SF-TH Inc
Gods like Men: Soviet Science Fiction and the Utopian Self
Author(s): Elana Gomel
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, Soviet Science Fiction: The Thaw and After
(Nov., 2004), pp. 358-377
Published by: SF-TH Inc
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SCIENCEFICTIONSTUDIES,VOLUME31 (2004)
Elana Gomel
Gods Like Men: Soviet Science Fiction and the Utopian Self
Western science fiction is often seen as a playgroundof posthuman"terminal
identities"thatarise in the wake of the deathof the humanistsubject(Bukatman
9). These identities are overwhelminglycast in the mold of Donna Haraway's
cyborg: fluid, multiple, virtual, viral, "without clear boundary, frayed,
insubstantial,"underminingbinary logic (Haraway 177). In opposition, the
"traditional"humanistself is assumedto be unproblematicand ahistorical.It is
unified, masculine, individualistic, liberal, and autonomous, the Foucauldian
"figure"of the Man of the Enlightenment.
The binary of human/posthuman,however, is as suspect as most binaries.
It ignores the history of subjectivity,which is far more complex thatthe simple
declaration of the postmodern death of Man would suggest. The utopian
tradition,for one thing, has generatedmanyalternativeversions of subjectivity.
Among them the pride of place belongs to the Soviet New Man, the hero of
classic Soviet sf.
Slavoj 2izek discusses the roots of what he calls the "sublime"subjectivity
of the New Man in the cauldronof conflictingutopiasof the last century.1The
New Man originates in the dreamof a radicalrestructuringof both society and
the individual, a dream shared by Communism and fascism (despite their
different visions of what such a restructuringwould entail). The history of the
New Man's violent gestation and abortedbirth indicatesthat the cyborg is not
the only alternativeto the Man of the Enlightenment.The New Man challenges
the traditionalWestern notion of the self by offering an alternativethat is
simultaneously humane and violent, utopian and apocalyptic, familiar and
strange.
In what follows I will discuss representationsof the New Man in the Soviet
sf of the 1960s with the view of challenging the binary opposition human/
posthuman.I will argue that the subject of Soviet sf representsa distinct and
unique modality of the self, informed by the ideology of utopianhumanism,
whose imaginative triumphin Soviet sf (if not necessarily in Soviet society)
also, paradoxically,spells its dissolution.
The paradoxesof the Soviet New Man that I will outlinebelow express the
aporiaof the ideology thatunderpinshis creation.2This aporiastems from the
self-contradictoryrelationshipbetweenutopiaandhistory. On the one hand, the
Soviet utopia inscribes itself in history as its inevitableconsummation.On the
otherhand, Communism,as imaginedin Soviet sf, cancelshistoryandabolishes
change. Thus, the utopian subject is both dynamic and static, both a fluid
potentialityand a set goal.
A concomitantparadoxhas to do with so-called "socialisthumanism,"the
official ideology of the regime, one of whose slogans was "Proudto be a man"
("Chelovek-eto zvuchit gordo"). The Soviet New Man, as opposedto the Nazi
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Ubermensch, was supposed to be both humdrum and sublime, both
immeasurablybetter than, and the same as, the average citizen. This led to
some strange contortions, for the utopian subject had to hold fast to his
humanitywhile at the same time transcendingit.
The ideology of the text I will be discussing in the next sections is not the
same as the political views of its producer.It is takenfor grantedin the analysis
of Westernsf thatwhat Jamesoncalled "the ideology of the form" is relatively
independentof the intentionsof the author. But with regardto Soviet sf, and
Soviet literaturein general, it is still assumedthatto "linkpolitics andliterature
when we speak of the [Soviet Union] is natural,"politics being understoodin
the reductive sense of the author'sdissidentor orthodoxviews (Brown 1). As
a result, Soviet sf is often misreadin two complementaryways, both of which
stem from the refusal to analyze the Soviet text in terms of its own intrinsic
codes.
The first misreadingconsists in interpretingsf texts as dissidentallegories.
While an allegoricalelement is undoubtedlyimportantin Soviet sf, in particular
in the Strugatskybrothers'oeuvre, allegory and sf work at cross purposes, and
when the allegorical element preponderates,it can fracturethe text altogether
(see my "The Poetics of Censorship"). Sf constructsself-consistent fictional
worlds, while allegory requiresa "networkof topicalitywithin itself to standas
that Real which it will undertaketo neutralize"and thus the fictional world of
the text is "menacedby the wealth of allusionsto currentevents which threaten
to dissolve it altogether"(Jameson, "Of Islandsand Trenches"82). But it is the
sf level of the text that is shaped by those ideological assumptionsthat the
regime and the oppositionshare andthatenabletheir meaningfulconfrontation.
The second problematicstrategyof reading Soviet texts assumes that they
are "Marxist"by definition. But it is at best a very reductiveway to describe
the ideological apparatusof the giant Soviet state, which penetratedinto every
crevice of everyday life and shapedpeople's bodies, emotions, thoughts, and
desires, no less than it controlledthe means of production.The natureof this
ideology is to be elucidatedby the study of Soviet culturalproductionsrather
than by classifying texts according to the presumed degree of the author's
ideological commitment.3Ideology is located not in the regime's obligatory
slogans but in the corporealeconomy throughwhich the subject,with its drives,
pleasures, prohibitions,and identities, is constructedin discourse.
The main focus of my discussion will be on the period between the late
1950s and the early 1970s. This period is central to the history of the Soviet
Union. Still warmed by Khrushchev's"thaw"and not yet beginningthe long
slide into the twilight of the 1980s, ending with its inglorious collapse, the
Soviet regime appearedto be stable, thus allowing its intelligentsiato take stock
of the ideological underpinningsof socialism and to come to terms with the
Terror, whose extent was partially revealed by Khrushchevat the Twentieth
Party Congress in 1956. The generation of the 1960s was on the cusp of a
political change: the breedinggroundof the dissidentmovement, it still did not
abandonthe Revolution's utopian project. Very often, in fact, attackson the
regime were leveled in the name of a "pure" or "original" Communism
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distortedby the powers-that-be.Vsevolod Revich, the authorof the one of the
few historiesof Soviet sf, significantlytitled The Crossroadsof Utopias(1998),4
describes the excitementof the "generationof the 60s" whose attemptsto build
"socialism with a human face" he defends against the dismissive cynicism of
post-Communism Russia (7). Revich shows how central sf was to "the
experienceof the 60s" and credits it with "breakingthe chains"thathad bound
Soviet cultureduringStalin's era (199). The utopianself of the Soviet New Man
finds its most comprehensivearticulationin the sf texts publishedin this period.
