Electricity: Science Fiction and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Russia (original) (raw)
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,
Science Fiction in Ukraine, 1920-2020 (Part One)
Science Fiction in Ukraine, 1920-2020 (Part One), 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.
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.
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.
Science Fiction in Ukraine, 1920-2020 (Part Two)
Science Fiction in Ukraine, 1920-2020 Part Two, 2024
What if the golden dreams of a techno-utopian future were born not in Silicon Valley, but in the crumbling empire of the Soviet Union? This study traces the surprising, untold evolution of Ukrainian science fiction from the 1960s to the 2020s, revealing how a complex dance of positivism, ideology, resistance, and metamodern hope reshaped the imagination of a nation. Moving through cyberpunk dystopias, existential dilemmas, and the haunting specter of Russification, Ukrainian writers crafted visions of the future that still ripple across today’s fractured cultural landscape. At the intersection of political oppression and artistic rebellion, a new and astonishing voice emerges — but its full significance has only just begun to be understood.
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.
Power failure: the electrification of Central-Eastern Europe, 1918–39
European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire
The authors argue that the new states of Central-Eastern Europe after 1918 faced a tension between investing in emerging network technologies (such as electricity) and safeguarding their newly gained national sovereignty against foreign influence. This can be seen as a dilemma between energy equity and energy security, which was present elsewhere as well, but particularly important in the region for three reasons. First, the new borders increased the need for new infrastructure to connect locations with energy resources (especially coal and water) to the centres of demand. Second, the region faced a shortage of capital and relied more than other parts of Europe on foreign direct investment. Third, the region was dependent on foreign technology and affected by cartel agreements between the leading foreign companies. Based on new data on the production and consumption of electrical energy across the region, the authors argue that this dilemma impeded the electrification of the region.
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.
Russian And East European Science Fiction
2011
vanisl1C'd. My eyes, a thousand eyes, gazed upwards, at the Machine. There-the third, iron gesture of that inhuman hand. Shaking in an unsrrn wind, the criminal makes his way, slowly, up thr steps, one step, another, and with that step, the last of his life, throws his face back to the sky, to the blue. Standing on his final resting place. Severe and immovable as destiny, the Benrfactor passed around the Machine in a circle, laid an enormous hand on the lever. There was not a whisper of breath: every eye was on the hand. Thr hand gripped the fiery vortex, the instrument, with its force of hundreds of thousands of volts. What a magnificent charge! An immeasurable second. The hand, crackling with current, lowers. An unbearably sharp, cutting beam flashes-like a shiver, a just audible crackle in the tubes of the machine-. The prostrate body is bathed in a luminous hazr; dissolving, dissolving, with a terrible spred brfore our eyrs. And then nothing: only a puddle of pure, clean watrr, whrre a moment beforr a scarlrt heart beat violendv ... This process was simple, and familiar to rach of us: yes, dissociated matter, yes, the splitting of the body's atoms. But nonetheless, every time it was like a miracle, a sign of the inhuman power of the Brnefactor. Before Him flared the faces of a dozen female ciphers, womrn with lips half-open from agitation, their flowrrs fluttering in the wind. 1 According to the old custom, ten women adorned the uniform of the Benefactor, which was still damp from the spray, with flowers. With the magnificrnt steps of a high priest He slowly descended, slowly moved through the Tribunal, and after him the tender white branches of womrn's arms, and a storm of cries from the unified millions. And then crirs in honor of the Guardians, invisibly present, somewhere in our rows. Who knows: maybe the Guardians wrre foreseen in the fantasies of the ancient people, in creating their tender-terrible "guardian angels" that were placed beside each individual at birth. Yes, something from the ancient religions, something purifying, like a thunderstorm, was present in the whole crkbration. You, whose task it is to read this-do you know moments like these? I feel sorry for you, if you do not. ..
This paper discusses the synaesthetically informed metaphors of light, fire, and the Sun in Russian Symbolism and shows their scientific, technological, and cultural resonance in the novel experience of electric light in Russia. The essay studies the harmonic synaesthetics of Aleksandr Skriabin's symphony "Prometheus, A Poem of Fire"-which also includes an enigmatic musically notated part for an electric organ of lights, along with Symbolist texts concerning light and electricity and the synaesthetic poetry of fire by Skriabin's close associate Konstantin Bal'mont. The article investigates how Skriabin's Mystic sonorities and his language of colored lights square with the peculiar Symbolist engagement with scientific notions of electricity and light at the Russian fin de siècle. Thus, it demonstrates the Russian Symbolists' fascination not only with aesthetic synthesis and mystic transfiguration, but also with the sciences and technology: both with divine light and with electric light.
Not a thing, stolen It begins with a theft. 'Early in the process of Soviet electrification, ' writes Arkady Markin, a Soviet himself and chronicler of this era, 'two men were arraigned for stealing energy. Though they freely admitted to tapping somebody else's electric mains, they were acquitted on the following pretext: "The nature of electricity is unknown, " said the judge. "When talking of electric current people take the word 'current' conventionally. A theft, however, implies that some definite object must be stolen, such as storage batteries, or wires. " In response, the defense attorney crowed, having just won his case: "The courts cannot establish the fact of theft! Indeed, " he continued, "can a smell, or air, or sound be stolen?"' (Markin 1961, 7). The same story, again differently In 2016, a power systems engineer in California repeated to me an explanation he had given his wife for the difficulty in assuring 100 per cent renewable power on any large-scale electricity system (a difficulty not acknowledged by those electricity retailers, who promise to sell such purity to customers for a small additional surcharge). 'Stand in the middle of a field, ' said this engineer to his wife. ' At the other end of the field are a number of men, each equipped with an identical bass drum. This one we'll call coal; this one-nuclear; this one-natural
The language of Electricity: Jan Hicks in conversation with Bill Morrison
Electricity, art science, film, Electricity Council, Electrical Development Association, public information film, exhibition, moving image, archive, art practice, film making, Bill Morrison, Bill Frisell, Decasia, Dawson City: Frozen Time, The Miners Hymns, celluloid, energy, electron, power cut, atom, particle, digitisation, interpretation
2010 International Conference on the Origins and Evolution of the Cavity Magnetron, 2010
The emergence and formation of microwave, electronics and radar community in Ukraine had been closely tied to the invention and development of original high-power decimeter-wave split-anode magnetrons in Kharkov in the 1920-30's. Navigating their lives and research between the deadly Orwellian torrents of the early USSR, the scientists had to close their eyes on the politically motivated famine, which was devastating Ukrainian countryside. Both microwave research and development and food confiscations were done in the name of labor people.