We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity
230
We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity
230eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
How science fiction forged a unique Russian vision of modernity distinct from Western models
Science fiction emerged in Russia considerably earlier than its English version and instantly became the hallmark of Russian modernity. We Modern People investigates why science fiction appeared here, on the margins of Europe, before the genre had even been named, and what it meant for people who lived under conditions that Leon Trotsky famously described as "combined and uneven development." Russian science fiction was embraced not only in literary circles and popular culture, but also by scientists, engineers, philosophers, and political visionaries. Anindita Banerjee explores the handful of well-known early practitioners, such as Briusov, Bogdanov, and Zamyatin, within a much larger continuum of new archival material comprised of journalism, scientific papers, popular science texts, advertisements, and independent manifestos on social transformation. In documenting the unusual relationship between Russian science fiction and Russian modernity, this book offers a new critical perspective on the relationship between science, technology, the fictional imagination, and the consciousness of being modern.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819573353 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Series: | Early Classics of Science Fiction |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 230 |
| Sales rank: | 863,391 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Conquering Space
In 1889, the Petersburg publishing house of P. P. Soikin launched a new magazine called Nature and People. The masthead of this "illustrated popular science journal for family reading" claimed to "bring the world into every Russian living room." Five years later, an almanac published intermittently since 1860 called Around the World was revamped into an illustrated weekly specializing in "geography, travel, and exploration." In the burgeoning market of popular print culture at the turn of the twentieth century, the new scientific illustrated magazines stood out not just for their preoccupation with space, but also for the particular moment at which the preoccupation manifested itself. Rather than lagging behind Western publications such as the National Geographic, founded in 1889, and l'Annales de Géographie, established in 1891, the Russian periodicals emerged simultaneously with them. Although they were not as systematic as their Western counterparts in bringing the dazzling expanse of the world to the lay reading public, their mission was identical: to cultivate a consciousness of space that was quintessentially modern.
A particular orientation toward horizons far beyond the reader's experience and knowledge defined the novelty of the illustrated scientific magazine. In the title of Nature and People, the terms "nature" and "people" functioned not as referents to the domestic and familiar but rather as gateways to radically different environments and exotic ways of life. Using the dual connotation of the word svet, which can mean both light and the world, Around the World promised to cast light upon, and therefore make cognitively accessible, many remote, unimaginable facets of the globe. Through text and image, the magazines staged an unprecedented encounter with the elsewhere without the audience ever having to step out of the familiar sphere of everyday life. The implications of this encounter, however, extended far beyond the enhancement of geographical, sociological, and anthropological knowledge.
Flooding the confines of "every Russian living room" with spectacles of far-flung places, the scientific illustrated compelled its readers to constantly reimagine their own sense of being in the world — a reflexive relationship between space and subjectivity that the philosopher Martin Heidegger would subsequently call "the very essence of the modern age." Modernity (die Neuzeit), according to Heidegger, is generated from the dual process of "setting out the world before oneself" and "setting it forth in relation to oneself." The emergence of space as a representable object, a "world-picture," therefore becomes inextricably bound with "becoming a subject in the midst of it."
Russian scientific illustrated magazines seemed to lay a further claim on Heidegger's model of modernity. They explicitly attributed the world-pictures represented on their pages to the latest scientific and technological means of accessing, charting, and controlling space. At the head of every issue in Nature and People stood a picture depicting the open sea from a distinctly non-Russian-looking rocky shore.
What distinguishes this image from a traditional landscape is the insertion of two technological artifacts. In the foreground stand two human figures looking out through a telescope, while a steamship interrupts the even line of the distant horizon. Although these instruments for accessing and traversing vast distances seem diminutive against the vertiginous cliffs and the daunting expanse of water, they have already conquered the sublime powers of the space surrounding them.
The titles of the new magazines also paid homage to the historical role that science and technology played in creating the modern perception of the world and shaping the modern idiom of the self. Nature and people coupled together invoked taxonomy, the system founded by Carolus Linnaeus in the eighteenth century for classifying all organic life in a single universal system. The fulfillment of Linnaeus's vision, in turn, depended on advancements in transportation and navigation, which not only enabled bolder forays into remoter places but also fed the popular enthusiasm for exploration and created a global market for publications such as Around the World.
