Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928)

Information and questions for reading: Bogdanov, Part I, Bogdanov, Part II and Fyodorov

Nikolai Fyodorov (1828-1903): The introduction to the piece you'll find on Blackboard gives you more or less what you need.

Note his illegitimate, mixed-class ancestry – he shared this, by the way, with the famous 19th-century intellectual and émigré publisher Aleksandr Herzen, a hero of Tom Stoppard’s recent set of plays The Coast of Utopia. Herzen’s father made up the last name (Герцен) from the German “Herz” ‘heart’ – in case anyone doubted that he was a love-child. Fyodorov had a sadder childhood, booted out along with his mother when his father died, though apparently the family continued to support him and his mother until he could earn his own living. I have to wonder how much this past tinged his concentration on “the fathers” and even his project to bring the fathers back from the dead.

Male serf owners, even the great poet Aleksandr Pushkin, often thrust their affections on their female serfs, and some of the resulting children received good educations and moved in society as aristocrats, or joined the growing group of “racnochintsy” (разночинцы) in the intelligentsia (for more information on raznochintsy, see http://www.encspb.ru/en/article.php?kod=2804035836"). Serfdom in Russia was not ablished until the great Emancipation reform in 1861.

I offer no questions for reading Fyodorov, since it’s a secondary reading, but please read the intro (pp. 11-15), then pp. 24-5; pp. 36-39; the top paragraph on p. 46, and pp. 53-4. Skim the rest of the piece in case you find something of interest to you (philosophy, religion, Russian history (the famine of 1891), scientific aspirations to climate control…). This piece lacks the final part of Fyodorov’s “Common Task”: once we resurrect the dead fathers, earth will be crowded, so we’ll need to colonize space and settle all the extra people on the stars. (Hence the references to astronomy: p. 24, “The unification of all sciences under astronomy…”) Fyodorov doesn’t say it here, but you can catch the implication, that sexual reproduction won’t be necessary once the fathers are all back from the dead. As a nice saintly Russian ascetic he presumes that it’s only the atavistic need to reproduce that fuels sexual desire. (He doesn’t imply, but it would not be much of a leap to conclude, that if sex and reproduction are out there’ll be no need for daughters and wives, just fathers and sons… See my special note below.) He doesn’t go into the fact that any society with the technology to resurrect all those dead guys will have no trouble with a trivial thing like ensuring the immortality of everyone now alive. (A society where the residents can assume immortality shows up very often in science fiction, handled with a variety of explanations – most often the triumph of medicine, either the ability to cure every ill or the possibility of regenerating organs or even entire bodies. As we’ll see, immortality though physical reconditioning can also take a dystopian turn.)

Fyodorov’s technical aspirations (“…to make the universe gradually better, to control the blind forces of nature which threaten human life…”) resonate strongly with Soviet scientific and technical ambitious, likewise his emphasis on collective action and taking on this task all together, though he died in 1903, long before 1917. On the other hand, his writing and emphasis on fathers rings of the all-male communities in monasteries on Mount Athos, where some not only permit no women, but permit no female animals either.

To be honest, I’ve always thought the guy was loony, which may just reflect my ender age when I first read him. He nevertheless exerted a big influence on, and through, Tsiolkovsky; philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and author Fyodor Dostoevsky were admirers too). Let me know if you’d like more info on Fyodorov, or suggestions of more subtle and specialized approaches to his theories than that of your humble professor. It would be fun (in a paper for this course) to compare Fyodorov’s vision of a future society with the all-male homosexual society on the planet Athos presented in Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel Ethan of Athos (1986), which I discovered to my surprise online in full text at http://www.scribd.com/doc/4932793/Lois-McMaster-Bujold-Ethan-of-Athos.

