Russian Science Fiction

В статье исследуется, как в современных антиутопиях отражаются трансформирующиеся взаимоотношения между личностью, обществом и государством. На примере повести Аркадия и Бориса Стругацких «За миллиард лет до конца света» и дилогии Сергея Лукьяненко «Черновик» и «Чистовик» показано, что фантастическое в современной утопической литературе практически перестало быть средством социальной критики. Скорее наоборот, фантастика взяла на себя «терапевтическую» функцию: оказывает молодому поколению помощь в поисках собственного пути и дает новые ориентиры в усложнившемся мире.

Neither Arkadii nor Boris Strugatskii had originally intended to make a living in writing. Arkadii dreamed of becoming an astronomer, but his wartime experience and training led him to work as a translator and editor of Japanese literature. Boris intended to become a physicist, trained as an astronomer, and ended up as a computer specialist at Pulkovo Observatory. This common thread of astronomy turns out to be fantastically important for understanding their works, as their most important ones are experiments in cosmology, and their shared expertise is instrumental in their construction of literary hellscapes. This book explores how the Strugatskiis’ cosmological explorations are among the most fundamental elements of their art. It examines also how these explorations connect to their predecessors in the Russian literary tradition—particularly to the poetry of Pushkin.

Learn more: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/therealtwentiethcentury/celestial-hellscapes-cosmology-as-the-key-to-the-strugatskiis-science-fictions

https://www.academicstudiespress.com/browse-catalog/russian-science-fiction-literature-and-cinema

Since the dawn of the Space Age, when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite and sent the first human into the cosmos, science fiction literature and cinema from Russia has fascinated fans, critics, and scholars from around the world. Informed perspectives on the surprisingly long and incredibly rich tradition of Russian science fiction, however, are hard to come by in accessible form. This critical reader aims to provide precisely such a resource for students, scholars, and the merely curious who wish to delve deeper into landmarks of the genre, discover innumerable lesser-known gems in the process, and understand why science fiction came to play such a crucial role in Russian society, politics, technology, and culture for more than a century.

Contributors include: Mark B. Adams, Anindita Banerjee, Lynn Barker, Eliot Borenstein, Aleksandr Chantsev, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Stephen Dalton, Dominic Esler, Elana Gomel, Andrew Horton, Yvonne Howell, Asif A. Siddiqi, Robert Skotak, Michael G. Smith, Vlad Strukov, Darko Suvin

Anindita Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and a Faculty Fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. She is the author of We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), winner of the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize.

Thi s study inquires into the ways in which contemporary science fiction (SF) interacts with the processes of identity-making in post-Soviet Russia. The importance of SF for contemporary Russian collective imagination could not be overestimated. Some commentators claim that this genre is replacing both traditional and avant-garde prose in Russian culture because many acclaimed headliners of the mainstream literature, such as Victor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitrii Bykov, and Zakhar Prilepin, have made important contributions to the genre of SF, thereby destabilizing the border between literature for mass reading and the literary mainstream. 1 The purpose of this article is, however, not to discuss imperial fantasies in the works of those headliners, but rather to tease out some meaningful shifts in contemporary Russian political culture by looking closely at the SF genre proper. SF enjoys a noble genealogy and a relatively high reputation bequeathed from the Soviet time, when authors and readers of SF were recruited mostly from the ranks of qualified engineers, scientists, and university teachers. 2 These same groups, however, were the ones most seriously affected by the socioeconomic transformations of the late 1980s and 1990s, suffering a dramatic lowering of their social status. Furthermore, the advent of the market economy in the book-publishing industry ushered in an epoch of uncertainty and low wages for the majority of SF writers. 3 In the 1990s the readership was totally dominated by non-Russian, mostly American, SF, which enjoyed the advantages of both quality and novelty for the former-Soviet reader. With the advent of the twenty-first century, however, Russian SF has slowly begun to emerge from under the rubble of foreign translations. 4 The digitalization of the Russian fandom, and the availability of virtually all SF books in pirated editions, might consolidate the popularity of some authors and enlarge readership, but they definitely are not increasing print-runs of paper books and royalties. 5 All these hardships notwithstanding, in terms of numbers, SF enjoys unprecedented and rising popularity in today's Russia, with anywhere from four hundred to nine hundred titles released annually. 6 At the same time, analysts have observed a lowering of the intellectual standard in terms of both SF authorship and readership, compared to Soviet times. Research shows that a typical SF reader is a young or middle-aged man of relatively low social status. 7 As one reviewer noted, SF was the literature for critically thinking