In her illuminating book on travel writing and imperialism, Mary Louise Pratt argues that an unprecedented conjuncture between new technologies of conquering space and new ways of representing distant corners of the globe gave rise to a "planetary consciousness," which became the hallmark of the modern subject in the West and provided the ontological foundation for universal knowledge. Likewise, Nature and People and Around the World cast their readers not as passive spectators of others' adventures in other spaces but rather as active agents embarking on their own journeys and creating their own pictures of the world. By "bringing the world to every Russian living room," they simultaneously created the template for a new kind of Russian subject: armchair geographers, scientists, and explorers, familiar with the powers of science and technology and possessing a spatial consciousness that extended to the farthest reaches of the planet and beyond. Scientific illustrated magazines invited this imagined community, in turn, to envision Russia's place and role in the brave new world of the twentieth century.
Conspicuously absent from their pages, however, are the cities and towns of European Russia, which not only served as the testing ground for national modernization projects but also provided, for a majority of readers, the only direct experience of how science and technology could transform the spaces of everyday life. Instead of St. Petersburg and Moscow, the magazines focused on the limitless steppe opened up by the Great Siberian Railroad, stratospheric heights experienced from the airplane, and the immeasurable depths of the cosmos penetrated by purely hypothetical spaceships. This chapter explores the implications of this paradox. Did the spectacularly remote frontiers dominating the media affect the perception of what was not represented — the everyday space of the home and the conceptual core of the homeland? How did the fantastical projections of the elsewhere influence notions of Russia's own geographical, historical, and cultural identity?
My approach to these questions draws upon the insights of an interdisciplinary movement called critical geography. Following Henri Lefebvre, I have found it useful to think about space as an evolving set of relations between the physical world and representations of the world, in which representations often shape individual experiences and collective ideologies of space. Representations, as David Harvey eloquently puts it, are hardly divorced from the reality of geopolitical negotiations and sociocultural formations: "They are as fiercely fought and as fundamental to the activities of space construction as bricks and mortar. ... [a]nd it is precisely in this realm that all those political values of community, of nation and the like, begins its work."
This conception of space as a field of contesting representations is particularly applicable to the Russian context. Ever since the eighteenth century, when Peter the Great sought to remake Russia into a Western-style nation-state, its liminal location between Europe and Asia has been an abiding source of existential anxiety. In spite of the establishment of St. Petersburg, a port and administrative capital that embodied Peter's legendary desire of opening a window to the West, Russia continued to be viewed as a part of the backward Orient by the very Europeans it was trying to emulate. As a growing body of recent scholarship demonstrates, a potent way of resolving the debate about where Russia is was to create spaces against which it could be defined. Over the next two centuries, Russia annexed progressively distant frontiers starting from Crimea and the Caucasus in the South to Central Asia and Siberia in the East. By the turn of the twentieth century, its imperial dominions stretched all the way to the North Pacific. These territories constituted crucial points of contrast for delineating Russia's geography, history, society, and culture.
Nevertheless, Russia continued to suffer from a unique crisis that Ronald Grigor Suny calls "dual peripherality." Even after its main cities had become the economic and political hubs of a vast multidirectional empire, their status as metropolitan centers of a modern nation remained suspect because of St. Petersburg and Moscow's marginal position on the map of Europe. Peter Chaadayev's Philosophical Letters of 1836 offers an iconic lamentation of this condition. Because Russia remained a "blank space ... belonging neither to Europe nor to Asia," he argued, it would never evolve into a proper homeland for its subjects:
No one has a fixed sphere of existence, there are no good habits, no rules that govern anything. ... We seem to camp in our houses, we behave like strangers in our families; and in our cities we appear to be nomads, more so than the real nomads who graze their flocks in our steppes, for they are more attached to their desert than we are to our towns.
Chaadayev's tropes of the nation as an absent core, its cities as meaningless chaos, and its inhabitants as perpetual nomads mirror the worst stereotypes associated with "our steppe," the farthest reaches of the empire populated by its most primitive subjects. To extend the logic of the influential thinker, the project of nation building — putting Russia on the map, so to speak — would have to start not in its metropolitan centers but beyond its known frontiers.
