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

4 CREATING THE HUMAN

119 4 Creating the Human The same “soul” or ineffable essence that transformed electrical technology into a vital force of resurrection in Soviet Russia becomes a potentially fatal liability in the future world of Zamyatin’s We. The novel ends with the chilling description of a medical treatment designed to cure deviant citizens that involves the surgical removal of a growth in the brain that houses the soul.The narrator D-503 undergoes precisely such a procedure to reverse the pernicious effects the soul had been exercising on his consciousness, causing him to resemble a primitive form of humanity that is securely cordoned off behind the transparent wall of the city-state. The mathematician’s hands sprout hair and his skin grows coarse in tandem with the degeneration of his cold, rational mind, which now fluctuates with the heat of emotion and develops the capacity for critical thought. Surgical removal of the soul signifies the landmark victory of the state over an “epidemic” (184) that instigated the first organized rebellion in its history. D-503 ends his account with a simple phrase: “Reason prevailed” (221). Zamyatin’s We may be interpreted as a narrative of the disjuncture between the human subject and the subject of the state. The body of the text produced by the diseased citizen, D-503, consequently becomes an equally contentious battleground. The narrator’s private journal, which itself is taboo in a state that has mandated “everyone [. . .] to compose treatises, epic poems, manifestoes, odes, or other compositions dealing with the beauty and the grandeur of the OneState ” (5), begins as the required epic but ends up becoming a textbook example of Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, in which divergent temporalities , voices, and perspectives disrupt the “single word, the single voice, and the single accent.”1 Both the physical body and the body of language in We thus become potent sites of the individual subject’s battle with what Foucault called biopower. According to Foucault, biopower ........... W E M O D E R N P E O P L E 120 is “the practice of regulating subjects through an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.”2 The intricate dialogue between science and the state in what Mark Adams eloquently calls the age of “visionary biology” in Russia has recently emerged as a focal point of historical research.3 Examining the veritable explosion of new fields ranging from experimental psychophysiology to endocrinology, serum therapy to tissue culture, Nikolai Krementsov traces the coeval continuum of scientific and political revolutions that commenced with the establishment, in 1890, of the Imperial Academy of Experimental Medicine and culminated in the 1920s with state-sponsored projects of creating the New Soviet Citizen .4 Although these historians of science point out the uncannily science fictional aura that surrounded Gastev’s Central Labor Institute, Ivan Pavlov’s psychoneural laboratories, Nikolai Bernstein’s school of biomechanics, and the Center of Blood Transfusion established by none other than the author of Red Star, science fiction itself occupies a peculiarly marginal place in literary and cultural investigations of biopower in the same period. Irene Masing-Delic’s seminal survey of God-building, Eric Naiman’s incredibly generative study of sexuality in the era of the New Economic Policy, Irina Paperno’s multifaceted examination of modernist experiments in zhiznetvorchestvo or “creating life,” and Seifrid’s nuanced overview of Platonov’s signature fractures between the body, language, and consciousness pay particular attention to the convergences and disjunctures between visionary thought, material practice, and literary representation.5 Yet, as Masing-Delic asserts , the investigation of “the here and now, in the midst of everyday life (byt)” rarely takes into account “science fiction or ventures into utopian realms.”6 Following Zamyatin’s counterargument, examined in the introduction of this book, that science fiction was an unprecedented negotiating medium between everyday life, byt, and the higher planes of existence , bytie, this chapter focuses on its crucial role in the project of what I call “biological modernity” in Russia. Biological modernity implies biophysical, biopsychological, biosocial, and biocultural change, often disciplinary in nature, with a shared emphasis on the betterment C R E AT I N G T H E H U M A N 121 of life. The continuum between prerevolutionary and Soviet sciencefictional figurations of the human examined in the following sections illustrates that in spite of the scientific...