"The Computer Does Not Believe in Tears" Soviet Programming, Professionalization, and the Gendering of Authority (original) (raw)
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The Strugatsky Brothers and Russian Science Fiction
Russian Studies in Literature, 2011
This issue of Russian Studies in Literature explores Soviet and Russian science fiction, focusing on the most famous practitioners of the genre, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
Tomorrow begins yesterday: data imaginaries in Russian and Soviet science fiction
This necessarily speculative as well as historically grounded essay examines two key works in the Russian-language literature, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star (1908. Krasnaia Zvesda: utopia. St. Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo khudozhnikov pechati) and Arkady and Boris Strugatskys' Monday Begins on Saturday (1965. Ponedel'nik nachinaetsia v subbotu: Skazka dlia nauchnykh rabotnikov mladshego vozrasta. Moskva: Detskaia literatura) for insights into their respective pre-revolutionary and Soviet imaginaries of the relationship between data, statistics, and society. It is argued that each work reveals their own peculiar science fantasy and speculative future rooted in the present, with special comment on the historiographical role of data in shaping the twentieth-century visions of labor and work.
Gods Like Men: Soviet Science Fiction and the Utopian Self
2016
This essay deals with the representation of the New Man in Soviet sf. The New Man is the ideal subject whose creation was one of the central goals of Soviet civilization. Soviet sf reflects the ideological paradox underlying his aborted birth: the New Man was supposed to come into being as the culmination of the historical process and, at the same time, to negate the contingency and violence of history. The article focuses on the articulation of this paradox in the canonical works of Ivan Efremov and the Strugatsky brothers and analyzes such aspects of the New Man as anthropomorphism, gender, violence, and relation to the Other. This content downloaded from 131.111.184.22 on Wed, 22 Oct 2014 05:25:39 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Of Planets and Trenches: Imperial Science Fiction in Contemporary Russia
The Russian Review , 2016
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
Irrationality in the works of the Strugatski Brothers
Paper presented at conference “Russian Irrationalism in the Global Context: Sources and Influences”, the University of Bristol, Bristol, UK, 2010
Boris (Natanovich) Strugatsky (an astronomer and computer scientist born in 1931) and his younger brother Arkady (Natanovich) Strugatsky (a linguist born in 1925, died in 1991) are usually regarded as not only the best-known, but also as the best Russian science fiction (SF) writers (Kajtoch 1993, Keller 1997(2), Lem 1983, Suvin 1993). Although they both have solid scientific background, their literary output is full of irrationalism, as it consists of a mixture of SF, fantasy and traditional Russian folk fables. Literary quality of their work is difficult to judge for a foreigner, as their writings (and especially their dialogues) are hard to translate even to the languages as close to Russian as, for example, Polish. For political reasons, their satire was characterised by allegorical indirection, which is another difficulty for a reader from outside of the Russia and generally the former USSR. Such escape into the allegorical indirection and irrationalism was a combined result of the guidelines set up by their editors, critics and, above all, the censors (Kajtoch 1993 pp. 9-10). Although the Strugatskys could be considered ‘mildly liberal Marxists-Leninists’ when they started writing in year 1956 , in the 1970s they clearly became ‘revisionists’ and later hardly could be classified as even remotely Marxist, as their prose contained less and less science and rationality, but more and more fiction and irrationality. This could be explained by general disenchantment of the Russians, who were told, that the ideology of their (allegedly socialist) state was thoroughly scientific. Thus, after collapse of the Soviet Union, the popular Russian heroes are no longer physicists and cosmonauts, but psychics as well as assorted movie and TV stars.
The Russian Review, 2020
Since the 1920s the relationship between literature and science, more specifically between the modes of popularizing scientific ideas to a broader public, was a broadly discussed topic among writers, critics and scholars. In these debates the relation between educational goals, entertaining devices and visionary thought experiments was a contested issue. Moreover, their interrelationship led to the first efforts to define the Soviet version of science fiction, namely as “scientific‐fantastic literature” (nauchno‐fantasticheskaia literatura). As an alternative to this controversial term Maxim Gorkyi proposed and popularized the expression “scientific‐fictional literature” (nachno‐khudozhestvennaia literatura) as early as the 1930s. His formulation was meant to constitute a new kind of genre within the frames of Socialist Realism, as well as generate a new, uniquely Soviet understanding of scientific thinking itself, opposed to the bourgeois notion of supposedly objective scientific k...