Nationalist ideologies developed over the nineteenth century followed precisely this logic. In the task of negotiating a cogent identity for Russia and its people, the conquest of new territories became as significant as the enhancement of urban civilization. As Mark Bassin suggestively argues, "The prospect of political-territorial expansion was intended not so much as an appetite for control of foreign lands and people as to secure evidence of positive or even superior national qualities which could serve to raise Russia's stature vis-à-vis the West. ... Its real concern was, accordingly, not with the object of conquest and incorporation but rather with Russia itself." Not surprisingly, literary representations of the empire provided some of the most fertile sites for imagining the spatio-historical contours of the nation (natsiia) as well as the ethno-linguistic profile of its subjects (narodnost'). As Susan Layton, Harsha Ram, and Katya Hokanson have demonstrated, far-flung imperial outposts that seemed especially alien or daunting to the audience in European Russia assumed a particularly important role in shaping the foundational tenets of national history and culture.
This chapter investigates a new kind of unfamiliar space that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century to capture the Russian imagination. It consisted of uncharted frontiers conquered by real or anticipated advancements in transportation and communications — the iconic catalysts of modernity that doubled as the tools of empire. Representing such spaces required a novel synthesis of discourses that created a direct continuum between the world picture of the scientific illustrated magazine and the alternative worlds of science fiction. The science fictional mode frequently employed by the media rapidly infiltrated a much wider range of cultural forms and institutions, from geography to astronomy and philosophy to poetry.
Although inspired by and imagined through real developments such as the Trans-Siberian Railroad, aviation, spectroscopic photography, and cinematography, these spectacular environments were only tenuously connected with actual places. In fact, like the sky or outer space, they often took off from the cartographic plane altogether. Rather than treating them as thinly veiled allegories of real geographical or geopolitical units, therefore, I build upon Jameson's challenge to the dominant perception of science fiction as futuristic extrapolations in time. Jameson contends that science fiction is first and foremost a "spatial genre," in which "the adventure is less of a character or collective than that of a planet, a climate, a system of landscapes — in short, a map."
The following sections trace the ways in which science fiction generated entirely new paradigms for filling in Chaadayev's blank space and curing Russia's predicament of dual peripherality. To be sure, its ambitious projections of transportation, communications, and media legitimized the imperial logic of expansion and control. Just as often, however, science fiction used the same tools for translating Russia's distance from Western-style modernity into the privileged position of a critical outsider. Through the expanding frontiers of its fantastic environments, the reader in every Russian living room could reimagine the absent nation as a third realm beyond the binary division between West and East, progress and backwardness. Science fiction thus also became the staging ground for a uniquely Russian third way of seeing, knowing, and inhabiting the world.
BEYOND EAST AND WEST ON THE TRACKS OF MODERNITY
SCIENCE FICTION GOES TO SIBERIA
Among Russia's many imperial peripheries, Siberia occupied an especially complicated place in imaginations of the nation. No one really knew where Russia ended and Siberia began. Unlike the Crimean peninsula or the mountainous Caucasus, Siberia's flat expanses offered no prominent topographical boundaries separating it from the metropolitan centers of St. Petersburg and Moscow. A particularly complex dynamic of territorial expansion, whose history predates the inception of the modern concepts of nation and empire, had shaped Siberia over the ages. Haunted by memories of Mongol invaders who occupied twelfth-century Kievan Rus' and shaped by Russia's eastward expansion since Ivan the Terrible's reign in the sixteenth century, it represented a unique geographical other which could have already infected the body politic with alien Oriental elements and infused its soul with the nomad's inherent violence. In both geographical and historical terms, therefore, Siberia lurked behind the very idea of the nation, playing the role of an uncanny alter ego that perpetually threatened to undermine Russia's efforts to be recognized on the world stage. It is no wonder that Chaadayev's nihilistic portrait depicted the steppe but one step away from engulfing Petersburg's fragile patina of civilization.
