two human beings look up and see “piercing the glistening shroud of the Milky Way, [shining] Cygnus the Swan, stretching its long neck out in eternal flight towards the future.”

  PART III. RED STAR RISES HIGHER, UNTIL….

  FROM REFORM TO FANTASY

  The Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953 was an entirely different place than it had been under his iron rule. The new Party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, was a reformer who openly repudiated the “excesses” of the past and openly (if inconsistently) advocated liberalization. A decade after the end of a devastating war on Soviet soil, the economy was on a rebound, the standard of living for ordinary citizens was going up, the atmosphere of terror was lifted, and for the first and last time, a generation of thoroughly educated Soviet citizens was seized with genuine enthusiasm for the idea that the worthy promises of socialism – enlightenment, education, equality – could be realized. In particular, people placed their hope in science. In the 1950s, a repudiation of the irrational goals and mystical terror that defined Stalin’s “cult of personality” was accompanied by a newfound belief in the humane goals of mathematics, cybernetics, physics, and the other exact sciences. It seemed that these objective disciplines, rather than grotesque ideological excesses, would finally usher in the communist future: thanks to science, there would be efficient agriculture, abundant energy sources, a rationalized economy, and even – yes! already in 1957! – a man-made Soviet satellite orbiting outer space.

  At this propitious moment, the undisputed kings of Soviet science fiction – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – made their writing debut. The Strugatsky brothers went on to dominate Russian science fiction, and in some sense late Soviet fiction in general (most of their novels were what today would be called “cross-over best sellers”), for the next three decades. They became internationally famous and their major works were translated into over two dozen languages, including English. Therefore, in this volume we present only one of their earliest stories in an new translation,8 and an excerpt of one of their previously un-translated novels from the last phase of their career. The 1958 story “Spontaneous Reflex” exhibits the combination of intellectual curiosity and deftly-drawn, humorous characterization that made the Strugatskys’ early science fiction seem refreshingly intelligent and engaging, setting a new tone for a new generation of Soviet readers. The excerpt from Those Burdened by Evil (1988), on the other hand, reflects the authors’ difficult reckoning with their own assumptions about the power of rational enlightenment and humanistic ideals. Burdened is not canonical Strugatsky fare. There are no swashbuckling heroes ready to bring decency and democracy to cruelly oppressed peoples on other planets; there are no wisecracking biophysicists ready to take the “para-” out of parapsychology in a top-secret Soviet research institute; there is no golden wishing ball at the end of a Stalker’s long quest through the unfathomably weird Zone.9 Instead, our readers will encounter the Demiurge, a brooding deity who answers to every name in the world’s mythologies for “the Maker, he who fashions the material universe,” and his servant Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. After enduring many deaths “worse than that primitive crucifixion” on multiple worlds, the returning Christ, the would-be spiritual savior of mankind, is back on Earth again for a visit. What will he do with the realization that “nothing has changed…”? The excerpt only raises the question, which is gradually explored in the course of the Strugatskys’ darkly compelling final work.

  Michael Ancharov is entirely unknown in the West. “Soda-Sun” (1961) captures a persistent theme in the vast ocean of Soviet science fiction that was produced and read by millions of readers during the last Soviet decades. The narrator of “Soda-Sun” is concerned above all with the phenomenon of genius: where do the Mozarts and Einsteins and Leonardo da Vincis come from? If creative genius springs up occasionally among us normal mortals, why doesn’t it spring up more often? Can we change something within ourselves, or within the structure of our societies, in order to bring forth the untapped capacity of human genius? Vladimir Savchenko’s “Mixed Up” (1980) can also be interpreted as an extension of this theme. If the brain gets “mixed up” and begins to hear colors and shapes, and to see sound, how much will our comprehension of the universe around us expand and deepen? Even Sergei Drugal’s far-future eco-parable “The Exam” includes a prominent digression on the nature of inventive genius. Drugal (1927-2011) himself was the author of several patented inventions in the realm of railroad engineering. He held prominent positions in rail transportation research and development throughout his life; writing science fiction was a hobby he pursued mainly in the 1970s and 1980s. “The Exam” is one story in a much larger cycle that Drugal devoted to the “Institute for the Restoration of Nature.” In this cycle, a far more advanced race of humans resides mostly on other planets, having once upon a time carelessly destroyed the flora and fauna of our home planet. Gradually, the earth is being repopulated with secondary nature and biogenetically engineered animals, many of which are whimsical creations of our imagination. Nevertheless, in Drugal’s far-future world, people have learned their lesson, and only the most stringently qualified moral and creative personalities are granted the honor of teaching a new generation of children.

  When the great Russian modernist Andrei Platonov wrote “Lunar Bomb” in the late 1920s, he forced the language of peasants to confront the language of the future, so that in Platonov one finds the heart of a sad man “becoming overgrown with the fat of forgetting,” even as a Special Committee puts him in charge of a project that will rocket a manmade sphere (“bomb”) to the lunar periphery and back, part of the kind of technological advancement the sad man hopes will “open up new virgin sources of sustenance for life on earth, run[ning] hoses from these sources to the earth, [to] swallow up the meanness and the burdened, cramped feeling of human life.”

