WE MODERN PEOPLE This page intentionally left blank ANINDITA BANERJEE WE MODERN PEOPLE SCIENCE FICTION AND THE MAKING OF RUSSIAN MODERNITY WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Middletown, Connecticut Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2012 Anindita Banerjee All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Richard Hendel Typeset in Arnhem and Clio by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. Wesleyan University Press is grateful to the Hull Memorial Fund of Cornell University for assistance with this publication. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright, and obtain their written permission. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Please contact the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Banerjee, Anindita. We modern people: science fiction and the making of Russian modernity / Anindita Banerjee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8195-7333-9 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8195-7334-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8195-7335-3 (ebook) 1. Science fiction, Russian—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society— Russia (Federation) 3. Russian fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Russia (Federation)—Civilization—20th century. I. Title. PG3098.S5B36 2012 891.73′08762—dc232012032037 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments / vii INTRODUCTION Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity / 1 1 CONQUERING SPACE / 17 2 TRANSCENDING TIME / 59 3 GENERATING POWER / 90 4 CREATING THE HUMAN / 119 AFTERWOR(L)D Russian Science Fiction and the Unmaking of Modernity / 156 Chronology / 163 Notes / 165 Further Reading / 193 Index / 195 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This book is about the alternative worlds of science fiction, but writing it would not have been possible without the help of many real people. First and foremost, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the people who were involved in the very first stages of its inception and the very last stages of its completion. Although this book has morphed into something quite different than the dissertation I wrote at the Univer- sity of California, Los Angeles, it still bears the imprint of my advisers, Ronald Vroon and N. Katherine Hayles, who always encouraged me to push beyond canonical texts and established ways of thinking. Michael Heim, Gail Lenhoff, and Alexander Ospovat were always ready to help as I worked my way through eccentric writers and rare materials. At the other end of the process, the final version of that initial idea would not have become a book without the active mentorship of Istvan Csicsery- Ronay and Arthur Evans. Under their editorship, a shorter version of the third chapter was published in Science Fiction Studies under the title “Electricity: Science Fiction and Modernity in Early- Twentieth- Century Russia” (Science Fiction Studies 30, 89 [2003]: 49–71). I am pro- foundly indebted to Parker Smathers, my editor at Wesleyan University Press, whose very human presence carried the project through. Along the way, there were almost too many people to thank here. Kenneth Calhoon, Katya Hokanson, Jenifer Presto, and Michael Stern, former colleagues at the University of Oregon, helped me brainstorm critical areas of the emerging manuscript. Jenifer Presto, in particu- lar, has been instrumental in shaping both the title and the contents of the book, having suffered through many drafts and many versions of its different parts. At Cornell University, I have benefitted from the generosity of many colleagues in diverse disciplines. They include Brett de Bary, Debra Castillo, Jonathan Culler, Matthew Evangelista, Sabine Haenni, Timothy Murray, Rachel Prentice, Shirley Samuels, and Gavriel Shapiro. I have also been lucky to connect with scholars out- side the institutions where I have studied and worked. Marina Balina, Sibelan Forrester, Mark Lipovetsky, Steven Marks, and Larissa Rudova have contributed greatly to the development of my ideas. vii The Hull Memorial Fund at Cornell University generously sup ported the publication of this book. I am also grateful to my many students who contributed valuable insights into the nature of science fiction and the particularities of people who read it. The largest debt of all is to Maxim Perelstein, my resident physicist, and Michael Perelstein, the four- year- old wonder who has opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS WE MODERN PEOPLE This page intentionally left blank Introduction Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity Science and technology are defining modern reality by transforming not just everyday life, but the very ways in which we think and imagine. A new kind of writing called nauchnaia fantastika, scientific fantasy, is playing a not inconsequential role in this process. Is it not in the imagination where bold theories and amazing machines are first born? Along with news of the latest scientific and technological