Three writers unquestionablydominated the sf in the 1960s and their
influenceon the subsequentdevelopmentof the genre in the USSR andin Russia
is incalculableand exceeds the influence of any comparableWestern figure,
with the possible exception of H.G. Wells. These writers are Ivan Efremov
(1907-1972) and the brothersArkadyandBoris Strugatsky(ArkadyNatanovich
Strugatsky, 1925-1991; Boris NatanovichStrugatsky,b. 1933), who wrote in
collaboration.5The importanceof these writers in Soviet sf was such that their
"popularityamong Soviet readers was regarded as almost a law of nature,
separate from and beyond the statistics which shuffled the relative popularity
ratingsof all otherscience fiction writers"(Howell vii). Vsevolod Revichpoints
out that the publicationof Efremov's The AndromedaNebula (1957) had "the
effect of an explosion"thatset into motionthe dizzying developmentof sf in the
1960s, dominatedfirst by Efremov and then by the Strugatskys(198).
The Strugatskysare still highly regardedin post-CommunistRussia, while
Efremov has been identified with the lost utopian dream.6 But there is no
uninterruptedprogression from the Soviet utopia to contemporaryRussian sf,
which is stronglyinfluencedby Westernmodels andstill very muchin flux. The
distancebetween the two is measurednot in years but in political, ideological,
and social upheavals that have opened up an abyss between their cultural
contexts. The best of contemporaryRussiansf resembles Westernpostmodern
fabulationor magic realism more than it does its predecessor(the worst of it
equally resemblesWesterncommercializedfantasy, provingthatit is as easy to
write endless imitationsof Tolkien in Russianas in English). It may be tempting
to constructa literaryhistory thatdismisses Soviet sf as a relic of a bygone age,
now supercededby ideologically astuteandartisticallysophisticatedpostmodern
fiction. But this is a vast oversimplification. Soviet sf is a coherent body of
writingthatreflects the culturalandideologicalassumptionsof a civilizationthat
is not merely betteror worse thanthe postmodernglobal village but is radically
different from it.
The Future of the Past. The OctoberRevolutionof 1917 overturnednot only
the social order but also the order of literature:if the classic Russiantradition
is dominatedby psychological realism, the 1920s are markedby avant-garde
experimentation,a significant part of which is cast in a utopian and fantastic
mold. Writers such as Vladimir Mayakovski, Evgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail
Bulgakov, Aleksei Tolstoi, and Andrei Platonov all contributedto the literary
ferment that sought new forms and styles to capture the new world-in-themaking. Zamyatin's We (1924), Tolstoi's Aelita (1923), Bulgakov's 7heFatal
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Eggs (1926) and The Heart of a Dog (1925), and Platonov's Chevengur(1929)
in different ways express the sense of the Revolutionas an ontological change
that has inauguratednew forms of human subjectivity. The Russian artistic
avant-garde was marked by the shared belief that "art is a means of the
organizationof life and the creation of the New Man" (Heller 53). Even for
those writers who opposed the emerging Soviet orthodoxyand were eventually
purged, the responseto the utopianpromise of the Revolutionwas not identical
to the response to the violent policies of the Soviet government. The case in
point is Platonov, whose enigmatic Chevengur,brilliantlyanalyzedby Jameson
in The Seeds of Time (1994), equatesthe pursuitof utopiawith death, while at
the same time re-imaginingdeathas the ever-recedinghorizonof humandesire.
The main concernof fantasticliteraturein the 1920s andearly 1930s was the
fluidity of the "human"and the permeable boundarybetween the individual
body/self and the body politic. Bulgakov'sHeart of a Dog, a satiricalvariation
on Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau in which a street mutt is
surgicallytransformedinto a risingproletarianstar, is a case in point. Sharikov,
its hero, is hardly a positive image of the New Man, yet like Dr. Moreau's
(m)animalsubjects, he reflects the vertigo of self-remaking,in which the limits
of humanityare violently breached.
As the Terror and its concomitant ideological campaigns intensified, sf
became subject to policing, which severely limited its artistic options. The
imaginative vigor of the 1920s faintly lingers on only in the fantasies of
AlexanderBelayev and AlexanderGrinthatare safely removedinto an abstract
"Western"setting. Butcomparedto the artisticexperimentationof thepreceding
decade, such sf as was allowed to exist between the late 1930s and early 1950s
appears conservative and tame, a mildly fantastic version of the prescribed
SocialistRealism. In fact, the differencebetweenSocialistRealismandSocialist
sf becomes negligible at that time. Many of the ostensibly "realistic"texts of
Stalinismare unabashedlyutopian,not only in the sense of paintinga pictureof
life in the USSR thathas nothingin common with the sordidand violent reality
but also in their attemptsto develop a new conceptof characterthatreflects the
ongoing project of creatingthe New Man. Sf, on the otherhand, limited by the
new critical doctrineof "close targeting,"sets its sights on the very near future.
The result of this convergence is the creation of a shared literary world that
masks the horror of the Gulag in two senses: covering it up and yet also
outliningits contoursas a mask outlines the contoursof the face. This world is
both tender and brutal, both paradisiacaland paranoid. The utopiannovels of
GrigoryAdamov and the children's fantasiesof ArkadyGaidarare what might
be called the idylls of the Terror.7
The war years and their immediate aftermathsaw little sf. The death of
Stalin, the Twentieth Party Congress, and the publicationof Ivan Efremov's
AndromedaNebula in 1957 are the events thatinauguratedthe blossomingof sf
in the 1960s. The main task of 1960s sf, as of Soviet literaturein general,
remains the representationof the "new positive hero" forged by the "new
system of social relations"(Heller 142). The sf of Efremovandthe Strugatskys
depicts the Soviet New Man in his finest hour, free from the crushingfear of
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the Terror and the devastation of the war but not yet confronted with the
economic and political failure of state socialism. But at the same time, theirs is
a utopia on the verge of dissolution, eventuallyto be sappedby the twilight of
the 1970s and 1980s, briefly reanimated by the feverish flicker of the
perestroika,and finally sliding down into the darknessof historicalforgetting.
Soviet sf was not unawareof its Westerncounterpart.The IronCurtainwas
permeable both to Western ideas and Western goods. Cross-cultural
intertextualityplayed a significant role in Soviet sf. The Strugatskys'Hard to
be a God (1964) is engaged in a dialogue with AlexanderDumas's The Three
Musketeers, Ivan Efremov's "The Heart of the Serpent"(1963) with Murray
Leinster's "FirstContact"(1945), and Efremov's masterpieceTheHour of the
Bull (1968) with David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus(1920). Conversely,
many Soviet sf texts, from AndromedaNebula on, were translatedinto English
and enjoyed a moderatesuccess. But the mutualinfluence of the two kinds of
sf was temperedby culturalmisreadingand mistranslation,which caused, for
example, the Strugatskys'Hard to Be a God to be read as routinesword-andsorcery in the West, while Leinster's Cold War tale was read by Efremov as a
philosophical meditation on the forms of intelligent life. This cultural
mistranslationexemplifies the subtle but profound difference between the
Westernhuman(ist)subject and the Soviet New Man.