Special Note: Just for fun, as I read this time, I kept track of Fyodorov’s references to sex or any female:

And that’s it, over 38 pages: I didn’t count the number of mentions of Fathers, Sons, and Men, but it’s clearly a male project. Some readers might charitably explain it as a unisex project – and both of those tendencies show up later in Soviet SF. As Stites briefly suggests in his introduction, it would be lots of fun to read Bogdanov side by side with Aleksandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a Russian revolutionary who went from great power and (rhetorical) influence in 1917-18 to being parceled off as the first female ambassador (to Norway, in 1923). She wrote no science fiction; (like Chernyshevsky) she wasn’t a particularly good writer, but her fiction from the 1920s (Vasilisa Malygina; A Love of Worker Bees) deals in extremely interesting ways with gender relations and free love.

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Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov (1873-1928), Red Star (1908) through page 59:

The introduction is both thoughtful and informative – you might find some suggestions here for other interesting works, though (as far as I know) many of the other early socialist or socialist-ish SF works have not been translated into English. Richard Stites, author of the introduction, is a super historian: he has taught Russian History at Georgetown University since 1977, and is author of the following excellent books:

To add to the introduction: As you’ll see in the novel, Bogdanov was already interested in blood transfusions in 1908; in 1924 he started blood transfusion experiments, hoping to achieve human rejuvenation and longevity. [Note: if you’ve read anything about the Romanian babies with AIDS who were discovered languishing in orphanages after 1991, they had contracted HIV from blood transfusions routinely given to newborns on the related theory that it made them more vigorous.) Bogdanov died in 1928 in Moscow, apparently of a botched blood transfusion (some have interpreted it as a suicide, others as an early move by Stalin to knock out the opposition – hm!). In any case, blood typing was less well understood at that point than it is now.

Questions for reading:

  1. What does it mean to have a politically engaged narrator? Anna Nikolaevna, the narrator’s apparently common-law wife, is just as devoted to politics: they allow their primary relationship to end because of political disagreement. The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (let me know if you want to know more about their history) were two factions of the same party, not two different parties! (It's worth noting how damn seriously they took what we might consider minor points of doctrine.)
  2. How do you react to the names (Menni, Sterni, Netti)? To me, they sound Finnish or Estonian – the double consonants, and the lack of gender specificity to the Russian ear (almost all Russian women’s names end in –a), and it's telling that Finnish and Estonian (like other Finno-Ugrian languages) don't have pronouns that distinguish gender. How about the term etheroneph?
  3. How do the Martians look, compared to other Martians you’ve known?
  4. Pay attention to the descriptions of the space flight – the appearance of Earth from above; the sensations of decreasing gravity and eventual weightlessness.
  5. What’s Bogdanov’s primary interest and focus in the first part of this story?
  6. On p. 37, 41 and elsewhere: how does the science stack up? What role does the science play in the story?
  7. Red Star was written to be popular reading – to appeal to proletarian readers and persuade them that socialism is the best way – and it went through several editions after the Revolution. Does it read to you like a best-seller? Why?
  8. After his scary dream our Leonid feels as if he should kiss Netti’s hand; on p. 42, “for some reason I felt involuntarily attracted to him.” Professor of French George Moskos (in his paper entitled “Getting Behind the Revolution: Alien Sexualities and the Sodomitical Scene in Red Star") reads the dream scene as a homoerotic moment. I’ll pick this up in the second set of reading questions for Red Star, but for now: how does Leonid’s attraction to Netti, and Menni's smiles when Leonid talks about Netti, impact your reading of their developing relationship, and their leaving the etheroneph together hand-in-hand (p. 59)?
  9. Our narrator Leonid is a mathematician – how does that impact his experience of the voyage?
  10. How socialist is he, compared to the Martians? Notice when their statements or answers surprise him.
  11. Why is our narrator so prone to vertigo?
  12. What do you make of Martian linguistics (p. 48)?
  13. What is the effect of Letta’s death (p. 50) – his own quick choice, the way that scene is described, our narrator’s reaction, the reactions of the others on the ship?
  14. Now and every time: what did you notice that these questions didn't point out?

Science and space travel form the matter of the first part of this novella, while the later parts concentrate on Martian society… I came up with a lot of questions this time, so please skim around until you find something interesting to you, instead of slogging through all of them.

