Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia PDF
Preview Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia
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 BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS 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 [email protected] © 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
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