ISSN: 2158-7051 ==================== INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN STUDIES ==================== ISSUE NO. 7 ( 2018/2 ) |
RUSSIAN SCIENCE FICTION LITERATURE AND CINEMA, By Ayse Dietrich*, Published by: Academic
Studies Press, Oakland CA. Edited by Anindita Banerjee, Year of Publishing: 2018.
Subject Area: Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema. Book Type:
Literature and Cinema. Page number 380, $39,99
ISBN:
9781618117236, Paperback.
Science fiction became an important branch of Russian
literature only during the Soviet period. During the Soviet Union,
the party-state's total control over mass media and the low level of mass-
communication technologies, literature was the privileged institution of
communication in language. In the Soviet Union literature remained the most
powerful, and potentially the most dangerous, forum for expression. Soviet Union’s governing
ideology of science fiction was established in
1922, science fiction and many other types of literature were banned in the
state since it was seen as a Western, decadent genre.
The book focuses on
Soviet-era science fiction in literature and cinema and its impact on global culture, and is comprised of four
sections. In each section there is a collection of chronologically arranged
articles devoted to issues related to the emergence and development of Russian
science fiction.
The first section, “From Utopian Tradition to
Revolutionary Dreams”, examines what the auther terms
Russia’s “governing obsession” in the period between the 18th
century and the October Revolution. The four articles in this section - “The
Utopian Tradition of Russian Science Fiction” by Darko
Suvin, “Red Star: Another Look at Aleksandr
Bogdanov” by Mark B. Adams, the editor Anindita Banerjee’s previouly
published “Generating Power”, and “Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and
the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia” by Asif A. Siddiqi
– all focus on the subject of “how to power the future in both the material and
ideological senses”.
The second section, “Russia’s Roaring Twenties” is
dedicated to the decade immediately after the October Revolution. This was the
period in which some of Russia’s early science fiction classics, works that
were sometimes regarded as controversial, were produced. The four essays in
this section - “Soviet Science Fiction of the 1920’s: Explaning
a Literary Genre in its Political and Social Context” by Dominc
Esler, “The Plural Self: Zamiatin’s
We and the Logic of Synecdoche” by Eliot Borensteing,
“Science Fiction of the Domestic: Iakov Protazanov’s Aelita” by Andrew J.i Horton, and “Eugenics, Rejuvenation, and Bulgakov’s Journey into the Heart of Dogness”
by Yvonee Howell – provide a detailed analysis of
some of these important works.
“From Stalin to Sputnik and Beyond”, the third section
examines limited number of science fiction works written in the period between
the early 1930s and the late 1950s, a period in which the editor Banerjee
claims that “the utopian aspirations of earlier decades had gone into complete
hibernation”. The articles “Stalinism and the Genesis of Cosmonautics” by
Michael G. Smith, “Klushantsev: Russia’s Wizard of Fantastika” by Lynn Barker and Robert Skotak,
“Towards the Last Fairy Tale: The Fairy-Tale Paradigm in the Strugatskys’s Science Fiction, 1963-72” by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and “Tarkovsky, Solaris, and Stalker” by Stephen Dalton make up
this section.
The fourth, and final,
section “Futures at the End of Utopia” is comprised of three articles that
examine the themes of disillusionment with the present and nostalgia for those
futures previous envisaged. This section’s articles are “Viktor Pelevin and Literary
Postmodernism in Soviet Russia” by Elana Gomel, “The Forces of Kinship: Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch Cinematic Triology”
by Vlad Strukov, and “The Antiutopia Factory: The Dystopian Discourse in Russian
Literature in the Mid-2000s” by Aleksandr Chantsev.
This collection of
scholarly articles related to the chronological history and development of
Russian science fiction in film and literature is a valuable contribution to a
little-studied genre. However, despite the quality of the articles in this book,
the fact that Russian science fiction has previously attracted limited
scholarly attention means that the reader will need a fair degee
of background knowledge to be able to fully appreciate this fine work.
*Ayse Dietrich - Professor, Part-time, at Middle East Technical University, Department of History. Editor and the founder of the International Journal of Russian Studies e-mail: editor@ijors.net, dayse@metu.edu.tr, dietrichayse@yahoo.com
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