As if to stave off this very threat, nineteenth-century geographers constructed elaborate models of naturalized barriers between European Russia and the vast steppe that stretched eastwards from it. While some textbooks argued that Siberia lay across a continental divide formed by the low-lying Ural range, others emphasized the ecological differences between the forest and the grassland, or maritime St. Petersburg and the isolated, landlocked plains of the East. Bassin notes that these scientific models soon metamorphosed into elaborate theories of historical and cultural distinction between European Russia and its Asiatic margins. Even for representatives of the influential Slavophile movement, who developed the first non-Eurocentric paradigms of the nation by pointing out the spiritual differences between Orthodox belief and Western Christianity, Russia remained confined to the western side of the Urals.
The impulse of consciously distancing the nation from Siberia no doubt contributed to its conspicuous absence from the foundational texts of Russian literature, which were replete with images of imperial territories in the South such as the Crimea and the Caucasus. Its exclusion from the literary canon, as Yuri Slezkine suggests, could also be attributed to aesthetic reasons. "In the age of Byronic 'dread and splendor,'" argues Slezkine, the flat steppe and arid tundra simply "could not compete with the glorious peaks, lush valleys, and mutinous streams of the Caucasus." A much more concrete explanation, however, can be found for Siberia's peculiar status as a negative space in the national imagination: the lack of physical access to its vast, inhospitable territories.
This hypothesis is borne out by the fact that long before the emergence of a national idea, the strategic location and natural resources of Siberia had already marked it out as an object of imperial desire. As early as the 1580s, Ivan the Terrible engaged the services of the Cossack pirate Ermak Timofeevich to extract revenue from the old Sibir' (Siberian) Khanate as well as recalcitrant steppe tribes such as the Buriats and the Kazakhs. In the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great called it "our India, Mexico, or Peru." Colonizing Siberia in the proper sense of the word, however, proved impossible due to the utter lack of infrastructure. In an illuminating history of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Steven Marks observes that even though by the mid-nineteenth century Russia had technically annexed an area larger than Europe, the legendary resources of Siberia could not be accessed in an economically viable way. As a result, its vast expanses remained a terra incognita for most metropolitan Russians. Even policy makers charged with administering the region could not form a proper mental picture of it. Until late in the nineteenth century, "while educated persons despised Siberia," the only people who ventured into its heartland were those exiled or escaping from the institutions of European Russia: convicts, Old Believers, and serfs "who had nowhere else to go."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "We Modern People"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Anindita Banerjee.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
<P>Acknowledgments<BR>Introduction: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity<BR>CONQUERING SPACE<BR>TRANSCENDING TIME<BR>GENERATING POWER<BR>CREATING THE HUMAN AFTERWOR(L)D<BR>RUSSIAN SCIENCE FICTION AND THE UN-MAKING OF MODERNITY<BR>Chronology<BR>Notes<BR>Further Reading<BR>Index</P>What People are Saying About This
“Making the compelling connection between mass-scale revolutionary technological projects, such as the Trans-Siberian railroad, and the avant-garde campaigns to transform the Russian/Soviet imagination, Banerjee demonstrates how the techno-political and science-fictional imaginations are entwined in the modernization process. This book is an exemplary study in linking the popularization of science with modern literature.”
"The basis of this book is an original and tremendously engaging idea—that science fiction served as a crucial model for national literature in Russia. It made Russian modernity possible. Banerjee treats science fiction not as a genre but as a mode of apprehending the world."—Stephanie Sandler, Harvard University
"Making the compelling connection between mass-scale revolutionary technological projects, such as the Trans-Siberian railroad, and the avant-garde campaigns to transform the Russian/Soviet imagination, Banerjee demonstrates how the techno-political and science-fictional imaginations are entwined in the modernization process. This book is an exemplary study in linking the popularization of science with modern literature.""—Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., author of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
"The basis of this book is an original and tremendously engaging idea—that science fiction served as a crucial model for national literature in Russia. It made Russian modernity possible. Banerjee treats science fiction not as a genre but as a mode of apprehending the world."—Stephanie Sandler, Harvard University
“The basis of this book is an original and tremendously engaging idea—that science fiction served as a crucial model for national literature in Russia. It made Russian modernity possible. Banerjee treats science fiction not as a genre but as a mode of apprehending the world.”