Red Star

Alexander Bogdanov, Charles Rougle

Description

Two classic Russian science fiction novels that speak to our own time

"[A] surprisingly moving story." —The New Yorker

"Bogdanov's novels reveal a great deal about their fascinating author, about his time and, ironically, ours, and about the genre of utopia as well as his contribution to it." —Slavic Review

"Bogdanov's imaginative predictions for his utopia are both technological and social . . . Even more farsighted are [his] anxious forebodings about the limits and costs of the utopian future." —Science Fiction Studies

"The contemporary reader will marvel at [Bogdanov's] foresight: nuclear fusion and propulsion, atomic weaponry and fallout, computers, blood transfusions, and (almost) unisexuality." —Choice

A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist.

Preface

Fantasy and Revolution: Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction, Richard Stites

RED STAR: A Utopia

ENGINNEER MENNI: A Novel of Fantasy

A MARTIAN STRANDED ON EARTH: A Poem

Bogdanov's Inner Message, Loren R. Graham

Selected Bibliography

Sujets

• Former Soviet Union
• Science Fiction
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Literature
• URSS
• General officer
• Eastern Europe
• Russian
• Russia
• General
• Fiction
• Science
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 juin 1984
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253013507
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

RED STAR
Soviet History, Politics, Society, and Thought
James Michael Holquist and Alexander Rabinowitch, general editors
ADVISORY BOARD
Katerina Clark
Stephen F. Cohen
Murray Feshbach
Loren Graham
Gail W. Lapidus
Moshe Lewin
Sidney Monas
S. Frederick Starr
RED STAR
The First Bolshevik Utopia
Alexander Bogdanov
Red Star Engineer Menni A Martian Stranded on Earth

