AZ-Print, Editor and Proofreader's Reference Book. Teenage literature: features of the genre. List of interesting books Order of placement of different prefaces
The book of poems that you are holding in your hands is addressed to a wide range of readers. It will not leave indifferent either a subtle connoisseur and connoisseur of literature, or a lover of the poetic word, or a person completely far from poetry into whose hands this book fell by chance, or a professional critic.
The author of the collection is Marina EPSTEIN, a Russian-speaking poetess who has lived in Australia since 1979, and speaks about different moments of our complex and diverse life in an accessible, insightful and understandable form for everyone.
I can't divide poems into chapters.
Love. Nature. Philosophical. About children…
No matter how you do it, it’s written about the main thing:
About our mortal life. About everything in the world.
Marina was born on April 17, 1939. in the cultural capital of Ukraine - the city of Kharkov. Since childhood, she was fond of poetry, was the editor of the school wall newspaper and its regular author. She studied at the philological department of Kharkov University. She worked as a teacher at school and headed the technical school library.
Until recently, her poems were not known to the general public. But the ubiquitous Internet did its job: on the social website “Odnoklassniki” in the group “Poems” Marina decided to open her page, and her poems were immediately noticed and noted both by colleagues in the poetry workshop and by lovers of Russian poetry from different countries peace. Here, on the website, Marina was noticed and invited to collaborate by the editors of the international almanac of Russian-language poetry and prose “Feelings Without Borders.” In one of the collections of the Almanac, Marina published her poems for the first time.
I wrote on the table many times,
Yes, it happens now too.
Paper can withstand anything.
What a lie, what the truth without embellishment,
What is love to her, what is divination -
This is her fate.
Over her long life, Marina wrote many poems. Perhaps there is no topic that she would not touch on in her poems. This is both love and hatred, civil and philosophical reflections, nature, travel, the world of childhood, literature and its heroes... And on every topic the poetess can speak to any reader in a language that is understandable to him, rich and figurative. Despite the fact that Marina has lived far from her homeland for a long time, her poems have not lost the depth, colorfulness, and accuracy characteristic of true speakers of the Russian language. Her speech is figurative, metaphorical and correct. But this correctness, literacy in observing the norms of language and the laws of poetics, does not make her poems dry and callous, they do not just make you think, they excite the soul, make the heart beat faster.
Write write! Sharpen your pen.
...Epithets and sophistications of a smart guy.
It should be beautiful and sharp.
Not only a pie, but also a highlight.
Marina herself says about the themes of her work: “I have always been concerned with topics related to a person’s personality: his experiences, emotions, relationships between people. It seems to me that writing on one topic is boring and uninteresting.”
Whatever the poet writes about,
He returns to the soul.
She hurts, gives advice,
Greets and says goodbye.
Marina's poems are positive and optimistic, they preach faith in man, in his best qualities: kindness, the ability to think, love, make this world more beautiful and perfect. Remember this name - Marina EPSTEIN!
Marina Belyaeva,
literary editor of the Almanac “Feelings Without Borders”,
Laureate of the international competition “Golden Stanza” 2009,
2010
Introductory article to the collection of stories by A.P. Chekhov.
“Brevity is the sister of talent...” This phrase is on everyone’s lips. But not many people know that it belongs to the greatest artist of the word Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. This aphorism, which has become popular, can serve as a kind of epigraph to the writer’s work.
Undoubtedly, Chekhov's stories are distinguished by laconicism, brevity, and the absence of beautiful and pompous phrases, but this is one of the many features of his works.
What can interest the reader so much that he wants to read the story again and again? What attracts him so much to these often ordinary and vulgar stories? How can the most typical, ordinary heroes differ?
Chekhov himself spoke about his writing style: “You can cry and moan over stories, you can suffer along with your heroes, but, I think, you need to do this in such a way that the reader does not notice.” Chekhov's reticence and restraint affects the reader more powerfully than loud words. One of the critics of the early twentieth century rightly wrote: “And when he was silent so deeply and meaningfully, it was as if he spoke expressively.”