The subjectof Westernsf lives in space, the Soviet New Man in time. The
foundersof various galactic empires disregardhistory altogetherin pursuitof
new frontiers, and this spatial dispersal of humanity, as Jameson argues,
eventuallyleads to the "decentering"of the Westernsubject("Postmodernism"
319). The Soviet New Man, on the otherhand, marchesalong the one-way road
of historical progress toward the revelation of his own glorious self. But this
intimateconnection to temporalityleads to its own kind of "decentering,"for
the subject never quite coincides with the ideal. And moreover, history itself
suddenlydeviates from its utopianrouteand loops aroundin strangeandpainful
convolutions.
The historythatgives birthto the New Maneventuallybecomes his nemesis.
As the gap between Soviet ideology and the reality of its implementation
becomes impossible to ignore, the New Man turnsfrom a millenarianpromise
into an apocalypticthreat. And yet, at the same time, the New Man's wrestling
with history undermineswhat Tom Moylan calls "the instrumentalizationof
desire" (Moylan 28). Utopiacomes backprecisely at the pointof its dissolution,
but as an unfocused longing ratherthan as a bureaucraticblueprint.
The Cosmic Body. In Efremov's "Cor Serpentis"("The Heartof the Serpent"
[1963]), a spaceshipfrom the CommunistEarthsome millenniainto the future
meets its alien counterpart.This is a classic science-fiction situation, whose
paradigmaticnature is emphasized by the characters' discussion of Murray
Leinster's 1945 story "First Contact," in which the humansand the aliens, in
order to escape mutually assured annihilation, exchange their spaceships to
avoid having "to kill or to be killed for strictly logical reasons" (155).
Efremov's revision of "First Contact" suggests another, and extremely odd,
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logic of the interactionbetween the aliens andthe humans. Insteadof launching
missiles, the two parties strip naked and paradein front of each other.
The rationale for this cosmic striptease is given in a long lecture on
evolutionaryconvergence, which insists that rationalbeings must of necessity
be human-likeandthatno "intelligentmonsters"arepossible (37). Thus, nudity
acts as a validation of shared intelligence. The aliens and the humans are
identical in their physical perfection, which is described in terms rather
reminiscent of the eugenicist discourse that underpinnedthe muscle-bulging
(male) and the wide-hipped (female) Nazi nudes. But despite their mutual
attractions, human and alien bodies cannot touch: the aliens are fluorine
breathers.The story ends with a suggestionby one of the humancrew that the
aliens' genetic code be rewired so as to make them into oxygen breathers,with
the view of subsequentsexual and reproductivemingling of the two races.
Despite their ostensible ideological opposition, both Efremov's and
Leinster'stales are structuredby exchange, which is embeddedin, andenabled
by, the matrix of similarity. But if for Leinster this similarity is mental (his
aliens' physique is not even described), for Efremov mental kinship must be
underwrittenby physical identity. The same inseparabilityof intelligence and
human(and not merely humanoid)physical form is the crux of TheAndromeda
Nebula, in which the Great Ring of civilizations comprises exclusively human
beings, since the Universe containsno others.
Whatis the connectionbetweenutopia-for bothTheAndromedaNebulaand
"Cor Serpentis" are first and foremost utopias-and this cosmic
anthropomorphism,which is characteristicof Soviet sf as a whole, though
Efremovis its most articulatespokesman?Most run-of-the-millSoviet sf simply
takes the humanityof the cosmic Otherfor granted,as in, for example, Georgi
Martynov's Kallisto (1957), a pedestrian first-contactnovel that eventually
develops into an equally pedestrianutopia. It baldly states that there is nothing
surprisingaboutthe fact of biological identitybetweenthe humansandthe aliens
and leaves it at that. Perhapsmore surprising,or at least more revealing, is the
fact that the aliens have black skin but Caucasianfeatures, a slip of the pen
betraying the incipient racism rife in the Soviet Union (Martynov 136). The
notableexceptionis the Strugatskys,whose novels containnon-humanoidaliens;
I will refer to this seeming paradox below. Here my concern is with the
underlyingideological matrixof Efremov's representationof the utopianbody.
"CorSerpentis"is basedon the corporealeconomyof the Same, epitomized
by the symmetrical scene of looking, in which the four participants,a naked
male and female on each side, gaze at each other across the transparent
partition,substitutingthe identificationof the Lacanian"mirrorstage" for the
Symbolic exchanges of verbal communication.The gaze in this scene cancels
alterity through narcissistic doubling. The proposed exchange at the
end-fluorine for oxygen-is meant to erase the last remaining difference,
leading to the perfect equilibriumof endlessly proliferatingsimulacra.
Efremov's world of the Same, however, is not devoid of the Other. Rather,
it negates spatialdifference by emphasizinga temporalone. Its locus of alterity
is not another planet but another age. The uniformityof the human shape in
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Efremov is producedby convergent evolution ratherthan by dispersalfrom a
novels. The erasure
common point of origin, as in UrsulaK. Le Guin's HAINISH
of difference is not a restorationof some primordialunity but the end result of
an historicalprocess that begins with widely scatteredand biologically diverse
savage planets. This narrativeinvertsthe story of the Fall in both its theological
and Freudianincarnations:the pre-Oedipalbliss of sameness is situatedat the
end ratherthan the beginning of time.
Thus, time rather than space, assumes that priority which, according to
Broderick'sdefinitionof sf, is given to the unknownandthe differentover "the
individuated, the comfortingly quotidian, the known" (Broderick 156).
Efremov's chiseled bodies trail dark evolutionary histories, every bit as
threateningas the grotesqueshapesof "intelligentmonsters"in Westernsf. The
paean to the perfectionof the humanform in "Cor Serpentis"is precededby a
passionate denunciationof the horrors of biological evolution, with its blind,
wasteful, and randomcruelty. Similarly, the heroineof Efremov's most mature
novel The Hour of the Bull claims:
[O]nlymanhasthe rightto judgenaturefor theexcessivesufferingon theway
to progress.The enormouslylong evolutionaryprocesshas so far managed
neitherto delivertheworldfromanguishnorto findtherightwayto happiness.
If it is notovercomeby intelligentbeings,theoceanof painwill floodtheplanet
untillife's finalextinction....(422)
Efremov's image of temporalityis what he calls "the arrow of Ahriman"
-the tendencyof natureand history to maximize suffering. But if the arrowof
Ahriman unswervingly points to the inferno, how does the paradise of a
humanistutopia come into being? Since any idea of a supernaturalintervention
is excluded, the humanist subject appearsto be necessarily generatedby the
anti-humanistevolutionary process that is simultaneouslyrandomin its local
adaptationsand yet strictly teleological in that at the end it is boundto produce
a perfect humanbody.
