Worlds Apart by Alexander Levitsky

Author:Alexander Levitsky [LEVITSKY, ALEXANDER, AND KITCHEN, T. MARTHA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000 FICTION / General
ISBN: 9781468314151
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2008-07-29T04:00:00+00:00

C2. Russia’s Modernist and Post-Symbolist Prose

THIS BRIEF SUBSECTION, just as the previous one, devoted principally to the poets, cannot even pretend to convey the period’s true thematic richness. Yet even those who initially shared neither apocalyptic apprehensions nor Symbolist sensibilities eventually came around to the conviction that the future unfolding of the century heralded doom for their homeland. Perhaps the best example of this kind of transmogrification is represented in the writings of Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870-1938). Kuprin, then a rising star in literature and an associate of the politically conscious Knowledge (Znanie) group, was a writer whose best-known works exposed and dissected social ills. In the heat of events surrounding Russia’s 1905 revolution he illustrated the hopes of contemporary Russians in a brief magazine piece, The Toast (1906), in which technology, social engineering and enlightened anarchy are shown to have made the Earth a paradise, thriving even in the harshest conditions for life—at the Earth’s poles. The piece is saved from outright propaganda on the benefits of social engineering by the emotional tribute, voiced at the end of the story, to the visions and sacrifices of early 20th-century revolutionaries. Yet, Kuprin was prescient in one regard: the reader should be struck by his description of global festivities, eerily reminiscent of the round-the-clock, satellite-assisted celebrations of Y2K.

But such festivities were hardly in view in the years immediately following the aborted success of the 1905 revolution, and Briusov’s The Republic of the Southern Cross, offered in the previous subsection and describing the fall of another circumpolar society, might have been written in response to this work by Kuprin. Kuprin’s own disillusionment with futuristic dreaming is reflected in the story Liquid Sunshine (1913), generally regarded to be the first Wellsean work of science fiction produced in Russia. The protagonists of writers like Chernyshevsky, Bulgarin and Odoevsky had been usually no more than devices allowing the author to describe future political or scientific transformations. In contrast, Kuprin strikes a more human note. His characters (just as those crafted by Wells) are individuals, and the narration is much more concerned with their particular personal response to events as they unfold. The Wellsean theme of global cooling and its attendant catastrophes also makes its appearance in Liquid Sunshine, and once again Kuprin seems prescient—this time in describing the destructive power of a tsunami, which we have witnessed quite recently indeed. The story recalls Dostoevsky as well: the most enlightened, altruistic man of science will in the end find himself at the mercy of his own self-destructive emotions. Human nature at its irreducible core is the true enemy of any utopia.

But the “tsunami” produced by the arrival of Bolshevik rule in 1917 was unlike any natural catastrophe Russia had witnessed earlier, and Remizov, Zamiatin and Pilniak, the last three writers chosen to represent the Modernist period—just as all those listed in the previous subsection—suffered from its mindless terror: Remizov and Zamiatin were forced into emigration and Pilniak died in a concentration camp. None of them was a Symbolist but each represented the very best the Symbolist school spawned.

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