Indeed, the author's assessment is not clearly expressed; it is scattered throughout the text. The author avoids straightforward and unambiguous assessments of the characters. His heroes are living people, and not schematic carriers of some ideas. And the main idea of the work is also always hidden, since for the writer the main thing is not the proclamation of any statement, but the search for truth, not the solution of the question, but its formulation. So, the feelings and thoughts of the characters are also guessed, they are not directly mentioned. And in expressive dialogues we can see the wisdom of the characters, although this is also hidden.
“Truth is born in dispute” (Socrates) And Chekhov allows the reader to independently draw any conclusions. The story becomes a reason to think about your life. And in the sometimes banal, ordinary plot there is a deep meaning hidden.
If you like comic short stories, satirical stories, and anecdotes, then you will be pleasantly surprised by Chekhov’s favorite techniques in his works: humor and irony, satire and sarcasm.
Chekhov's jokes are also based on generalizations. Drawing the image of a shopkeeper in the story “Requiem Service,” we can see how “Andrei Andreevich wore solid galoshes, those same huge, clumsy galoshes that only positive, sensible and religiously convinced people wear.” The writer's humor is based on raising every little thing and accident to a power. This is Chekhov's poetics of little things. The author moves from details to greater generalization.
In his stories, Chekhov focused on what is most ordinary in everyday life. From the first to the last act, the main event of the work “Ionych” is obscured by everyday events of life. How to explain this feature of Chekhov's stories? First of all, the writer seeks to understand what motivates the characters to take any action. Therefore, Chekhov emphasizes ordinary everyday episodes, at first glance completely insignificant, filled with trifles. This helps him reproduce the most character traits modern life, under which his heroes think, act, and suffer. Another characteristic feature of them is connected with this feature of Chekhov's stories. The source of conflict does not lie in contradiction and clash of passions. In The Man in the Case, for example, there are no guilty parties. Who is to blame for teacher Belikov’s lifestyle? There is no one subjectively to blame. Life develops outside the will of people, and suffering occurs by itself.
Who is to blame? This question is heard in every story. Thanks to these features, we understand that it is not individual people who are to blame, but all of life in the endless monotony of its everyday life.
All of Chekhov's work is a call for spiritual liberation and emancipation of man. M. Gorky told the writer: “You seem to be the first free person who worships nothing that I have ever seen.” Undoubtedly, this inner freedom as the main sign of Chekhov’s character is reflected in the stories presented in this collection.
This collection includes almost the entire book of poems “Terroir of Loneliness” and a little from previous books: “Pure Female Lyrics”, “Properties of a Shell”, “Creating the Sky” and the next one, which is also written “And Together”.
Terroir of loneliness" is a place for the ripening of various loneliness - the loneliness of a poet, the loneliness of a woman, loneliness in love, loneliness in life, in time and place, in age and level of erudition. life, in time and place, in age and level
Poems are always an attempt at contact. Contact, for example, between the inner self and the outer bodily appearance. Or the external environment with the internal world. Self-isolation is collapsing into a black hole.
In the poems, the external harmonic consonance found reveals and makes clear only the mystically discerned essence of the relationship between the elements of nature, man and things.
A person thinks with his whole body, and not just with logical constructs. The poet's feelings are always tragic. Their volume is so enormous that it is overwhelming. You can only share the burden with poetry, otherwise it is impossible to bear. And their endless polarity is the living pulsations of your flesh and the universe as a whole. This is always a relationship, any monologue is a dialogue with an internal interlocutor who is part of your inner world. And even nature, and history, and religion, and God enter the inner space and become an integral part of you. “But man is the world.” This is what I can say about “Terroir of Solitude”. And this image of attitude towards the world, the image of a possible position at some point changed.
Another book of poems, “And Together,” has begun. But the person saved from alienation, who puts his soul into his work, remains. I managed to save the “living soul” once again, as in other earlier books of poetry.