In Soviet sf this paradoxgoes by the name of dialectics-Hegel dilutedby
the grade-schooldoses of Marxism-Leninism.As Soviet utopias demonstrate,
however, the core of the matteris ethical ratherthanphilosophicalor scientific.
The New Men appointthemselves judges of time and history. And yet at the
same time they derive their legitimacy from the very evolutionaryprocess that
they find morally abhorrent.Validatedby (evolutionary)history, they standat
the pinnacle of the pyramid of life and denounce its teeming, predatory,
sufferingfoundation.But if man indeedjudges naturefor its blind andrapacious
contingency, why should the human body be seen as anything but a chancy
conglomerationof parts? The suggestion of genetic engineering at the end of
"Cor Serpentis"paves the way for the creationof "intelligentmonsters,"just
as it covertly assails the criterion of beauty that Efremov elevates into the
foundationof his anthropology. If metabolismcan be tinkeredwith, why not
eyes, breasts, genitals?
This aporia, in which the arrowof Ahrimanmust somehow be bent into the
Great Ring without losing its directionality, reflects the New Man's double
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relationto history. If, as Soviet ideology confidentlypromises, utopiais to arise
out of the bloody chaos of class struggle, war, and state violence, it must be
both the consummationand the negation of the historicalprocess. The perfect
body of the utopian subject, which simultaneouslysums up and repudiatesthe
evolutionaryprocess thathas broughtit into being, is this paradoxmade flesh.
The utopiansubject finds his Otherin his own history, whose signatureis both
invisibleandineradicable.The ideologicalfissuresof utopiandiscoursegenerate
the uncannytableauof the naked men and women staringat each other across
the gulf of space and by the mutualconfirmationof their perfection, trying to
allay the anxiety generated by another gulf, that of time. And perhaps the
uncanniestaspect of this tableauis thatit tries so hardto pass itself off as simple
and natural.
Women and Other Supermen. In its anthropomorphism,Soviet science fiction
neutralizes the Other (of history) by the Same (of the body). In its
representationof gender it performs the opposite maneuver: it uses sexual
difference to stabilize its definitionof humanity.
The history of feminism in the Soviet Union is a complex andtangledissue,
for while the Revolution proclaimed the complete equality of the sexes, the
ingrainedsocial attitudesand the conservativefamily policies of the Stalin era
(approachingthose of the Nazi paradigm) created a paradoxical reality of
women's full participationin the labor force while they remainedburdened
with the traditionaldomestic roles as well. The gender politics of the Soviet
utopia seem, at first glance, simply to reflect this duality: women are, of
course, present in the futureCommunistsociety and ostensibly equal, yet they
mostly appearas the protagonists'wives and girlfriends.A closer investigation
reveals a far more paradoxicalpicture, however. Women may or may not take
center stage, may or may not be representedin terms of gender stereotypes,
may or may not be sexually liberated. But in whatever way each particular
writer interpretsthe gender divide, the presence of this divide is inescapable.
In other words, whatever form sexual difference takes (and it may even be
weightedto the advantageof women), it is imperativethattherebe a difference.
This is as true in the work of the female sf writers of the 1960s, such as Olga
Larionovaand ValentinaZhuravleva,as it is in thatof their male counterparts.
In Larionova'sLeopards vershinyKilimandzharo(TheLeopardon the Summit
of the Kilimanjaro, 1965), for example, the male protagonistis ratherweak,
while the two women who love him are strong and steadfast in the face of
approachingdeath (the premise of the novel is that in the future Communist
society it is possible, if one so chooses, to know the exact dateof one's demise).
But the basic structureof the traditionalromantictriangle is left undisturbed,
while the women, despite their strength, closely correspondto the feminine
stereotypesof the Snow Queen and the rebellious but loyal girl-child.
In the Strugatskys' utopia Noon, XXII Century (The Return) (1966), the
future Communist society is deliberately "unglamorous":despite all the
wonders of technology, the abolitionof private property, and profoundsocioeconomic transformations,the people are ordinary,even humdrum.One of the
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stories in the Strugatskys'novel, which is composed of independentepisodes,
is programmaticallytitled "Almost the Same" (as ourselves). When a twentyfirst-centuryspacemanwho has time-jumpedinto this utopialooks at his "greatgrandchildren,"he is surprisedto see "quiteordinarypeople. Middle-agedand
young, tall and short, beautiful and plain. Men and women" (85). This
"ordinariness"is emphasizedin the representationof love. Couples court and
marryin exactly the same way as educatedSoviet men and women courtedand
married in the 1960s, with the same rituals of masculine pursuit, feminine
bashfulness, and eventual friendly cohabitation,in which public references to
sexuality are discreetly reducedto an occasional kiss. The pangs of unrequited
love are renderedinto the formulathata male characterin anotherStrugatskys'
novel, Escape Attempt(1962), sums up as "I love a girl, the girl does not love
me but likes me and treats me well" (28). Women as objects of desire are
marginalized in order to maintainthe equilibriumof homosocial friendships,
while women as subjects of desire are simply absent.
Whatis peculiaraboutthis persistenceof traditionalgenderroles, however,
is the fact that their main matrix, the family, has been dismantled.As in all
Communistutopias, children from an early age are rearedcommunallyin the
boardingschools. In anothernovel, Voikunskiand Lukod'ianov'sTheSurge of
the Star Seas (Plesk zvezdnykhmorei, 1967), where the emotional bond of
marriageis emphasized, the parent-childbond is neverthelessextremelyweak.
Patriarchyhas traditionallyjustified itself on the basis that motherhood is
women's "natural"burden. But in Soviet sf this burdenis lifted andyet gender
roles, ratherthan disappearing,seem to ossify.
The representationof women in Efremov's work is at the opposite pole to
that of the Strugatskys.' Women characters are very prominent in The
AndromedaNebula where-unlike in the Strugatskys'-they are included in
spaceship crews. And Efremov's dystopia/utopia The Hour of the Bull,
structuredlike Le Guin's The Dispossessed by the oppositionof two societies,
may claim the title of one of the most feminist sf texts ever written, if feminism
means delineationof strong and memorablefemale characters.It is the men in
the novel who suffer from feminine "invisibility,"while the women, including
the formidablecommanderof the space-faringexpeditionFai Rodis, are both
vivid and central to the plot. Romanticlove is supplantedby erotic magnetism,
which is representedwith startlingfranknessand analyzedat equally startling
length. But this magnetism, symbolized by the frequently invoked myth of
Circe, is a product of biologically perfect femaleness, necessarily different
from, and opposed to, biological maleness.
