Zhizn’ i tekhnika budushego: Social Utopian Imagination of the 1920s and the Soviet Science (original) (raw)

Introduction: From Nauchnaia Fantastika to Post-Soviet Dystopia

Slavic Review, 2013

Science fiction is the genre that links our lives to the future: the faster the pace of scientific and technological advancement, the greater our awareness of what István Csicsery-Ronay called “the science-fictionality” of everyday life. The more we feel the effect of scientific and technological change on global flows of economic, social, and cultural exchange (not to mention the blurring of biological and environmental boundaries), the more we are drawn to a literature that Boris Strugatskii identified as “a description of the future, whose tentacles already reach into the present.“ It is hardly surprising that scholarly interest in Russian and Soviet science fiction has been growing in recent years, with an expanding roster of roundtables and panels exploring the topic at professional conferences. Why talk about Soviet science fiction? As the articles in this special thematic cluster suggest, science fiction functions more as a field of intersecting discourses than as a clearly d...

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

Image of the Future in Russian Communism Narratives of the Collective Representations in the 1920s in the USSR

2020

Representations of the future are part of any worldview. In opposition to the Christian notion of the Apocalypse, the Enlightenment paradigm suggested the idea of a bright future. In the beginning of the 2Oth century, many people all over the world were under the impression that freedom and justice existed in the world and that imperfection could be overcome through social and technical progress. Faith in Progress was one of the most effective consolations for humans affected by fears of modernization. This global upsurge of utopian hopes and faith in progress was embodied in the anticipation of a socialist miracle. In socialist myth the value of the future was strongly emphasized. My paper studies the parameters of the Communist concept of the bright future in opposition to the liberal ideologies-collective (rather than individual) salvation, the narrative of sacrifices, and short-term orientation. This paper will use new archival documents to study popular visions of the socialist future, including abundance, brotherhood, love and equity.

The Motif of Nature in Early Russian Soviet Utopian and Dystopian Novels

Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne

In this paper the most important works of Russian-Soviet literary utopia and dystopia have been analysed to investigate the role of nature. In literary utopias, people and their needs are the measure of all things, and the image of a utopian future is the vision of a nature so subdued that the need to eat and sleep have been subdued as well. Yet authors, such as Chayanov, emphasise the importance of a coexistence with nature. Dystopian authors ( Platonov and Zamyatin ) see the meaning of nature symbolically. They see nature not only as an unconquerable force, but also as a force entirely impermissible to defeat and that should not be defeated: for Platonov and Zamyatin nature is the eternal source of all that is to come.

Science Fiction in Russian Literature and Cinema

Avrasya Uluslararası Araştırmalar Dergisi, 2021

In the 20 th century, science and technology, which penetrated into every individual's life after the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, gained a complete dominance over foremostly daily life of the humankind and all other fields by demonstrating a progress further than the ground covered throughout the human history. This process at the same time has caused various kinds of appearances within the world of thought of the humanity. By considering the positive and negative effects of science and technology on the human life, utopic and dystopic narratives were produced. The last 200-250 years of the human history have gone by witnessing that these ideas created debates, concepts, theories, facts, and practices not only within the fields of art but also in the social and political arenas. Particularly, it is an undeniable truth regarding the social and political influences of the literary and visual instances of science fiction, which is one of these concepts. In general, an investigation concerning the 20 th century adventure of science fiction at the same time offers an opportunity for a depth discussion in regards to the social and political atmosphere of the 20 th century as well. For this reason, by this article, while the science fiction works in Russian literature and cinema and the conditions cause to exhibit them will be handled, on the other hand, it will be tried to disclose the hints of the social and political circumstances of the era.

The Actuality 20s: Form, Production and Transknowledge in Soviet Modernity

Conference Abstract and Program, 2024

The practices of the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK), which operated from 1923 to 1926 under the directorship of Kazimir Malevich, represent an original and distinctive merger of art and science. How did artists working in GINKhUK attempt to establish a new field of research, namely artistic culture, what was the specificity of scientific research, produced by a group of avant-garde artists, and what idealistic values and utopian ideas underlined their activities-these are the main questions that are to be discussed at the presentation.