If you’d like to look at the novella in Russian, see http://lib.ru/RUFANT/BOGDANOW/red_star.txt

More questions for reading:

  1. I’m glad we started the semester with a freshly translated work, and talked about its style etc. How does this translation read to you? (Charles Rougle has translated a number of other works from Russian: Nina Gurianova’s Exploring Color. Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde 1910-1918 [1999], Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism [1992], and Valentin Kataev’s Embezzlers [1972], among others. He also translates from Swedish, especially scholarly monographs on Russian literature, and is fluent in Finnish. He edited the 1996 AATSEEL critical companion to Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry. Very cool.)
  2. How does Russia appear in this work (in the narrator’s opinions and memories; in statements by the various Martians)? Before, Leonid commented that Russia was especially full of life, but on p. 96 he refers to himself as “Asiatic” (we’re presumably supposed to think that means backward or culturally inferior).
  3. Note the central planning of the system of labor and production; if you’ve taken Economics, how does the system described here stack up?
    Note too Menni’s comment, p. 66: “‘There is never any shortage of voluntary labor – work is a natural need for the mature member of our society, and all overt or disguised compulsion is quite superfluous.’” Socialists generally agree, and Russian SF will continue to assert once it becomes Soviet SF, that human beings MUST labor in order to be happy, never mind being productive members of society.
  4. p. 78: It turns out that socialist poetry rhymes and scans. In fact, Socialist Realism kept Russian poetry in a kind of “deep freeze” that lasted until the late 1980s; this was quite a bit less true of the Eastern and Central European countries, where interwar poetry looked much like the poetry in the rest of Europe or North America. Let me know if you’d like more information about this kind of thing.
  5. Enno says (p. 80) that curbing the birth rate is the last thing the Martians would resort to – and yet (as George Moskos points out) the sex and marriages we read about in Red Star apparently don’t lead to conception. Consider as you read on: Is this a sexual utopia, or just weirdly different from the earth?
  6. p. 85: Note the brief mention of the role of mutual blood transfusions – later this was Bogdanov’s big interest.
  7. Does the fact that Anna Nikolaevna, his former partner, is the first of the phantoms who approach him suggest that the break with her wasn’t as clean and painless as we were led to believe? Have the Martians misjudged his suitability, or the nature of human personality in general?

    SPOILER ALERT:
    If you’re reading these questions before you finish the novella, stop here and start again after you get to p. 93!
  8. p. 93: Netti reveals (in a surprisingly stylistically-marked way, not the calm and neutral way she has spoken until now) that she is a woman. This is much more shocking in Russian, because all the verbs and pronouns associated with Netti until now were masculine; the reader didn’t even question the idea that Netti was a man. (Linguistic plausibility: if you're from a language that doesn't distinguish gender in any grammatical way, it must be easier to speak with the other gender's forms - a kind of linguistic transvestism that is more typical of written language. On the other hand, since we're told Netti knows Russian quite well, having to use masculine forms when talking to Leonid must have reminded her constantly that she had to hide her sex from him - and thus perhaps creating an energy of repression that made him more attractive to her, highlighted his sex even as she hid her own?)
    Is this revelation something you expected? (Does it convey anything particular that it’s the phantom of his old revolutionary acquaintance Ibrahim – an “Asiatic” Muslim – who right before this asks Leonid “crudely” whether he really can't see who his doctor really is?) How about the ensuing love scene? The violence, maybe even pathology, of Leonid's desire? What light does it cast on the tininess (but strength) of Netti’s hand, and whole body? What’s the feeling of Netti giving him a Martian name, Lenni?
  9. You can’t tell this from the translation, but they don’t switch to using informal pronouns after they have sex and then become a couple. If you’re familiar with formal and informal second persons, how would you speculate on the meaning of this? (Mutual socialist respect?)
  10. Why did Netti encourage Enno to hide her gender as well? How about the eventual affair with Enno? (Why doesn’t she want to have children with him, if she rejects birth control for Martians? Why not just “resist his caresses”?) What can you infer about the sex drive on Mars from the behavior of these two women? What can you infer about the human sex drive from Leonid’s behavior?
  11. What do you make of Netti’s sexual history, once we learn it (p. 104: Eek, they’re not monogamous!), and Leonid’s pathological response? What are Leonid’s failures in Martian society – in your opinion, and in his own socialist self-criticism (pp. 134-5)?
  12. There's a certain trace of pathology in the Martian society as well: we hear about workers being sort of hypnotized by the rhythm of heavy machinery and barely being saved from going under the big hammer; Enno is prepared to commit suicide after ending her marriage to Menni; Menni himself is distracted and held back from his creative work by sex, and makes great leaps forward once she leaves him. Several of them speak in ways that make clear that Martians need to balance work and relaxation, that they are vulnerable to a variety of mental conditions that timely intervention and loving support from their fellows help to avert or eventually cure. What do you make of Netti's response to Leonid's murder of Sterni?
  13. What changes after Leonid returns to Earth, and has he “redeemed” himself by the time Netti returns to collect him?