The plot of the novel confronts the utopian Earth (older than the Earthof
The AndromedaNebula) with the dystopian society of the human-populated
planet Tormance, its name borrowedfrom David Lindsay's allegorical fantasy
A Voyage to Arcturus. Lindsay's novel probes the metaphysical issue of
suffering, which Efremov translatesinto social terms. Both, however, make a
connection between pain and sexual difference. For Lindsay, sexuality is part
of the spirit's confinementin matter,which his protagonistlongs to escape, only
to find himself locked in a vicious circle of sexual attractionand repulsion.
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Efremov's logic of sex is equally circular, for while insisting that sexual
difference as conceptualizedin capitalist societies is painful and perverse, he
can oppose it only with more of the same. The social infernoof his Tormance
generates the sadomasochistic dynamics of male domination and female
submission,while the utopiaof Earthcreatesthe ostensiblyfree andequalEros.
But this utopiais in no sense matriarchal;ratherit empowerswomen by making
them "better"men thanmen themselves. And this empowermenttakesthe form
of phantasmagoriccorporealexchanges, in which the New Woman is equated
with the phantasmof the phallic mother.
The phallic mother in Freud is a fantasy created by the masculine fear of
castration,which endows women with an imaginaryphallus in order not to be
confrontedwith the disturbing"absence"of theirgenitalia.Deployingthe image
of the phallic mother, in other words, is a way to preserve the binary of
male/female by creating phantasmagoricbodies that unite the poles of this
dichotomy without questioning or undermining it. In Lindsay's novel, for
example, there is a character called Oceaxe, who combines the "bold,
masterful, masculine egotism of manner"with "the fascinatingand disturbing
femininityof her voice" (88). It turnsout thatOceaxe, a fantasticfemme fatale,
"absorbs"weak males, symbolicallystealingtheirphalluses. Efremov'swomen
also seem to have "absorbed"their pale masculine counterparts.Their Circelike power has a dark, disturbingaspect, evident in the fact that its exercise
uponmales of Tormanceinvariablyresultsin outbreaksof violence andsuicide.
Not only the sexual power but even the physique of Efremov's women is
informedby a fantasyof genderplenitudethat recuperatessexual difference in
the very act of apparentescape from it. Before the landing on Tormance, for
example, the cosmonautsseal themselves in metal shells that cling as close as
a second skin. Their heads are unprotected,so the shells are useless as bacterial
filters (theirostensible purpose). Instead,they wrap the body in a shiningmetal
film, which is proof against"knife,bullet, andheat ray," andsexualpenetration
(107, 191). Even though both men and women wear the shells, the metallic
bodies that are described in lavish detail are exclusively female. This utopian
femaleness, hard, impregnable,alluringbut untouchable,always erect, is the
phallic mother made flesh.
And if women are transformedinto steely walking phalluses, men display
traditionally feminine characteristics. When Rodis suggests that a male of
Tormance be taken to the Earth spaceship and remade in the utopian mold,
taught "how to control [his own] body and feelings and how to subdueothers,
if necessary," the chosen man refuses, preferring to dedicate himself to
"kindness, love, charity, and care of others," all traditionalfeminine tasks
(303). Even when men are violent, their violence is representedas a result of
weakness. When an Earth woman is wounded by a Tormance man, he
immediately turns his knife upon himself. And it is not only the damaged
Tormancemales but also theirutopiancounterpartsthatare more emotionaland
impulsive than women. In The AndromedaNebula, for example, the scientist
Mwen Mass, swayed by his uncontrollableattractionto a lovely alien female
seen on the screens of the GreatRing's communicationdevice, conductsa rash
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and dangerous experiment that results in the deaths of several people. He is
redeemed by two strong and steadfastwomen, his lover CharaNandi and his
friend Evda Nal.
Such reversals may seem very appealing when opposed to the weak or
absentwomen charactersof other Soviet utopias, but they are equallycaughtin
the binary logic of gender. Efremov's utopia inverts misogyny without
transcendingit. If the phallic mother is a sort of female man, to appropriate
JoannaRuss's expression, her counterpartis a male woman. But in whatever
way the gender attributesof masculinity and femininity are shifted around,
gender itself is never questionedas the necessary and sufficient characteristic
of a humanbeing. Efremov's muscularheroines and the Strugatskys'wilting
wives are two sides of the same coin. Both are images of gender as the
inescapable "matrix"of humanity.
Judith Butler claims that "the matrix of gender relations is prior to the
emergence of the 'human"' (7), and Soviet utopianscience fiction provides a
stunningillustrationof this thesis. Whethermisogynist or quasi-feminist,the
New Man strives hard to preserve his humanityagainstthe corrosive forces of
history that both bring him into being and constantlythreatento turnhim into
something "new and strange." Sexual difference is a major way to keep
humanityin place by hitching it to the grid of gender. Hierarchyof the sexes is
less importantthan their difference since this difference is what assures the
survival of the human subject. But Soviet utopia absolutelyexcludes "a sexual
economy ... founded on sexual indeterminacyratherthan sexual difference"
(Hurley 213). Soviet sf of the 1960s is neither necessarily prudish nor
conservative; it can imagine alternativesocial roles for men and women but it
cannot make sexual difference itself a subject of "estrangement,""exploring
and questioning the ways in which 'woman' and 'man' are literally, and
literarily, constructedwithin society" (Broderick55). And the reason for this
incapacityis the insistence on the New Man's humanity. In The Surge of the
Star Seas, for example, the future Communistsociety is in turmoil when it
appearsthatthe colonists on Venus deviate from the humannorm. The conflict
is symbolically resolved when the protagonist,named Ulysses, returnsto the
bosom of his Venusian family, finding in the traditional gender roles
reconfirmationof his own andothercolonists' essentialhumanity.The mother's
embrace validates the New Man's manhood, even if the mother in questionis
phallic.
The Other. The inscriptionof gender in Soviet science fiction encapsulatesits
general dynamics: the more it changes, the more it remainsthe same. Utopia,
like Alice in Wonderland,rushes forward in order to remain in place. At the
end of Noon, XXII Centuryone of the charactersimagines history as a spiral
that inevitablyturns in upon itself: "Manbegan with Communismand returns
to Communism" (318). Symptomatically, the novel is subtitled Return.
Efremov's Great Ring is anotherimage of this energetic stasis.
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But history refuses to standstill, as the dramatichistory of the USSR itself
cogently demonstrates. Soviet sf conveys the subject's increasing alienation
from temporalitythroughthe recurringimages of monstersout of time.
In TheHour of the Bull an ancientspaceshippopulatedby a maskedcrew of
the dead, a Galactic Flying Dutchman,passes close to Tormance.The episode
of this ship, whose shrieking passage throughthe darknessof space fills the
humanobserverswith "unaccountablerevulsion," is unconnectedto the plot: it
intrudesinto the utopian/dystopiandialogue like a phrase in an alien tongue,
meaningless and yet signifying another, and unreachable,horizon of meaning
(296). It is the only point in the book at which both Earth and Tormance
charactersreact to the events in exactly the same way, with depression and
anxiety, momentarily united by the common "resistance to this inhuman"
(Lyotard7).