  Platonov’s plot may be science fictional, but his language forces us right to the brink of the absurd, or of what the post-war European existentialists would identify as the abyss of meaningless. Platonov’s ambiguous depiction of machine-driven progress did not fit the spirit of Stalinist times, nor did it characterize the generally upbeat attitude towards scientific enlightenment that animated mainstream Soviet science fiction until the late 1980s.

  The last stories in Red Star Tales were written in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s abrupt collapse. Everything had changed: when government censorship of literature was suspended, artistic innovation was no longer propelled by the need to “write around” possible censorship. Instead, artistic choices would now be measured against consumer demand, since for the first time, Russian readers would decide what sells. As it turns out, science fiction would not sell for long. When the official myth that promoted scientific rationalism as a kind of social panacea turned out to be exhausted, other long-suppressed expressions of “how to cope” rushed into the void: a resurgence of interest in religion, money-making self-help schemes, parapsychology and magic, alternative national and folk histories, and a fascination with power for power’s sake.

  Dalia Truskinovskaya’s “Doorinda” cha
rmed readers with its humorous depiction of a working mom’s exasperation with notorious Soviet (and post-Soviet) consumer product deficits. In 1990, though, the literary solution is not longer a technological marvel – it’s fantasy and magic. Sergei Lukyanenko’s 1992 story “My Papa’s an Antibiotic” anticipates the tough-guy, weapons-and-morality fantasy genre that has propelled subsequent Lukyanenko novels to blockbuster status in print and on film.10 In this story, as well as in all subsequent Lukyanenko productions, the central dilemma concerns the hero’s ability to remain strong without losing his essential decency and humanity.

  It’s a tough dilemma.

  Yvonne Howell

  Summer 2015

  * * *

  1. The Anthropocene is a proposed term for the geological epoch in the late Holocene (which followed the Pleistocene), during which the impact of human activities begins to significantly shape planetary ecosystems. The Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky first coined the term “noosphere” in the 1920s to describe a geological era in which human cognition begins to fundamentally transform the biosphere. In recent years, the term Anthropocene has been popularized by the Dutch atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen.

  2. Michael Holquist, “The Philosophical Bases of Soviet Space Exploration.” In The Key Reporter 51:2 (Winter 1985-6). Tsiolkovsky was the first person to figure out most of the things necessary to make, launch and sustain life in rockets. Working alone, mostly deaf since childhood, he wrote hundreds of reports on, among other things, designs for rockets with steering thrusters, multistage boosters, airlocks for exiting a spaceship, how much fuel is needed to overcome the Earth’s gravitational pull, etc.

  3. Joseph Slabey Roucek, The Challenge of Science Education (U.S.A.: Philosophical Library, 1971).

  4. Matthias Schwartz, “How Nauchnaia Fantastika Was Made: The Debates about the Genre of Science Fiction from NEP to High Stalinism” in Slavic Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (SUMMER 2013), pp. 224-246.

  5. An earlier English language translation of “Professor Dowell’s Head” by Antonina Bouis (NY: Macmillan, 1980) is based on Belyaev’s much-expanded and altered 1938 book-length version of the original story. We are grateful to Matthias Schwartz for providing an authenticated copy of the 1926 source text.

  6. An estimated two million combatants and civilians were killed in this single battle, which halted the German advance into the Soviet Union and turned the tide of World War II in favor of the Allied Forces.

  7. Andromeda Nebula changed the face of Soviet science fiction, and brought its author international fame. In an epic sweep that would characterize Western science fiction of this period as well, Yefremov imagined a completely transformed universe of the far-future. In this universe, inhabitants of the planet Earth have long since transcended the problems of the twentieth century – racism, gender inequity, material deprivation, the diseases of old age, and so forth are all distant historical issues that have been overcome – and the action driving future history has to do with the struggle to connect across vast cosmic distances with our fellow advanced civilizations throughout the galaxy.

  8. “Spontaneous Reflex” was translated into English in 1959 and again in 1960, in the first wave of post-sputnik American fascination with Soviet science fiction. Both previous translations feature unauthorized additions, omissions, mistakes, and, in one case, an introductory frame with the question “Do the actions of a wild-running Communist robot reflect the thinking of a Communist master?”

  9. Hard To Be a God (1964), Monday Begins on Saturday (1965), and Roadside Picnic (1972), respectively, to mention just three of the Strugatskys’ most popular novels.

  10. Lukyanenko’s breakout novel Night Watch (Nochnoi dozor, 1998) is the first of a series that chronicles the eternal battle of the “Others,” an ancient race of humans divided between the forces of Dark and Light. The novels have been translated into English by Andrew Bromfield.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This volume started as a small brainstorming session among a few colleagues. The editor wants to give a special thanks to Anindita Banerjee, Sibelan Forrester, and Sofya Khagi, who advocated for new collection of Russian and Soviet science fiction to “delight and inform” all kinds of readers and fans. Muireann Maguire and Kevin Reese also generously contributed their knowledge and their translations. Our favorite ex officio consultant, Matthias Schwartz (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung) responded with great insight to every query. The marvelous Annie Fisher made editing seem like fun. Our publisher Paul Richardson did what great publishers do best: he combined enthusiastic vision with the ability to keep things in line and on time.