Abenteuerliteratur und Science Fiction gehörten in der Sowjetunion zu den beliebtesten Literaturgattungen. Hier konnten die Wunsch- und Schreckensbilder der eigenen Gegenwart in ferne und exotische Welten projiziert werden. Zugleich war diese "Boulevardliteratur" umstritten. Abenteuerliteratur galt als ideologisch problematische Koloniallektüre, während Science Fiction den offiziellen Wissenschafts- und Zukunftsoptimismus herausforderte. Erstmals wird dieser vernachlässigte Bereich populärer Literatur hier betrachtet. Der Autor rekonstruiert die publizistischen und internen Debatten um deren Genese und arbeitet in exemplarischen Lektüren die sich wandelnde Poetik heraus. Er gibt damit auch grundlegende Einblicke in die Funktionsmechanismen und Aporien sowjetischer Kulturpolitik.

В статье делается попытка описания и обсуждения основных моментов социальной метафизики братьев Стругацких. К этим моментам относятся зависи-мость от советского социокультурного фона, принцип реализма, проектирование экспериментальных миров, теория воспитания, обсуждение возможностей разума, предположение о двух ветвях развития человечества.
The paper endeavors to describe and discuss the main points of the Strugatsky brothers’ social metaphysics, the said points including the impact of Soviet socio-cultural background, the principle of realism, designing of experimental worlds, the theory of education, the debate concerning limits of reason, the idea of two branches of human development.

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My original longish 1972 essay, to which the reader is respectfully referred, used a bibliography of 96 units of criticism for a survey of the critical reception accorded to the Strugatsky Brothers. It wished to plot the USSR ideological debate and intervene into the conflict between the critical “cold” and “warm” stream with sympathy to the latter. It is remembered here for historical memory of how the rulers are prone to not only blame but also materially harass and bully critical intellectuals, alas very actual today. It contains a simplified overview of the main points from my original essay, while my evaluation the Strugatsky opus can be seen in my book PARABLES OF FREEDOM AND NARRATIVE LOGICS: POSITIONS AND PRESUPPOSITIONS IN SCIENCE FICTION AND UTOPIANISM, edited by Eric D. Smith, forthcoming in the Ralahine Series at P. Lang, Oxford. Whatever the Pope or Caesar may say, Lucretius was among the very best poets of the Latin language.

Is international cooperation essential for the humankind movement into the Universe? What may be the goals of space exploration as seen by contemporary science fiction writers today, in the beginning of the 21st century? These questions will be approached from the perspective of comparative culture research on the basis of Russian and American new trends in literature and film.
Lecture can be watched at this permanent link:
https://commons.und.edu/ss-colloquium/46

This article examines how Soviet science fiction between 1920 and 1965 developed the metaphors provided by eugenics and evolutionary biology, and in particular, by the contending discourses of Darwinism and Lamarckism, to explore the
concept of the Soviet New Man. The article surveys popular science fiction by Aleksandr Beliaev, Abram Palei, Anatolii Dneprov and others (including Mikhail Bulgakov's 'Rokovye iaitsia'), analysing how these writers responded to trans-humanist ideas in biology and politics by proposing their own utopian prototypes for human physiology, such as
Beliaev's 'Chelovek-amfibiia'. It also traces how these literary
prototypes were progressively modified in response to Russia's
increasingly reactionary ideological climate.