In those books, a person was saved by feeling from reification. We are not “ghosts loaded with knowledge”, we are made of flesh and blood, drowned in the material worries of this day, but not limited by them. The fight for Life and Death has to be in the realm of feelings (homeless people don’t commit suicide). Fight to rise to the senses. To write something sincerely, you need to have passion. And passion is not only eros, it is any emotion brought to a peak state. And then you need to step out of it and look at the work of your hands with a conscious concern for style. This is my philosophical approach.
A necessary poetic element can be the sound value of a word, the color pumped up by comparisons, the length of a line - the whole complex of sensations. But only the deep trembling of the spirit is the actual conversation with the animated world - there is an inner voice, there is individuality, there is our question to this world of people that enters you, and you cannot renounce them, for the world and you are the same thing. All that remains is to wait for an answer. All that remains is to wait for contact.
In this story, Belyaev expressed confidence in the possibility of research emotional life a person at its most complex level. Thinking about " a device with the help of which it would be possible to mechanically fabricate melodies, well, at least in the same way as the final figure is obtained on an adding machine", the writer to some extent foresaw the capabilities of modern electronic computers (it is known that computers “compose” music).
The artistic method of Belyaev, whose work was usually classified as lightweight, “children’s” literature, turns out to be deeper and more complex. At one pole there is a semi-fairy tale cycle about the magic of Professor Wagner, and at the other there is a series of novels, stories, studies and essays that popularized real scientific ideas. It may seem that in this second line of his work Belyaev was the forerunner of modern “close” science fiction. Its attitude: “on the edge of the possible,” declared in the 40-50s to be the main and only one, led to the reduction of science fiction literature. But Belyaev, while popularizing real trends in science and technology, did not hide behind recognized science.
He wrote to Tsiolkovsky that in the novel “Leap into Nothing” “ made an attempt, without going into independent fantasy, to present modern views on the possibility of interplanetary communications, based mainly on your works" Without going into independent fantasy... But at one time, even such an outstanding engineer as Academician A. N. Krylov declared Tsiolkovsky’s projects scientifically untenable.
On this occasion, Tsiolkovsky wrote:
“... Academician Krylov, borrowing from O. Eberhard’s article, proves through the mouth of this professor that cosmic speeds are impossible, because the amount of explosive will exceed the most reactive device many times.”
So, rocket navigation is a chimera?
“Exactly right,” continued Tsiolkovsky, “if you take gunpowder for calculation. But the opposite conclusions will be obtained if the gunpowder is replaced, for example, with liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The scientist needed gunpowder to refute the universally accepted truth.”
Tsiolkovsky was decades ahead of his time - and not so much technical capabilities as narrow ideas about the feasibility, the necessity of this or that invention for humanity. And the science fiction writer Belyaev saw this second, human face of the “universally recognized truth” better than other specialists. For example, Tsiolkovsky’s all-metal airship is reliable, economical, durable - it still plows the ocean of air only in Belyaev’s novel.
The novel “Airship” began to be published in the magazine “Around the World” at the end of 1934. Soon the editors received a letter from Kaluga:
“The story... is wittyly written and scientific enough to inspire imagination. Let me express my pleasure to Comrade. Belyaev and the venerable editors of the magazine. I ask Comrade Belyaev to send me by cash on delivery his other fantastic story dedicated to interplanetary wanderings, which I could not get anywhere. I hope to find good in it too...”
It was the novel "Leap into Nothing."
“Dear Konstantin Eduardovich! - Belyaev answered. -...I am very grateful to you for your feedback and attention... I even had the idea of dedicating this novel to you, but I was afraid that it “wouldn’t be worth it.” And I was not mistaken: although the novel met with a warm reception among readers, Yak[ov] I[idorovich] Perelman gave a rather negative review about it in issue No. 10 of the newspaper “Literary Leningrad” (dated February 28)... But now, since you yourself about you ask, I willingly fulfill your request and send the novel to your judgment. The novel is currently being republished in a second edition, and I would very much like to ask you to provide your comments and corrections... Both I and the publishing house would be very grateful to you if you would also write a preface to the second edition of the novel (if, of course, you think that the novel deserves your introduction).
