Vladlen Yefimovich Bakhnov (b. 1924 in Kharkov/Kharkiv, now Ukraine) has led a double or even multiple life as a creative artist: he writes screenplays (often humorous) and also SF. Occasionally the two will overlap, as in his screenplay for the movie Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (the English-subtitled release is called Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future). The Ivan Vasilievich in question is better known as Ivan the Terrible; he leaps into an apartment in contemporary (well, almost) Moscow when a sweet but slightly mad scientist invents a time machine. Even better, the screenplay was based on a play by our friend Mikhail Bulgakov. Well worth watching! Bakhnov was also involved with the truly marvelous 1971 Soviet screen version of Il'f and Petrov's famous novel The Twelve Chairs - funnier than Mel Brooks.

Vladimir Il'ich Lenin died in 1924, and Bakhnov's first name is a tribute: Vlad(imir) Len(in).

Questions for reading "Fifth on the Left":

1. What facts suggest a lifestyle different from ours?
2. The ruling planet here is Oza, and the system they're running is obviously colonialist and capitalist. What's the effect of this setting?
3. Can you read this against the surface, as a criticism of sdomething other than capitalism and colonialism? (As Aesopian language, perhaps used to camouflage criticism of Soviet factory managers who doctor the production figures so they seem to have overfulfilled the Plan?)
4. But why limit our imperial comparisons to the Soviets and the Western imperialists? How does this compare to Kafka?
5. On yet another hand, isn't bureaucracy (and its books of regulations - see p. 146) always fun to mock?
6. The pictures AB C looks at during these meetings sound like the standard version of Marxist history (which, I add after class discussion, is fairly like the standard 19th century view of history until you get to the obligatory socialist and then the state-withered-away capitalist part). What scenes should come next, if he's looking at the scene of a slave-holding society that sounds so much like ancient Greece?
7. An interesting paper topic: reflections of ancient Greece in SF, starting with Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Ridiculous Man."
8. How does the society we glimpse on Oza compare to various utopias and dystopias?
9. On p. 151: what's the effect of the little wink where the author comments that AB C has "the makings of a decent sf writer"? Besides praising his gifts for fiction, what does it suggest about what science fiction writers accomplish with their stories?
10. How do you like the ending? - Much less violent than the layers of Soviet history the story obliquely recalls.

Sever Feliksovich Gansovsky (1918-1990) was from the generation born right around the Revolution (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born the same year); his first name means "North" in Russian, and the whole name sounds un-Russian. He was born in Kiev/ Kyïv, now Ukraine, and published his first science fiction work in 1960. He was extremely prolific, especially in the 1960s (inspiring influence of the Thaw?). He won an Aèlita Prize in 1989, at the age of 71. "Vincent Van Gogh" ("Винсент Ван Гог") was published in 1970 in the popular science journal Химия и жизнь (Chemistry and Life).

Questions for Reading:

1. The "future" parts of the story are set in 1995. What's the effeect of reading that over ten years later?
2. Ancient Russian wisdom: p. 54, "Both the past and future exist simultaneously, and meanwhile every moment varies."
3. How does the meddling with the past we see in the story compare wtih other cautionary tales of time travel?
4. What motivations are there for time travel besides the narrator's initial greed?
5. What do we learn about the past, from our gradually evolving narrator?
6. How smoothly is the information about Van Gogh integrated into the story? Are we more willing to read it because the artist is famous, hence we figure he is worth learning about? (How improving or educative are we willing to allow our pleasure reading to be?
7. How do the art history sections compare to the pseudoscientific parts of Solaris?
8. Though the narrator corrects his actions by "cutting the loop," why might Van Gogh seem to know what is going on? (p. 98)
9. How plausible are the depictions of the past, and of Van Gogh himself?
10. Note the narrator's comment on p. 111: "Wines, unfortunately, are not what they used to be." Well, at least something hasn't gotten way better in the future.
11. Is the moral transformation of our narrator believable? In what terms does it show itself?
12. And what are the Moral Lessons?

For bio- and bibliographical information about the Strugatskys, see the page of information and questions about them and their novella Escape Attempt. "Old-Timer" is from a collection called Полдень, 22-ой век (Noon: 22nd Century), first published in 1962 and translated in 1978. The man who emerges from the antique spaceship at the end of this story, Slavin, is a recurring character in the collection. In its first story, he is the first human born on Mars; later in the book, he is reintegrated into the society of his great-grandchildren, finds a job, meets a nice young woman...

Questions for reading:

1. Even though we're only reading one story from the "Nooniverse," how may a set of works that create and treat a single universe and even a single (albeit large) cast of characters differ from works that present individial plots or situations. (Perhaps this is comparable to the difference between a feature film and a continuing series.) What is the effect of the gathering information and familiarity on the reader?
2. The name "Slavin" comes from the word слава 'glory,' suggesting the heroic aura of the early cosmonauts. How does this story resemble or not resemble Bulychëv's "I Was the First to Find You"?
3. How would a listener react to Slavin's greeting, "Hello, great-grandchildren!"?

Ilya Iosifovich Varshavsky (1908-1974) was born in Kiev/ Kyïv, then the Russian Empire and now Ukraine. Aftr finishing school he worked as a naval mechanic. In 1929 he published one story ("Around the World Without a Ticket," co-authored with two others), and then published nothing else until the 1960s. The story is that he saw his son, an engineer and cyberneticist, reading a science fiction book and irritatedly asked how he could waste his time on such nonsense. His son said he should try to write some himself rather than complaining, and the rest is history. His emphasis on plot has been compared to O. Henry's. "No Alarming Symptoms" ("Тревожных симптомов нет") was written in 1964.

Questions for reading:

1. This story, like 'Fifth on the Left," seems to me ripe for reading in the Soviet context. How much do you know about Stalinism, the Terror, and the ways official Soviet history damped or even obscured both historical events and the biographies of victims of the Terror?
2. How would you describe the story's balance of funny and terrifying?
3. What nationalities are the names of the characters? What does that suggest about this society?
4. What does the work Krebs and Leroi do remind you of?
5. What does this story suggest about the role of unpleasant experiences, and memories thereof, in shaping a personality?
6. What happened to their son Henry?
7. Does the competitive, high-testosterone environment of Clarence's math activities ring true?
8. How does this story compare with Nesvadba's depiction of that cocky young Bauer in "Inventor of His Own Undoing"?

In general, it's always worth looking for ways to read the story in the context of its own time and from other possible vantage points. The Thaw (1956-64 or so) and the following period of Stagnation (1965-1985, more or less) saw much more ideologically interesting literature than the Stalinst period, during which a poem criticizing Stalin or even a funny prose sketch making fun of Soviet bureaucrats could get a person killed and leave his or her whole family in lasting danger. Soviet writers became experts at "Aesopian language," which could be read for a variety of hidden, ideologically subversive messages, and during the Cold War many Western readers were delighted to find these anti-Soviet threads. On the other hand, the authors were far from being uncritically pro-Western. These stories were translated within a Cold War dialogue that was part contest (the SF component of the Space Race!), part an altruistic attempt to make human connections that might make nuclear war less likely, but now we can begin to read them for their full complexity - to the extent that they contain ideological messages rather than just fun.

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