Jean-FrancoisLyotard distinguishesbetween "two sorts of inhuman" of
history and of the psyche, the "inhumanityof the system" and "the infinitely
secret one of which the soul is hostage" (2). Sf often uses these two
interchangeably,as metaphorsfor each other. Efremov's alien spaceshipstirs
the common sediment of atavistic fears in the souls of those who witness its
passage. But the most impressive image of the connection between the "two
sorts of inhuman"is the evolution of the alien Wanderersin the Strugatskys'
oeuvre. Like Efremov's spaceship, the Wandererscome from outer space,
develop into a symbol of history, and end up lodged at the core of the utopian
subject,becoming the "nonhuman[thatis] locatedwithinhumanity"(Rose 33).
A mysteriousrace that leaves its artifactson dozens of planetsbut is never
encounteredface to face, the Wanderersfirst appearin Afternoon,XXIICentury
as a jarring note in the novel's bland symphonyof utopianboredom. In one of
the stories thatcomprise the novel, the space explorerGorbovskiwarns against
the shock and humiliation of meeting a truly alien intelligence. Echoing
StanislawLem's preoccupationin Solaris with the cognitive andmorallimits of
Nietzsche's "human, all too human," Gorbovsky muses on the mutual
incomprehensibilityof differentkinds of intelligence. His interlocutorconsoles
himself with the thoughtthat if the totally Other exists, it will be outside the
humancognitive universe and thus irrelevantto it. It turnsout, however, that
like the living ocean of Solaris, the alien Wanderersmeddle with humanity:
Gorbovskyhimself is implantedwith their transmitter
The Wanderers' influence grows throughout the Strugatskys' oeuvre,
culminatingin two late novels, Beetle in the Anthill (1979-80) and The Waves
Still the Wind (1985-86). From an epistemological quandarythe Wanderers
become a moral one, shifting from the indifferentcomplexity of what Lyotard
calls "a cosmological chance" (7) to the alienating complexity of history.
Already in Escape Attempt(1965) the Wanderersare deployed as a metaphor
for the forbiddensubjectof genocide. In the novel a Soviet WorldWar II POW,
Saul, escapes into the Communistfutureand goes on an interstellarjaunt with
two young men. They discover a human-populatedplanet dotted with
concentrationcamps, whose brutish masters use the never-endingstream of
strange machines left behind by the Wanderersto tortureand kill the camps'
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inmates. Saul tries and fails to stop the machines and then returnsto his own
time and dies heroically in a battle with Nazis. "History,"he says. "Nothing
can be stopped"(1 18). History in the novel becomes not the spiralof humanism
but an alien streamthatsweeps its helpless subjectstowardsmass graves andthe
crematorium.
In the Strugatskys' masterpiece Roadside Picnic (1972), the aliens (not
named as the Wanderersbut resemblingthem in their mysteriousness)land on
Earthand lift off again, leaving behinda scatterof incomprehensibleandhighly
dangerousartifactsin six sharplydefined Zones. The novel is concernedwith
human reactions to this cosmic event, and especially with the culture of
smuggling and exploitation that develops around the Zones. It ends
ambiguously, with the protagonist, Red Schuchart,penetratingdeep into the
Zone to face the mythic Golden Ball, which is supposedto grant all wishes.
Precisely as he cries out, "HAPPINESSFOREVERYBODY,FREE, AND NO
ONE WILLGO AWAY UNSATISFIED!"the narrativestops (152). Stanislaw
Lem, in his analysis of RoadsidePicnic, claims the aliens representthe cosmic
"inhuman,"whose opacity to the human intellect results from the fact that
natureis incommensurablewith ourculturallycontingentattemptsto understand
it (244-5 1). FredricJameson, on the otherhand, sees in the novel's ending "the
unexpectedemergence, as it were, beyond 'the nightmareof History' and from
out of the most archaic longings of the human race, of the impossible and
inexplicable Utopian impulse here none the less briefly glimpsed" ("Progress
Versus Utopia" 157). These two readings are not mutually exclusive: they
suggest a metaphorical connection between the opacity of nature and "the
nightmareof history."
The Zone in the novel is a place of horrors, whose alien artifactsseem to
have no other function than mutilatingthe humanbody in a variety of highly
imaginative ways. Lem's epistemological reading cannot explain the
contradictionbetween the indifferenceof the alien intelligence and the malice
of its gifts. A key to this contradictionlies in the word "zone," one of the most
loaded ones in the Soviet vocabulary,a slang name for the Gulaguniverse. The
alien Zone is the locus of history that turns unruly and perverse, delivering
concentrationcamps insteadof the promisedparadise.
In the Strugatskys'novels writtenclose to the end of the Soviet Union, the
"politicalunconscious"of their earlier utopiasis laid bare. The Wanderersare
now clearly linked to the creation of the utopian subject, a project that is
condemned as dangerous and futile. In Beetle in the Anthill (1979), the
Wanderersattemptto interferein humanevolution, leaving a "gift"of fertilized
ova, which develop into speciallyendowedchildren.Whenone of these children
is about to come into his superhumaninheritance, he is killed by a Special
Service agent, who justifies the murder by the necessity to safeguard the
humanityof Communistsociety. But such desperatemeans only underlinethe
failure of the New Man, the failure that at this point is evident to the Soviet
intelligentsia, even as the USSR still clings to the old slogans that now ring
increasinglyhollow.
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In the sequelto the novel TheWavesStillthe Wind(1985), all attemptsto
veil the horrorof historyby cosmicmetaphorsare dropped.The inhumanis
arenowrevealedtobe thenatural
firmlyplacedwithinhumanity.Thesupermen
themselvesare
resultof humanevolutionandtherearehintsthattheWanderers
no aliens but "ludens," the Strugatskys'sterm for New Men, punningon the
Russian word for "people." The inhumanis a product of history, as time,
leadsit awayfromitself,generating
insteadof preservinghumanity,inexorably
self-alienation
andself-difference.
betweenthestatic
Theaporiaof theSovietutopiainscribesthecontradiction
of human-as-inhuman,
andthedynamiccontinuity
opposition
of human/inhuman
betweenprogress
open-endedness,
betweenhistoricalteleologyandevolutionary
and contingency.Lyotarddescribesthis contradictionas that between a
"mythic"and a "modem"conceptof diachrony.In the mythicconceptthe
and "humanbeingshave as theironly taskthatof
endingis predetermined
unfoldingidentitiesalready constitutedin synchronyor achrony"(67).
on the otherhand,is "away of shapinga sequenceof moments
"Modernity,"
(68). TheSovietutopia
in sucha waythatit acceptsa highrateof contingency"
is caught in a double bind: by accepting "the contingencyand freedom proper
to the human project," it runs the risk of achieving results opposite to its
humanistethos (Lyotard69). But this centralcontradictionof modernityturns
into a particularly ugly paradox in the USSR, as the Zone graphically
demonstrateswhat horrorshistory can deliver when it runs out of control.