  AUTHORS & TRANSLATORS

  AUTHORS

  MIKHAIL ANCHAROV (1923-1990) was a writer, poet, and one of the first Soviet bards to pioneer the country’s singer-songwriting genre. After completing his studies in oriental languages at the Military Academy of the Red Army, he was sent to the Far Eastern front during World War II to serve as a Chinese translator. In the latter half of his life Ancharov became a prolific screenwriter, writing the screenplay for the first Soviet television serial, Day After Day.

  ALEXANDER BELYAEV (1884-1942) was a leading figure in Soviet science fiction whose works from the 1920s and 1930s earned him the title of “Russia’s Jules Verne.” Belyaev wrote dozens of stories and 13 novels, including Professor Dowell’s Head and the well-known Amphibian Man, which were both later turned into films. He died of starvation in the occupied town of Pushkin, after refusing to evacuate while he was recovering from an operation.

  VALERY BRYUSOV (1873-1924) was a Russian poet, prose writer, and literary critic who was influential in shaping artistic culture. He was an ardent disciple of the French Decadence movement, translating Mallarmé, Rimbaud and others into Russian. He became a leading member of the fin de siècle Russian Symbolist movement, and did as much as anyone to endow poets and the art of poetry with mystical significance and cult-like status in pre-Revolutionary Russia. His prose fiction includes historical novels in a decadent mode, depicting the decline of past civilizations and future histories in a science fictional mode.

  KIR BULYCHEV (1934-2003) was the pen name of Igor Mozheiko, a prolific Soviet science fiction writer who wrote for adults and children alike. He spent his professional career as an expert on Burmese history at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, penning hundreds of novels and short stories on the side. The author of more than 20 scripts, Bulychev is the Russian science fiction author who has been most widely adapted to film.

  YURY DOLGUSHIN (1896-1989) was a Georgian writer and journalist. His longest and most significant work is The Generator of Miracles, excerpted in this volume, which he wrote before the war, and then reworked again in the 1950s.

  SERGEI DRUGAL (1927-2011) was born in Kazakhstan and trained as a railway engineer. It wasn’t until age 50 that he began to publish his first stories, combining his interests in ecology and pedagogy to create a series about a futuristic institute that perfects nature using the advancements of science. A recipient of the Aelita Prize for the best Russian work in the science fiction genre, Drugal has been translated into Polish, German and Hungarian. His story “Every Tree Has Its Bird” appears in the English-language anthology of Russian fantastical fiction Tower of Birds, published in 1989.

  NIKOLAI F. FYODOROV (1828-1903) was the most important progenitor of Russian “cosmism,” a version of non-secular transhumanism. An omnivorous reader and charismatic polymath, for most of his life he worked as a librarian in Moscow’s Rumyantsev Library. His philosophy of Orthodox Christianity incorporated modern science on the path to transcendence and preaches the necessity of controlling natural processes so that human beings can become literally immortal. His intellectual influence on a succession of important thinkers, including the writer Dostoyevsky and the rocketry engineer Tsiolkovsky, had a profound impact on Russian culture.

  NIKOLAI FYODOROV (“the other Fyodorov”), author of “One Evening in 2217” – the seminal anti-utopian text
that prefigures many others to come – has a mostly untraceable biography. In the preface to the volume containing “One Evening in 2217” (St. P: Gerold, 1906), the author is described as a Christian anti-socialist.

  ALEXANDER KAZANTSEV (1906-2002) was trained as a mechanical engineer. He rose to a fairly high rank as a military engineer during WWII. Descriptions of the nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki caught his attention in 1945 and reminded him of the unsolved mystery of the 1908 explosion in the Tunguska region of Siberia. His story devoted to this subject is published here. For the most part, Kazantsev’s writing in the post-war years is associated with the notorious Stalinist decree that science fiction should depict the “near goals” of Soviet industry.

  SERGEI LUKYANENKO was born in Kazakhstan in 1968 and educated as a psychiatrist. He began writing science fiction in the 1980s and has published over 25 books. Today, owing to the spectacular success of his Night Watch series, he is one of the most visible and popular SF-fantasy authors in Russia. The Watch series of novels have sold over two million copies worldwide and have been translated into 28 languages.

  ANDREI PLATONOV (1899-1951) was born in Voronezh. He was a passionate supporter of the 1917 Revolution and remained sympathetic to the dream that gave birth to it, yet few people have written more searingly of its catastrophic consequences. His position within the Soviet literary world was equally fraught with contradictions. Some of his works were published – and immediately subjected to fierce criticism; others were accepted for publication – yet never in fact published.