A great book that would be relevant to this discussion, though it deals with later authors, is Eliot Borenstein's Men without Women: Masculinty and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 (in McCabe).

Perhaps the most interesting thing in this book is the trouble with gender and sexuality. George Moskos is right to point out queer elements of the text: Leonid's dream about Menni makes him feel powerless in a way that’s not entirely unpleasant; he wakes from that to feel attracted to Netti, taking her for Menni (and wanting to kiss her hand - both an erotic move and a pre-Revolutionary way to greet an upper-class woman); twice he refers to Netti as a brother or a man, which provokes Menni to smile. We later learn that Netti and Enno agreed to hide from Leonid that they were women - making the ship appear to be "manned" by a single-sex crew. When a woman is in drag (be it in the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare or in the misconception of our narrator), it always raises issues of gender and sexuality, who and what we are attracted to. As if (I think) Bogdanov means us to be concerned: uh-oh, Leonid’s attracted to this man Netti: what if he turns out to be gay? What if Menni is gay and smiles because Netti is not his brother, but his lover? Then we’re supposed to be relieved when he learns (and so do we) that Netti’s a woman. It’s telling that once Netti reveals her sex, Lenid says, “But please, let Menni remain a man, because it would be terrible if I were to fall in love with him!” – even though he’s free now to love Netti, the idea of falling in love with Menni seems to continue to trouble him, and Netti gives him an odd look. (?) Bogdanov seems to take it for granted that having women in a spaceship's crew would be dreadfully distracting to Earthmen - and even our calm Martian Netti has started a second marriage, with Letta, when she discovers that he has not known the pleasures of a woman's caress.

About Leonid’s heterosexual relationships: Once he finds out Netti is a woman, he thrusts himself on her, and she comments “your love is like murder” (does “your” mean Leonid’s, or does it mean all humans’? we can’t tell, since she’s using the formal/plural pronoun) After Netti leaves for Venus he starts sleeping with Enno, but then freaks out when he learns that Netti used to be married to Sterni (and at the same time to Letta, who at least is already dead so doesn't need to be murdered later). As an Earthman, he's plausibly a bearer of the old double standard - but why would a nice Martian like Netti be attracted to that? ("He killed my ex-husband, he must really care for me!") Troubling.

I'm leaving out the influence of the records of Sterni, Netti and Menni discussing what to do with the Earth, which definitely impacts Leonid's attitude towards Sterni. Their last conversation certainly shows Leonid as obsessed with both Sterni's marriage to Netti, and with Sterni's words about exterminating humanity; he's also barely articulate and certainly not in a normal mental state.

Bogdanov’s treatment of sex draws on the Victorian and general Christian distrust of sex, reflected in the asceticism of a lot of revolutionary fiction even when it was written by non-believers (Kollontai's an exception; Chernyshevsky’s exemplary Rakhmetov in What Is to Be Done sleeps on a bed of nails to mortify his flesh!). On the other hand, fin-de-siècle decadence made consideration of non-monogamy and even hints of homosexual attraction part of literary discourse and thus possible here. In the end it’s all right because Netti promises that she’ll be with him alone; because he’s been wounded in the revolutionary fight – “punished” for his violence with Netti, Enno, and Sterni, and maybe also tamed a bit by this physical suffering?

Return to the syllabus for Russian and East European Science Fiction.