We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity

Further Reading

193 Further Reading Other than Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, which emerged as a cult classic in the late 1980s and has been revised and retranslated twice in the last two decades, early Russian science fiction is accessible to English-speaking readers only in a fragmented , selective way. Even landmark texts such as Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star and Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita did not get translated until the mid-1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was already announcing the collapse of the Soviet Union as everyone knew it. In the past decade, a resurgence of critical interest in Velimir Khlebnikov and Andrei Platonov has corresponded with the publication of many works previously unavailable in English. Other than these particular authors and texts, however, only select examples of early Russian science fiction can be found in collections, often buried among Gothic tales and other works of metaphysical and social fantasy. Vladimir Odoevsky’s 4338, the first example of a technological utopia in Russian literature, appears in fragments ; Valery Bryusov’s “Republic of the Southern Cross” and Alexander Kuprin’s “Liquid Sun” are easily accessible, but not Bruysov or other modernists’ prolific experiments in science fiction; Konstantin Sluchevsky, a prominent metaphysical poet, has not made his way into any collection; and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s stories exist only in an out-of-print Soviet translation from 1960, which was published soon after he was posthumously canonized as the father of the Space Program . Clearly, systematic and comprehensive translations of early Russian science fiction are just as critically needed as studies of its remarkable emergence. The following list of sources available in English represents only a fraction of the works examined in this book. Anthologies Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Russian Fantasy and Science Fiction. London: Duckworth, 2007. Edited by Alexander Levitsky. Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction (Seven Utopias and a Dream). Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982. Translated by Leland Fetzer. Individual Authors and Works Bogdanov, Alexander. Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Translated by Charles Rougle, edited by Loren Graham and Richard Stites. Khlebnikov, Velimir. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. III: Selected F U R T H E R R E A D I N G 194 Poems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Translated by Paul Schmidt, introduction by Ronald Vroon. ———. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. II: Prose, Plays, and Supersagas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Translated by Paul Schmidt, introduction by Ronald Vroon. Kruchenykh, Alexei, et al. Victory Over the Sun. Forest Row, Sussex: Artists Bookworks, 2008. Translated by Evgeny Steiner. Platonov, Andrei. Soul: And Other Stories. New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2007. Translated by Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson, foreword by John Berger. Tolstoy, A. K. Aelita. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985. Translation and introduction by Leland Fetzer. Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin. The Call of the Cosmos. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960. Translated by V. Danko. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. New York: Modern Library, 2006. Translated by Natasha Randall, foreword by Bruce Sterling. ———. We. London: Penguin, 1993. Translated by Clarence Brown. ———. We. New York: Avon, 1987. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. Essays and Manifestoes Christie, Ian, and Richard Taylor. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents. London: Routledge, 1994. Khlebnikov, Velimir. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. I: Letters and Theoretical Writings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Translated by Paul Schmidt, introduction by Charlotte Douglas. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Evantson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. Visual Media Aelita, directed by Yakov Protazanov, studio Mezhrabprom-Rus’, 1924. Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1992. Victory over the Sun. Clips of several contemporary reconstructions available at www.youtube.com. ...