developments, therefore, our magazine will continue to present a rich panorama of meditations on their potentials that will seem anything but fantastic to those of our times. Opening the fifth- anniversary issue ofNature and People (Pri- roda i liudi) in 1894, this editorial note redefined the narrative parame- ters of a pioneering popular science journal in Russia.1 Three decades later in 1923, Yevgeny Zamyatin—author of the landmark dystopian novel We (My), which George Orwell acknowledged as an inspiration for 19842—designated nauchnaia fantastika, or scientific fantasy, “the kind of literature that best commands the attention and wins the be- lief of us modern people.” Consequently, he proposed it as the foun- dational template for a “New Russian Prose” of the twentieth century: Modern life has lost its plane reality. It is projected not along the old fixed points, but dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of the airplane. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, the familiar—unfamiliar. And these new beacons clearly stand before the new literature: from “daily life” to “realities of being,” from physics to philosophy, from analysis to synthesis.3 The striking continuity between the two passages reveals that a dis- tinctive category of writing called nauchnaia fantastika, which I have translated as “scientific fantasy,” began to be recognized, produced, 1 and consumed in Russia long before the American editor Hugo Gerns- back introduced the term science fiction to the English- speaking world in 1926. Its defining features, furthermore, corresponded closely with what Darko Suvin would theorize as estrangement and cognition, the “necessary and sufficient conditions” of science fiction. While the 1894 editorial stressed that it required a modern, techno- scientific sensi- bility on the part of both writers and readers, Zamyatin celebrated its unprecedented potentials of defamiliarization.4 Even more remarkable, however, is the fact that long before science fiction came to be called a genre in the West and merited with due criti- cal attention, its Russian equivalent seems to have metamorphosed from a novelty of popular culture to an integral part of intellectual de- bates about the best way to engage with the new realities of the unfold- ing twentieth century. What accounts for the emergence of science fic- tion avant la lettre in Russia? Why and how did it proliferate so rapidly and acquire such prestige in a context whose actual state of modern- ization was famously described by Leon Trotsky as “combined and un- even development”?5 The answer may be found in a unique symbiotic link between genre and time repeatedly invoked by the passages cited above. For editors, practitioners, and critics alike, the new category of writing was inextricably bound with the concept of modernity, or sovre- mennost’. Science fiction in the Russian context, therefore, connoted much more than a by- product of the consciousness that science and technology had become the primary driving forces of modern life. As both Zamyatin and the editors of Nature and People take pains to em- phasize, it evolved into an important participant in the formation of that consciousness. By privileging science fiction as a crucible of actual techno- scientific innovation and equating news reportage with speculative extrapola- tion, Nature and People blurs the boundaries between the representa- tion of modernity and the realities of modernization. Zamyatin goes one step further: He compares the effects of this new kind of writing to the cognitive revolution brought about by actual developments such as the theory of relativity and the technology of aviation. His prescription for a new model of national literature, therefore, invests science fiction with the radical function of modernizing not just Russian life but also the Russian mind. For Zamyatin, its poetics of estrangement trans- 2 WE MODERN PEOPLE form science itself into a new metaphysics, and elevates technology far above the level of novel artifacts. What were previously perceived to be mere analysis and mechanics become portals for entering a higher state of existence, a “reality of being” (bytie) quite different from mun- dane “daily life” (byt). Science fiction thus provides the road map for a new class of subjects, whom Nature and People calls “those of our times” and Zamyatin designates “we modern people,” to reinvent their lives, realities, and even beliefs. This book explores how science fiction became a way of not just telling but also of making modernity in Russia. Bold as the proposi- tion may have sounded in 1894 or 1923, it seems particularly apt from the vantage point of our own present, widely understood to be in the midst of a similar transformation of which science and technology are also the chief driving forces. Like relativity or aviation at the turn of the twentieth century, genomics and robotics, information science and digital media, have come to constitute primary indices of tremen- dous upheavals in our contemporary life and reality.