EDITED BY
Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites
TRANSLATED BY
Charles Rougle
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
B LOOMINGTON AND I NDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail [e-mail]
1984 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bogdanov, A. (Aleksandr), 1873-1928.
Red star.
(Soviet history, politics, society, and thought)
Contents: Red star-Engineer Menni-Martian stranded on Earth.
1. Bogdanov, A. (Aleksandr), 1873-1928-Translations, English. I. Graham, Loren R. II. Stites, Richard. III. Rougle, Charles, 1946- IV. Title. V. Series. PG3467.M29A27 1984 897.1 33 83-48637
ISBN 978-0-253-17350-8 ISBN 978-0-253-20317-5 (pbk.)
5 6 7 8 9 12 11 10 09 08 07
CONTENTS
Preface
Fantasy and Revolution: Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction / Richard Stites
RED STAR: A Utopia
ENGINEER MENNI: A NOVEL OF FANTASY
A MARTIAN STRANDED ON EARTH: A Poem
Bogdanov s Inner Message / Loren R. Graham
Selected Bibliography
Preface
The first edition of Red Star appeared in St. Petersburg in 1908. It was reissued in Petrograd and in Moscow in 1918, and again in Moscow in 1922. A stage version was produced by Proletcult theater in 1920. In 1928, after Bogdanov s death, it was published as a supplement to Around the World . It was not again reissued in the Soviet Union for almost fifty years, until 1979, when it was anthologized in a slightly expurgated version in the collection The Eternal Sun: Russian Social Utopia and Science Fiction. It appeared in a German translation in 1923, and this was reprinted in 1972. An Esperanto edition came out in Leipzig in 1929, celebrating, no doubt, the Esperantists admiration of unilingual utopias. The first English translation recently appeared in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction: An Anthology (1982), edited by Leland Fetzer. There were at least six editions of Engineer Menni between 1913 and 1923, and it was reissued also by Around the World in 1929. The present translations are of the original 1908 and 1913 editions. Chronologically, Engineer Menni comes first as a historical novel about the social revolution on Mars long before Leonid s voyage of 1905-06. We have placed Red Star first, however, because it was written first and because this order makes for better reading. As a writer, Bogdanov was no master of style, and so we have given preference to clarity over literalness of translation, without omitting or violating anything essential. For the Martian place names, we have used the standard classical terminology still employed by astronomers (and used by Bogdanov in Russian translation). The illustrations for Red Star are taken from the 1923 Moscow edition.
The editors and translator wish to thank the following people for reading and commenting on our work: in Philadelphia, Mark Adams; in New York, Abraham Ascher and Kenneth Jensen; in Leeds, Moira Donald; in Washington, D.C., Murray Feshbach; in Helsinki, Ben Hell-man, Eugene Holman, Pekka Pesonen, and Ilmari Susiluoto; in Turku, Kurt Johansson; in Berkeley, Louise McReynolds; in Freiburg, Thomas Markowsky; in Montreal, Darko Suvin. Charles Rougle and Richard Stites thank each other for what Bogdanov would have called our comradely exchange of labor in Helsinki in the summer of 1982. Loren Graham and Richard Stites thank each other for joining together our once independent projects. We all thank Janet Rabinowitch of Indiana University Press for her stubborn faith in our work.
RED STAR
FANTASY AND REVOLUTION
Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction
Richard Stites
Blood is being shed [down there] for the sake of a better future, says the Martian to the hero of Red Star as they are ascending to Mars. But in order to wage the struggle we must know that future. The blood he speaks of was the blood of workers shot down in the streets of St. Petersburg, of revolutionaries put against the wall of prison courtyards, of insurgent sailors and soldiers, of Jewish victims of pogroms in the Russian Revolution of 1905. And by that better future he means not the immediate outcome of the revolution but the radiant future of socialism that will dawn on earth after revolution has triumphed everywhere. In order to inspect the coming socialist order, the hero-a Bolshevik activist named Leonid-has accepted the invitation of a Martian visitor to fly with him and his crew to Mars.
In this manner Alexander Bogdanov, a major prophet of the Bolshevik movement and one of its most versatile writers and thinkers, begins his Utopian science fiction novel Red Star , first published in 1908. The red star is Mars; but it is also the dream set to paper of the kind of society that could emerge on Earth after the dual victory of the scientific-technical revolution and the social revolution. Bogdanov, a professional revolutionary, was one of those people, peculiar to revolutionary societies of our century, who moved easily back and forth between the barricade and the study table, the prison cell and the laboratory. He was a physician and a man of science; and he was the first in Russian fiction to combine a technical utopia, grounded in the latest scientific theories of the time, with the ideas of revolutionary Marxism. This was the central theme of both Red Star and his other novel, Engineer Menni.
Bogdanov s revolutionary Martian fantasy grew out of his personal experiences as a Marxist during the Revolution of 1905, the popularity of science fiction in Russia around the turn of the century, and his still developing theory of tectology, the science of systems thinking and organization. Bogdanov was born in Tula in 1873 to an educated family, studied science and psychology in Moscow and Kharkov, and received a medical degree in 1899. By that time he had also become a Populist and then a Marxist. On the surface, Bogdanov s path from medicine to revolution appears typical of radical Russians of that age in that so many of them-Mark Natanson, F dor Dan, Vera Figner, among others-had begun their love affair with the people by learning how to cure their physical illnesses. Unlike most of them, Bogdanov did not abandon science for revolution: rather, he deepened and extended his study of physiology, technology, and natural science and combined them with his own version of Marxian sociology. An early member of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Party-the matrix of Bolshevism and Menshevism-Bogdanov worked as an underground agent, fomenting agitation and disseminating propaganda among workers, students, and educated society in Moscow as well as in provincial towns far distant from the two capitals. In terms of on-the-spot experience, he was one of the best informed of the Social Democrat leaders about actual life and labor conditions in Russian cities. As a physician he was also keenly aware of the social misery of poor people in the burgeoning factory centers of industrializing Russia. His repugnance for the contemporary city reveals itself in his loving description of the Utopian factory settlements of Red Star and the dreadful working conditions in Engineer Menni . Numerous arrests and terms in exile punctuated his revolutionary career, and these experiences-often called the university education of radicals-threw him into contact with like-minded young thinkers and rebels such as Anatol Lunacharsky, future Bolshevik Commissar of Education and Culture, F dor Bazarov, a well-known economist, and I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, publicist, economist, and writer on atheism.
When the newly formed Russian Marxist party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, Bogdanov-like the hero of Red Star -chose the more impetuous and revolutionary current of Bolshevism headed by Lenin. Bogdanov was among the original Bolsheviks (not yet a separate party), one of those twenty-two, with Lenin as the central figure, who fashioned in Switzerland early in 1904 a group dedicated to disciplined revolutionary action. In the stormy years of war and revolution from 1904 to 1907, Lenin and Bogdanov were close associates, with Lenin mostly in emigration and Bogdanov inside Russia organizing and directing the underground network of party cells and organizations. In 1905 the social unrest that had been brewing since the 1890s exploded in a revolution that swept over the vast expanse of the Russian land. In an unprecedented display of revolutionary energy, workers, peasants, soldiers, sailors, intellectuals, teachers, students, schoolchildren, priests, actresses, musicians, and people of every rank of society revolted; they demonstrated, shouted down their former masters, fought, struck, boycotted, burned out manor houses, and in every imagina