Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia

301 Pages·1908·2.15 MB·English

by  Alexander Bogdanov & Loren R. Graham & Richard Stites & Charles Rougle

RED STAR
Soviet History, Politics, Society, and Thought
James Michael Holquist and
Alexander Rabinowitch,
general editors
ADVISORY BOARD
Katerina Clark
Stephen F. Cohen
Murray Feshbach
Loren Graham
Gail W. Lapidus
Moshe Lewin
Sidney Monas
S. Frederick Starr

RED STAR
The First Bolshevik Utopia
Alexander Bogdanov
Red Star
Engineer Menni
A Martian Stranded on Earth

EDITED BY
Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites
TRANSLATED BY
Charles Rougle
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America Cataloging information is available from the Library of
Congress.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bogdanov, A. (Aleksandr), 1873–1928.
Red star.
(Soviet history, politics, society, and thought)
Contents: Red star—Engineer Menni—Martian stranded on Earth.
1. Bogdanov, A. (Aleksandr), 1873–1928—Translations, English. I. Graham, Loren R. II. Stites,
Richard. III. Rougle, Charles, 1946– IV. Title. V. Series.
PG3467.M29A27 1984 897.1’33 83-48637
ISBN 978-0-253-17350-8
ISBN 978-0-253-20317-5 (pbk.)
5 6 7 8 9 12 11 10 09 08 07
CONTENTS
Preface
Fantasy and Revolution: Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik
Science Fiction / Richard Stites
RED STAR: A Utopia
ENGINEER MENNI: A NOVEL OF FANTASY
A MARTIAN STRANDED ON EARTH: A Poem
Bogdanov’s Inner Message / Loren R. Graham
Selected Bibliography
Preface
The first edition of Red Star appeared in St. Petersburg in 1908. It was reissued
in Petrograd and in Moscow in 1918, and again in Moscow in 1922. A stage
version was produced by Proletcult theater in 1920. In 1928, after Bogdanov’s
death, it was published as a supplement to Around the World. It was not again
reissued in the Soviet Union for almost fifty years, until 1979, when it was
anthologized in a slightly expurgated version in the collection The Eternal Sun:
Russian Social Utopia and Science Fiction. It appeared in a German translation
in 1923, and this was reprinted in 1972. An Esperanto edition came out in
Leipzig in 1929, celebrating, no doubt, the Esperantists’ admiration of unilingual
utopias. The first English translation recently appeared in Pre-Revolutionary
Russian Science Fiction: An Anthology (1982), edited by Leland Fetzer. There
were at least six editions of Engineer Menni between 1913 and 1923, and it was
reissued also by Around the World in 1929. The present translations are of the
original 1908 and 1913 editions. Chronologically, Engineer Menni comes first as
a historical novel about the social revolution on Mars long before Leonid’s
voyage of 1905–06. We have placed Red Star first, however, because it was
written first and because this order makes for better reading. As a writer,
Bogdanov was no master of style, and so we have given preference to clarity
over literalness of translation, without omitting or violating anything essential.
For the Martian place names, we have used the standard classical terminology
still employed by astronomers (and used by Bogdanov in Russian translation).
The illustrations for Red Star are taken from the 1923 Moscow edition.
The editors and translator wish to thank the following people for reading and
commenting on our work: in Philadelphia, Mark Adams; in New York, Abraham
Ascher and Kenneth Jensen; in Leeds, Moira Donald; in Washington, D.C.,
Murray Feshbach; in Helsinki, Ben Hell-man, Eugene Holman, Pekka Pesonen,
and Ilmari Susiluoto; in Turku, Kurt Johansson; in Berkeley, Louise
McReynolds; in Freiburg, Thomas Markowsky; in Montreal, Darko Suvin.
Charles Rougle and Richard Stites thank each other for what Bogdanov would
have called our “comradely exchange of labor” in Helsinki in the summer of
1982. Loren Graham and Richard Stites thank each other for joining together our
once independent projects. We all thank Janet Rabinowitch of Indiana
University Press for her stubborn faith in our work.
RED STAR
FANTASY AND REVOLUTION
Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik
Science Fiction
Richard Stites
“Blood is being shed [down there] for the sake of a better
future,” says the Martian to the hero of Red Star as they are ascending to Mars.
“But in order to wage the struggle we must know that future.” The blood he
speaks of was the blood of workers shot down in the streets of St. Petersburg, of
revolutionaries put against the wall of prison courtyards, of insurgent sailors and
soldiers, of Jewish victims of pogroms in the Russian Revolution of 1905. And
by “that better future” he means not the immediate outcome of the revolution but
the radiant future of socialism that will dawn on earth after revolution has
triumphed everywhere. In order to inspect the coming socialist order, the hero—
a Bolshevik activist named Leonid—has accepted the invitation of a Martian
visitor to fly with him and his crew to Mars.
In this manner Alexander Bogdanov, a major prophet of the Bolshevik
movement and one of its most versatile writers and thinkers, begins his Utopian
science fiction novel Red Star, first published in 1908. The red star is Mars; but
it is also the dream set to paper of the kind of society that could emerge on Earth
after the dual victory of the scientific-technical revolution and the social
revolution. Bogdanov, a professional revolutionary, was one of those people,
peculiar to revolutionary societies of our century, who moved easily back and
forth between the barricade and the study table, the prison cell and the
laboratory. He was a physician and a man of science; and he was the first in
Russian fiction to combine a technical utopia, grounded in the latest scientific
theories of the time, with the ideas of revolutionary Marxism. This was the
central theme of both Red Star and his other novel, Engineer Menni.
Bogdanov’s revolutionary Martian fantasy grew out of his personal
experiences as a Marxist during the Revolution of 1905, the popularity of
science fiction in Russia around the turn of the century, and his still developing
theory of tectology, the science of systems thinking and organization. Bogdanov
was born in Tula in 1873 to an educated family, studied science and psychology
in Moscow and Kharkov, and received a medical degree in 1899. By that time he
had also become a Populist and then a Marxist. On the surface, Bogdanov’s path