Sincerely respecting you A. Belyaev"
The review mentioned by Belyaev by Ya. Perelman, a famous popularizer of science who contributed greatly to the spread of the idea of space exploration, was biased and contradictory. Perelman either demanded strict adherence to what was practically feasible, then reproached Belyaev for popularizing what had long been known, or rejected what was new and original.
Perelman, apparently, was dissatisfied that “The Jump” did not reflect the possibility that Tsiolkovsky had just discovered to achieve cosmic speeds using ordinary industrial fuel. Before that, Tsiolkovsky (as can be seen from his objections to Academician Krylov) pinned his hopes on a very dangerous and expensive pair - liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Tsiolkovsky published his discovery in the Tekhnika newspaper in May 1935. Naturally, in the novel, published in 1933, this new idea Tsiolkovsky could not be taken into account in any way.
The main thing, however, is not this, but the fact that Perelman approached the work of science fiction from the point of view of his own purely popularization task, into which science fiction, of course, does not fit. And here he was not consistent either. Perelman contrasted “Leap into Nothing” with O. V. Gayle’s novel “Moon Flight” as an example of scientific popularization. Meanwhile, the German author was based on the works of his compatriot G. Oberth, which were not at all the last word Sciences. Here are excerpts from Tsiolkovsky’s letter to Perelman dated June 17, 1924:
« Dear Yakov Isidorovich, I am writing to you mainly to say a little about the work of Oberth and Goddard (American pioneer of rocket technology - A.B.) ... Firstly, many important questions about the rocket are not even touched upon theoretically. Oberth's drawing is only suitable for illustrating fantastic stories...“That is, Oberth should have illustrated Guile, and not vice versa. Tsiolkovsky lists Oberth's numerous borrowings from his works. Consequently, Guile took it not even from second, but from third hands and, in any case, could not serve as an example for Belyaev. Belyaev was thoroughly familiar with the works of Tsiolkovsky. Back in 1930, he dedicated the essay “Citizen of the Ethereal Island” to him.
Tsiolkovsky’s preface to the second edition of “A Leap into Nothing” (the reader will find it on page 319 of this book) is in all respects the opposite of Perelman’s review. The famous scientist wrote that Belyaev’s novel seems to be “ the most meaningful and scientific"of all the works about space travel known to him at that time. In a letter to Belyaev, Tsiolkovsky added (we quote a draft of the letter preserved in the archive): “ As for dedicating it to me, I consider it your kindness and an honor for me».
The support inspired Belyaev. " Your warm review of my novel, he replied, gives me strength in the difficult struggle to create science fiction works" Tsiolkovsky consulted on the second edition of “Leap into Nothing” and went into details.
“I have already corrected the text according to your comments,” Belyaev said in another letter. “In the second edition, the editors only slightly lighten the “scientific load” - they remove “Hans’s Diary” and some lengths in the text, which, in the opinion of readers, are somewhat heavy for a work of fiction.”
“I also expanded the third part of the novel - on Venus - by introducing several entertaining adventures, in order to make the novel more interesting for the general reader.”
“When correcting your comments, I made only one small digression: you write: “The speed of nebulae is about 10,000 kilometers per second,” I added this to the text, but then I write that there are nebulae with high speeds...”
The retreat, however, was not only this. Belyaev rejected Tsiolkovsky's advice to remove mention of the theory of relativity and the resulting paradox of time (when time in a rocket traveling at a speed close to the speed of light slows down relative to the earth's).
