We Modern People by Anindita Banerjee

Author:Anindita Banerjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Galvanic Healers, The Field, 1900

Recuperating nineteenth-century figurations of electricity as a vitalist force of creation and healing, science fiction integrated Pushkin and Gogol’s models of poesis into a new national idiom for the rapidly modernizing twentieth century. While in Odoevsky’s work the synthesis of anodic and cathodic applications sustained an ethical class of innovators and administrators, at the cusp of the twentieth century electricity evolved into a consummate means for transfiguring the entire population. Commensurate with this democratic impulse, a new character type emerged as a stock element of science fiction. Electricity became the special area of expertise for a particular brand of Russian scientist or engineer, who, whether by virtue of his background or his chosen field of work, bridged the city and the country, institutional training and populist intuition. Corresponding with the gap between speculation and reality, moreover, this central figure privileged the new synthetic model of knowledge symbolized by electricity.30

Ethical and epistemological change became the primary functions of electric power in the realm of the imagination. A story published in 1898 by Konstantin Sluchevsky, a prominent metaphysical poet of the fin de siècle, serves as a representative example of the new kind of electrical science fiction that emerged in Russia during the decade following Edison’s invention. “Captain Nemo in Russia” (“Kapitan Nemo v Rossii”) employed electricity to articulate an overt literary and ideological response to Western modernity’s functional relationship with science and technology. In Sluchevsky’s story, Verne’s famous hero travels to a remote island on the White Sea, where a Russian is said to have created lush farmlands out of frozen Arctic wastes. What sets Nemo and the protagonist apart is precisely their relation to electricity: while the Frenchman uses electric power only to run his personal submarine, the Russian, literally reincarnating Lomonosov, reinterprets the eighteenth-century visionary’s broad view of social transformation within the uniquely Russian understanding of electricity at the turn of the twentieth century. In a striking biographical correlation with the eighteenth-century scientist, Sluchevsky’s hero lives on an island close to Lomonosov’s hometown, Arkhangelsk. His visionary thinking and scientific activities, however, are shaped by an unprecedented conjuncture between the social consciousness of the Enlightenment and electricity’s cathodic perceptions in early-twentieth-century Russia.

Rather than harnessing electricity to satisfy his individualistic wanderlust, the Russian inventor utilizes it for alleviating two existential concerns of the local peasantry, lack of food and the absence of education. As climate control enables local farmers to produce bumper crops during the day and study by Edison’s bulbs at night, electricity evolves into a force that simultaneously resurrects the body and kindles the mind. Introducing his gifted assistant to Nemo, the protagonist wryly observes that he is not of French or British origin as the visitor presumes, but “a local peasant, a samorodok purer than gold, from the kingdom of darkness and tallow candles.”31 The composite image of electricity established in the story provides a powerful counterpoint for both stereotypes invoked in the ironic statement: Russia, “dark” and “backward” in European eyes, and its subjects held back by ignorance and superstition.

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