Electricity: Science Fiction and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Russia (original) (raw)
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The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926
The American Historical Review, 1993
Research and Exchange Board fellowship gave me an invaluable year in Soviet archives and libraries. Further support came from an Insti tute of Electrical and Eledronic Engineers Postgraduate Fellowship,
Heavenly spirit or material being? Science on electricity at the turn of the 19th century in Poland
"History of Science", 2023
In my paper I follow the emergence of the science of electricity in Poland. I believe that the science of electricity established in 1777 served as a new social program. Through the introduced translations, this science was intended to create a new social imaginary and social relations. I describe two interrelated processes: the social construction of the science of electricity, and negotiations between secular and religious definitions of electricity. In the first part of the article I show that both processes were related to each other and contributed to hybrid interpretations of electricity-as a "material being" and "spirit of the world." In the second part of the paper I pay attention to the efforts made by Jan and Jędrzej Śniadecki to secularize the science of electricity in Vilnius. I follow the metaphor of 'laboratory' used in their works in order to describe the natural phenomena. I claim that Jędrzej Śniadecki established not only a new theory of electricity (a "radiant being"), but in fact a new understanding of social space. I point out that he did that by transferring scientific practices into the cultural space.
Science Fiction in Ukraine: 1920–2020
Science Fiction in Ukraine: 1920–2020, 2023
The variability in the genre of Ukrainian science fiction (SF) has always been determined by the requirements of the time and the political situation. That is why the fiction of the 1920s promoted the ideology of naive techno-communism, but during the next forty years it became obvious that the Soviet project had reached a dead end, and its positivist component had not brought the desired results. Ukrainian SF writers then turned to mysticism and denial of a rational view of the world.
The Revolutionary Past as Environment: Rain, Dust and Faces in "The Homeland of Electricity"
ReFocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko, edited by Lida Oukaderova, 2024
Larisa Shepitko's short film The Homeland of Electricity (Rodina elektrichestva) was to be one among five contributions to Beginning of an Unknown Century (Nachalo nevedomogo veka), an omnibus film conceived to commemorate the 50 th anniversary of the October Revolution. 1 One of the studio's senior creative associates, Vladimir Ognev, proposed the idea of adapting for the project writers who had witnessed and written about the maelstrom of the revolutionary era. 2 The list comprised Isaak Babel, Yuri Olesha, Konstantin Paustovsky, Aleksandr Malyshkin, and Andrei Platonov, authors whose work had suffered varying degrees of censorship during the Stalin years. 3 The short films were to be directed by recent graduates of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK)-Andrei Smirnov, Genrikh Gabai, Elem Klimov, Dzhemma Firsova, and Shepitko. In the end, the State Film Commission under the Council of Ministers greenlighted the four out of five proposals for production in late April. 4 For her film, Shepitko chose Platonov's short story "The Homeland of Electricity," which focuses on an episode set during the devastating famines of 1921-22 in the Lower Volga basin. In the early 1920s, Platonov had worked as a land reclamation engineer at the Voronezh branch of Regional Agency for Land Management, overseeing projects for drought prevention, and in that capacity had travelled the area extensively. 5 Written in 1926 and possibly reworked as late as 1939, "The Homeland of Electricity" is a fictionalized account based on the author's firsthand experiences in the famine-stricken countryside. 6 Like the short story, the film seems to have the requisites of a postrevolutionary narrative of modernization: the plot concerns an agent of the new regime delivering progress to the backwoods. An engineering student, who in the film's script
Polar Fantasies: Valery Bryusov and the Russian Symbolist Electric Aesthetic
Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union. Eds. Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokur. London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2023
Imagine the Earth connected from pole to pole by an electric current, running down billions of cables coiled around the globe. 1 This is how Romantic realist writer Aleksandr Kuprin (1870-1938) envisioned the bright future of the Anarchist Union of Free People in his utopian story "Toast" (1905). 2 This article traces the polar flow of the electric current in Russian Silver-Age literature to define its distinct electric aesthetic of diametrical oscillations: from the North Pole to the South Pole and from the negative pole to the positive pole of the electric circuit.
Jahrbuch für Europäische Wissenschaftskultur ___ Yearbook for European Culture of Science 8 (2013-2015, 2016
The paper will compare and reflect on three different plots, all having to do with the history of electricity in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first plot is a classical history of science plot. It is the story of the world-wide-known discoveries concerning electricity that took place in Bologna from the times of Luigi Galvani (`animal electricity', 1791) to those of Guglielmo Marconi (`wireless telegraphy', 1895). This plot is an example of how the history of science could be bent to satisfy the needs of the professors and the public of an ancient university town like Bologna. The second plot is a history of technology plot, and also an economic his-tory and social history plot. It is the story of the slow take-off of electricity as an industry, paralleling the rise of the middle and working classes in a medium size, provincial town like Bologna. The third plot is the story of the collections of instruments illustrating the history of electricity that were assembled, dispersed, and reassembled in town to celebrate science and technology in the public sphere. Systematic comparisons among these three plots will be used to reflect on the different materialities in which science is involved, and on the pleasures and dangers of what has been called the `museification' of science.
RUSSIAN SCIENCE FICTION 1956 – 1974: A BIBLIOGRAPHY (1975 and 2024, 17,200 words)
English-first by hiring me to teach (among other things) SF, second by creating an exciting Department where such activity was taken seriously by him and a number of other colleagues, and last but not least by making it possible to obtain some material assistance in the Department for it. The support has been continued under the present chairman, Dr. Peter Ohlin, My sincerest thanks go to all the above persons and institutions, as well as those mentioned in the introductions to the various parts of the book. * The standard Russian abbreviations for book publishing houses, and of M for Moscow and L for Leningrad are used throughout the book; also SF for science fiction(al), NY for New York City, In Part 2 FLPH for Foreign Languages Publishing House, and in Part 3 a few standard abbreviations for scholarly journals and serials. Faced with the frequent Russian publishing habit of using only the first initial of the author's first name, I have decided to standardize that and used it in all cases, allowing a few exceptions for authors of non-Russian critical articles signed with more than one first name, where I retained two initials, Frequently used abbreviations are: Detskaia lit.for Detskala literatura Mol. gvardiiafor Molodaia gvardiia kn. izd.for knizhnoe izdatel'stvo [book publishers] Sov. pisatel'for Sovetskii pisatel' Sov. Rossiiafor Sovetskaia Rossiia s.a.for sine anno [no year indicated]
Revolutionary electricity in 1790: shock, consensus, and the birth of a political metaphor
British Journal for the History of Science, 2021
The 1790 Fête de la fédération in the early French Revolution evoked the memory of the taking of the Bastille while tamping down on the simmering social forces that had erupted on 14 July 1789. How to do both? As an official architect put it, through the festival, 'the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification, against which even the most perverse men cannot defend themselves'. This paper argues that a new language of revolutionary electricity came into being with the French Revolution. It argues that revolutionaries drew upon concepts of medical electricity developed in the 1780s to analogize the literal electricity of the ether to the revolutionary electricity of collective political sentiment. Though historians have associated electricity with radical politics, this paper argues that in the hands of bureaucrats and festival planners, electricity entered revolutionary discourse as a powerful mechanism for exercising authority and control over an unruly revolutionary public.