Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry

Chapter 4. Cross-Fertilizing Futuristic Literary Genres: Utopian Science Fiction or Didactic Popular Technology in Revolutionary Russia, 1890–1928

4 CROSS-FERTILIZING FUTURISTIC LITERARY GENRES UTOPIAN SCIENCE FICTION OR DIDACTIC POPULAR TECHNOLOGY IN REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890–1928 In July 1935, K. E. Tsiolkovskii published an editorial entitled “Is This Mere Fantasy?” in the Soviet youth newspaper Komsomolskaia pravda. He wrote this piece near the end of his life when he was simultaneously a consultant on the science fiction film Cosmic Journey. For the past decade he had been thinking a lot about the public resonance of his science fiction, especially since there were several attempts to adapt his fiction to the silver screen. In the article, he argued that cinema would soon have a broader appeal to the masses than books: “films are more graphic and closer to nature than a mere literary description.”1 He was pleased to hear that one of his books would be made into a film soon, and believed that film adaptations would greatly help science fiction in convincing the public about the feasibility of spaceflight. Tsiolkovskii had a relationship with the newspaper Komsomolskaia pravda and was interviewed by its famous science journalist Evgeny Riabchikov on several occasions. Tsiolkovskii was particularly interested in educating a younger readership and popularizing science among it. Not only was he a popularizer of science, he was also a skilled and experienced science teacher. In 1925, ten years earlier, he had been asked to have his story “Outside the Earth” adapted for the screen, but the production was a complicated affair at the time and never came to fruition. Tsiolkovskii, however, had been aware that Oberth had collaborated in a similar vein with the famous German director Fritz Lang in the immensely popular “Women on the Moon” which opened in Germany in the late 1920s. (The film premiered in October 1929 in Berlin, and cross-fertilizing futuristic literary genres 65 Oberth had tried unsuccessfully to build a rocket for the opening.)2 Finally, in 1935, Mosfilm, under the guidance of the Soviet director V. N. Zhuravlyev, produced a version of Tsiolkovskii’s book and entitled the film Cosmic Journey. For Tsiolkovskii, popular science fiction and science film truly were great media to carry new ideas to the masses. He saw these as inspirational and educational media. In his 1935 article, he stated emphatically, “Science fiction stories on interplanetary travel carry new ideas to the masses . . . they excite interest . . . and bring into being people who sympathize with, and in the future engage in, work on grand engineering and technical rocketry projects .” He believed furthermore that while he wrote voluminous science fiction novels and short stories, they never veered away from science proper. He believed ultimately that his science fiction was imbued with the profound conviction that someone would, in the future, more precisely than he undertake these important projects and bring them to fruition with technical exactitude.3 He therefore saw his science fiction as serving a primary didactic purpose—imbuing the stories with visionary scientific concepts. At the same time, he believed these fantasies could be inspirational , if not catalytic—getting future engineers and technicians motivated to study, correct, and move beyond Tsiolkovskii’s visionary , yet elementary, conceptions. Tsiolkovskii, in his diary, clearly argues that he himself was inspired by the stories of Jules Verne that he read at a young age. When he was studying in Moscow during the 1870s, he read science fiction voraciously, and began to think deeply then about colonizing outer space through interplanetary travel.4 Furthermore , when Tsiolkovskii began writing science fiction novels in the 1890s, he did not do so in an intellectual and literary vacuum. Indeed, there was a proliferation of American and European science fiction novels that Tsiolkovskii could engage in his own, somewhat didactic, way. In the late nineteenth century, H. G. Wells enjoyed enormous popularity in Russia, and his novel The War of the Worlds was eventually translated into many European languages, including Russian.The British writer Percy Gregg and the German writer Kurd 66 chapter 4 Lasswitz also wrote several utopian science fiction novels set on planets, such as Mars.5 Brezhnev-era Soviet scholars such as A. Britikov have argued that A. Bogdanov was the authentic founder of this genre of science fiction in Russia. Britikov believed that A. Bogdanov’s stories about Mars combined a unique mixture of utopian science fiction with dialectical materialist analysis.6 However, Richard Stites, a cultural historian of Russia, has argued against Britikov’s perspective on Russian utopian science...