The Enemy. The only acceptable venue for representing mass violence in
Sovietsciencefictionof the 1960s(as in muchof Sovietpopularliteraturein
general)was WorldWarII, or theGreatPatrioticWar,justas thetrueenemy,
the one whose negativerepresentationwas underpinnedby real passion, was the
fascist, the Nazi Ubermensch.Fascism, rather than faceless capitalism, was
hated with a vengeance and during the Cold War America and its allies were
often labeled "fascists."Most Soviet dystopiastake fascism andNazism as their
startingpoint,depictingeitherthe survivalof a Nazi enclaveor, moreoften,
constructingimaginarysocieties based on the Nazi model.
The irony, of course, lies in the fact that both Communismand fascism in
its many varieties (including Nazism) are ideologies of the New Man. Their
models for the utopian subject are different, leading to frequent
misunderstandingand misrepresentationof the Nazi in Soviet literature.
Referringto the image of "the fascist" in the USSR, Russianscholar Mikhail
Ryklin writes: "The two totalitariansystems turnedout to be totally opaqueto
each other, since the direction and logic of terrorwas completely different in
each case" (815). Especially during the Great Terror, however, there was a
noticeablerapprochementbetween the Soviet New Man andwhatthe scholarof
the psycho-dynamicsof fascism Klaus Theweleit calls the Nazi "manof steel."
Stalin deliberatelychose a name for himself which is derived from the Russian
word for "steel" (Stalin's real name is Dzhugashvili; "Stalin" is a nom de
guerre).
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The utopias of the 1960s, written after the disclosure of Stalin's atrocities,
aregenerallyat painsto oppose the sadistic, cold-blooded,andarrogantviolence
of the Ubermenschto the humanismof the Soviet subject. Occasionally this
opposition collapses, however, and the two New Men are revealed as two
different modalities of the same utopiansubject.
Sever Gansovky's story "Demon of History" (1966) suggests that the
horrors of the Holocaust are intrinsic to the fabric of history, which in
accordancewith the Marxistview is representedas guidedby ineluctablelaws.
But these laws are demonic ratherthanprovidential,andthe final destinationof
progress is not a utopia but a mass grave. The protagonistof the story travels
back in time to assassinatea nameless dictatorwho has built death camps and
killing fields, only to find out on his returnthathe has inadvertentlyenabledthe
rise of Hitler and the existence of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The dictator,
Hitler's alter ego, is referred to as the Father of the Nation, a cognomen
resonatingwith Stalin's titles. The tragic tenor of the story, borrowing from
Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, reflects the disillusionmentof the Soviet
intelligentsiawho were beginningto realize thatthe GreatPatrioticWarwas not
a fight between good and evil but a clash of two bloody tyrants.
I have already referred to a similar covert conflationbetween Nazism and
Stalinism in the Strugatskys'Escape Attempt, where the concentrationcamp
common to both regimes functionsas the "repressed"of utopia. In theirBeetle
in the Anthill, the would-be supermanLev Obalkin'sobsession with power and
manipulationalso suggests the Ubermensch.But it is Efremov's eugenically
perfect Earthmenin The Hour of the Bull who most uncannilyresemble their
Nazi counterparts,all the more uncannilybecause this resemblanceis clearly
unintentional.
Their flawless bodies clad in steel, their minds filled with images of "IndoAryan"mythology, Fai Rodis and her crew strutamong the vaguely "Asiatic"
inhabitantsof Tormancelike the fulfillmentof an S.S. wet dream. They talk of
"degeneration," while the cowed nativesworshiptheir "inhuman"beauty(157).
When the ruler of Tormance asks Rodis to bear him a superhumanchild, she
contemptuouslyrefuses, explainingthatthe appearanceof a supermanin a fallen
society would only create more suffering (322). But from Efremov's point of
view this does not constituteracism. There is no racism on CommunistEarth
because there are no races: all diversity has been abolished, all physical and
mentaldifference deliberatelyreducedto fit one godlike type, the male with the
"wide shouldersof the fighter and the builder"and the female with the "wide
hips" of the mother of the race ("Cor Serpentis"64).
In presenting this eugenicist utopia, Efremov deviated from the Soviet
consensus sufficiently to have The Hour of the Bull encounter some official
displeasure. Soviet ideology, as opposed to Nazism, was based on "nurture"
rather than "nature"and had a strong Lamarckianelement, evident in the
deified statusof the quackbiologist Trofim Lysenkoduringthe Stalinistperiod.
The so-called "school of Efremov" in the 1980s magnified these quasi-Nazi
elements in the master's heritage into a full-blown rightist and nationalist
ideology. But there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Efremov's own
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Communistcommitment. The biological superiorityof the New Man in The
AndromedaNebula and The Hour of the Bull is the resultof the in-builttension
between humanism and perfectionism, between history and utopia, in Soviet
ideology itself. The temptationof eugenics, in bothits positive (bio-engineering)
and negative (extermination)varieties, is inescapablypresentin the structureof
the Soviet subject, as Bulgakovpresciently recognized in TheHeart of a Dog.
The inhuman beauty of Efremov's protagonists is the obverse side of the
inhumanityof the camps. And there is a bitter irony in this Siamese pairingfor
the society whose collective identity was largely based on the victory over
Nazism. We have defeated the enemy only to discover that it is ourselves.
The Ends of Man. Thus, the humanistethos of Soviet sf evolves into its own
posthumanity. This is the central-and unresolvable-paradox of Soviet sf,
predicated on the mutual split, and mutual interdependence,of history and
utopia. To preserve his fragile humanity,the subjectof Soviet sf embarkson a
hopeless battle against time. The ultimate Other is neither the phantom
capitalist,afterall, nor the spookilyfamiliarUbermensch,buttemporalityitself.
In The AndromedaNebula the goal of Mwen Mass's heroic experimentis to
avenge the countlesswastedgenerations,whose lost lives demanda "battlewith
time" (149). And in The Hour of the Bull, the dark "rootsof the universe"that
are encounteredon the boundaryof ordinaryspace-timeare associatedwith the
pervasive, almost obsessive, images of war and atrocity(51). The splendorof
the utopian achievement is precariously floating on the dark tide of history,
symbolized by the twin images of the "arrowof Ahriman"and the "inferno,"
the self-perpetuatingsocial hell.
But if history is hell, how can utopia come into being? The ruler of
Tormance asks Rodis: "How could it happenthat the ravished, robbedplanet
turnedinto a marvelousgarden,andits savage, faithlessinhabitants-into loving
friends?" (175). And to this question neither Soviet sf nor Soviet history can
provide any answer.
