#6 - RAS 14
SCIENCE FICTION:
THE BIRTH OF SCIENCE FICTION IN RUSSIA
SOURCE. Iu. I. Ritchik, "Zarozhdenie nauchnoi fantastiki v
russkoi romanticheskoi povesti 30-40-kh gg. XIX v." [The Birth of Science
Fiction in the Russian Romantic Tale of the 1830s and 1840s] in Utopiia i
utopicheskoe v slavianskom mire [Utopia and the Utopian in the Slavic World]
(Moscow: Izdatel' Stepanenko, 2002) , pp. 114-121
The first work of science fiction (SF) written in western Europe is considered to be "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus" (1816) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). (1) The author dates the birth of SF in Russia a little later, to works by such writers as A. A. Pogorelsky (Perovsky) and N. I. Grech that appeared in the 1820s. However, he focuses on works of the 1830s and 1840s by two other writers: Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoyevsky and Osip Ivanovich Senkovsky.
Odoyevsky has to his name two published collections of short stories and novellas: "Pestrye skazki" [Multicolored Tales] (St. Petersburg, 1833) and "Russkie nochi" [Russian Nights] (1844). (2) At the time of his death he was in the middle of writing a utopian SF novel entitled "4338 God" [The Year 4338], in which he envisages human settlement on the moon, the cultivation of plants by means of artificial sunlight, and the use of electric aerostats.
Of particular interest are two novellas that Odoyevsky intended as satirical critiques of contemporary British social philosophers. "Posledneye samoubiistvo" [The Last Suicide] is directed against the "dismal economist" Thomas Malthus, who argued that mass impoverishment is inevitable because population always increases more rapidly than resources. "Gorod bez imeni" [City Without a Name] is a dystopian vision of an impersonal world based upon the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, which aims to subject everything to rational control. The parallel that comes to mind is the city of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "My" [We], imagined almost a century later against the background of the earliest years of the Soviet regime.
Let us turn now to Senkovsky. His main contribution to SF was "Fantasticheskie puteshestviia Barona Brambeusa" [The Fantastic Travels of Baron Brambeus] (St. Petersburg, 1835), which comprises a 50-page introductory essay followed by three stories -- Poetical Travels on White Light, A Scientific Journey to the Bear Islands, and A Sentimental Journey to Mount Etna. In the "scientific journey" the author, accompanied by a German scientist friend, ventures into the Russian far north and discovers there the traces of a lost civilization. (A lost civilization in the far north is a recurrent theme in Russian myth-making: for instance, the civilization of Arktogeya in the imagination of Alexander Dugin. (3))
The introduction, entitled "Autumn Boredom," tells how Senkovsky came to embark upon his fantastic travels. He was inspired in part by his impressions from a real two-year journey that he had made through Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other countries of the East following his appointment in 1819 to the Russian mission in Constantinople [now Istanbul]. In part he was inspired too by the knowledge he had gained from long study of various sciences. Thus science adds a new ingredient to the long-established genre of travel fantasy, as well as to its utopian and dystopian sub-genres, and the new genre of SF is born. Senkovsky takes a self-deprecating attitude to his own achievement, referring to his stories as "my foolishness."
Besides writing SF, Senkovsky for nearly 20 years edited a periodical called "Biblioteka dlia chteniia" [Library for Reading]. This was a magazine of literature, the arts and sciences, industry, news, and fashion that reached a circulation of 5,000, which was "astronomical for those times." Senkovsky saw himself as an educator and steered clear of political engagement, for which he was excoriated by "progressive" literary critics like Belinsky and Chernyshevsky.
NOTES
(1) The first surname came from her mother, an early feminist thinker, the second from her husband, the famous poet. Another of her works, "The Last Man" (1826), set in a distant future world, might also be classified as science fiction.
(2) The 1844 publication was the first of three volumes.
(3) On Dugin see RAS No. 9 item 3, No. 10 item 8, and No. 12 item 3.
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