The story of the New Man is yet to be written: this essay provides only a
snapshot.But what even this brief look indicatesis thatutopiacontainsthe seeds
of its own downfall. Its subject cannotbe squeezed into an immutablematrix,
whetherof Soviet humanismor of Nazi bio-transcendence.As Nietzschepointed
out, the New Man is a process ratherthan a goal, open-endedand contingent,
borne away on the tide of history, which cannotbe arbitrarilydammedwhen the
desired state is achieved. History, in the words of Saul in the Strugatskys'
Escape Attempt,cannotbe stopped.The inhuman,insideandoutsidethe psyche,
is the foundationof humanity.
But the flux of history also contains the seeds of utopia's regeneration.
Jameson's distinctionbetween the static utopia and what he calls "the utopian
impulse",elaboratedby Tom Moylan, KrishanKumar,andothers, suggeststhat
the roots of utopia lie in the desire for "somethingelse," which transcendsits
instrumentalizationin the normative schemes of a brave new world. The
posthumanterminalidentitiesof sf are less importantas blueprintsfor the future
than as indicatorsof dissatisfactionwith the present. And this dissatisfaction
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links the half-forgotten Soviet New Men with their cyborg successors. The
unravelingof the New Man, documentedby those very texts that attemptedto
representhis triumph,testifies to the survivalof the utopianimpulseeven in the
prison-house of the Soviet institutionalutopia. This is not a simple matterof
resistance to the regime. Rather, it is the self-unraveling of an ideology
confrontedwith its own inner paradoxes,of a humanismthatushers in its own
negation. The End of Man in Soviet science fiction illustrates Jameson's
paradox of the utopian death-wish: "Utopia is ... anonymity as an intensely
positive force, as the most fundamental fact of life of the democratic
community;and it is this anonymitythatin our non- or pre-Utopianworld goes
by the name of death " (Seeds of Time 128).
Utopia, then, is not any specific image of perfection but rather the
dissolutionof all such images in the acid of desire. The deathof utopialiberates
the imaginationto conceive of alternativesto normative identity that are not
bound by the dichotomies of old/new, male/female, or human/posthuman.
Perhaps the truly utopian images in the texts I have discussed are not the
eugenically perfect New Men and the steel-clad superwomenbut the faceless
Wanderers,the darknessof space, and the vertigo of time, in which names and
identities blur and dissipate. These images indicate that the utopiansubject is
neither the humanist One nor the postmodern Many but rather that very
temporal process that both creates and underminesall modalities of human
subjectivity.Paradoxically,the only pathto utopiais pointedat by the arrowof
Ahriman.
NOTES
1. All early-twentieth-centuryradicalideologies, whether "left" or "right,"shared
the utopiandreamof the New Man that2izek describesas "manas harmoniousbeing ...
a New Man withoutantagonistictension" (5). Both Nazism and Communismaimed for
an anthropologicalrevolution, or what the French fascist thinker Drieu La Rochelle
called "the revolution of the body." Spurredby late-nineteenth-centuryevolutionary
thought, the desire for a perfect society was transmutedinto the longing for perfected
man. The endlessly reiteratedgoal of Nazism was the birthof the new subjectof history,
which Otto Strasser,one of the volkischideologues, calls "thenew type of humanbeing"
(qtd. in Griffin 115). A similar rhetoric, with a similarbiological emphasis, was partof
Soviet discourse, especially in the 1920s, the main difference being that it emphasized
the Lamarkianflexibility of heredity. Aron Zalkind, a prolific and popular political
writer of thatperiod, claimed in Pedologia thatproletariansare geneticallypredisposed
to correct philosophicalthinking. But even apartfrom such extreme cases, the creation
of the New Soviet Man was a professed goal of the Soviet State and Zizek's discussion
of this new ideological subject applies both to fascism, in its many varieties, and to
Communism. See also Griffin and Theweleit for analyses of the fascist New Man.
2. The New Man of both Nazism and Communism is of course a man, so the
masculinepronounis fully warranted.Below I will discuss the relationshipof the utopian
subject to gender.
3. I deliberately disregard the extratextualpolitical backgroundof the writers I
discuss, such as the presumeddegree of their compliance with the regime, the rivalry
between Ivan Efremov and the Strugatskys,and the latters' dissidentgestures. Nor will
I discuss the rise in the 1980s of the so-called "Efremovschool" of sf, which comprised
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375
hacks with frankly neo-fascist and conservative political agendas, even though the
question of the relationshipbetween their overt ideological platformand the intrinsic
ideological structure of Efremov's texts is fascinating. Such political backgroundis
undoubtedlyimportantfor a comprehensivestudy of Soviet sf. But my goal here is not
only narrower but altogetherdifferent: to study the intrinsicutopian "ideology of the
form" of the genre at mid-centurywith regardto its delineationof the humansubject.
4. All the Russiantitles andquotationsare in my translation,unless otherwisenoted.
Transliterationis according to the US Libraryof Congress system.
5. A similar assertion is made in Heller, one of the first comprehensivestudies of
Soviet sf publishedbefore the collapse of the USSR.
6. Post-Soviet sf writer Vyacheslav Rybakov wrote a parody of Efremov's Te
AndromedaNebula titled Proschanie slavyankis mechtoi(roughlymeaningFarewell to
a Dream, 1991), which is a bitter reckoningwith the failed Soviet utopia. Nevertheless,
the work is dedicatedto Efremov, whose belief in the possibilityof a qualitivelydifferent
future is regardedwith a mixture of nostalgia and cynicism.
7. Adamov wrote three science-fictionnovels dealingwith the "conquest"of Nature
hinderedby perfidiousenemies-in-disguisethatperfectlyreflect Stalinism'scombination
of romanticismand paranoia. The novels are Pobedityelinedr (The Conquerorsof the
Interior, 1937), Tainadvuchokeanov(TheMysteryof TwoOceans, 1939), andIzgnaniye
vladyki(Exile of the King, 1941-46).
8.This, of course, intensified the writers' mutual animosity; Arkady Strugatsky
claims that The Return was written as a polemical response to Efremov's Andromeda
Nebula, which the brothersfelt lacked "people" (qtd. in Revich 246).
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SOVIET SCIENCEFICTIONAND THE UTOPIANSELF
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ABSTRACT
This essay deals with the representationof the New Man in Soviet sf. The New Man is
the ideal subjectwhose creationwas one of the centralgoals of Soviet civilization. Soviet
sf reflects the ideological paradox underlying his aborted birth: the New Man was
supposedto come into being as the culminationof the historicalprocess and, at the same
time, to negate the contingency and violence of history. The article focuses on the
articulationof this paradoxin the canonical works of Ivan Efremov and the Strugatsky
brothers and analyzes such aspects of the New Man as anthropomorphism,gender,
violence, and relationto the Other.
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