The name of Alexander Romanovich Belyaev is a whole era in our science fiction literature. His early works appeared in the mid-20s, almost simultaneously with “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” by Alexei Tolstoy; the last novel was published already during the Great Patriotic War. Belyaev was the first Soviet writer for whom it was new in Russia literary genre became my life's work. Sometimes he is called the Soviet Jules Verne. Belyaev has in common with the great French science fiction writer his intelligent humanism and encyclopedic versatility of creativity, the materiality of fiction and the scientific discipline of artistic imagination. Like Jules Verne, he knew how to pick up on the fly an idea that arose at the forefront of knowledge, long before it received recognition. Even his purely adventure fiction was often filled with insightful scientific and technical foresight. For example, in the novel “Struggle on the Air” (1928), which was reminiscent of Marietta Shaginyan’s adventurous fairy tale “Mess-Mend” (1924), the reader received an idea of the radio compass and radio direction finding, wireless energy transmission and volumetric television, radiation sickness and sound weapons, about the artificial cleansing of the body from fatigue toxins and the artificial improvement of memory, about the scientific-experimental development of aesthetic standards, etc. Some of these discoveries and inventions were just being realized in Belyaev’s time, others still remain a scientific problem today, others have not lost their freshness as science fiction hypotheses.
In the 60s, the famous American physicist L. Szilard published the story “The Mark Geibl Foundation,” which is surprisingly reminiscent of Belyaev’s old story “Neither Life nor Death.” Szilard took the same scientific topic - suspended animation (long-term inhibition of vital functions) and came to the same paradoxical collision as Belyaev’s: the capitalist state also freezes the reserve army of the unemployed “until better times”. Belyaev physiologically correctly defined the phenomenon: neither life nor death - and correctly guessed the main factor of suspended animation - the cooling of the body. Academician V. Parin, who already in our time studied the problem of suspended animation, had reason to say that initially it was covered in most detail not in scientific literature, but in science fiction. It is important, however, that Belyaev from the very beginning established scientifically based foresight in our science fiction.
He was an enthusiast and a true devotee: he wrote a whole library of novels, novellas, essays, short stories, film scripts, articles and reviews (some of which had recently been found in old newspaper files) in just fifteen years, often while bedridden for months. Some of his ideas were developed into a novel only after testing with an abridged version, in the form of a story, such as “The Head of Professor Dowell.” He was amazingly hardworking. The few surviving manuscripts testify to how painstakingly Belyaev achieved the ease with which his works were read.
Belyaev was not as gifted as a writer as Alexei Tolstoy. “The images are not always successful, the language is not always rich,” he lamented. And yet his skill stands out among the science fiction of his time. “The plot is what he felt his power over,” recalled the Leningrad poet Vs., who knew Belyaev well. Azarov. This is true. Belyaev skillfully weaves a plot, skillfully interrupts the action “at the most interesting part.” But his talent is richer than adventure entertainment. Belyaev's strength lies in his meaningful, rich, beautiful imagination. The mainspring of his novels is the romance of the unknown, the interest of exploration and discovery, the intellectual situation and the acute social clash.
Jules Verne already tried to convey scientific information in episodes where they could easily be linked to the adventures of the heroes. Belyaev took a further step - he included scientific material in a psychological context. Therefore, his science-fiction theme often receives an individual coloring, associated with the personality of a particular hero. When in the novel “The Man Who Found His Face,” Dr. Sorokin, talking with Tonio Presto, likens the community to hormonal and nervous systems worker self-government, when he contrasts this view of the body with the opinion of other scientists who talk about the “autocracy” of the brain, and at the same time ironically remarks: “The monarchs were generally unlucky in the twentieth century” - all this wittily translates medical concepts into the language of social images and corresponds to the patient’s ironic intonation:
“What are you complaining about, Mr. Presto?
The Doctor understands perfectly well what kind of fate a famous artist may be grieving over: the hilarious dwarf Tonio Presto is burdened by his ugliness. The action takes place in America. In the depths of the body’s likening to the “Council of Workers’ Deputies” lies Dr. Sorokin’s belonging to another world, and this figurative political association anticipates Tonio’s rebellion against American democracy. The science-fiction theme (Dr. Sorokin turns a dwarf into an attractive young man) develops on several semantic levels at once.
Belyaev always sought to poetically express the rational content of his fantasy. His artistic detail is always very purposefully colored by a fantastic idea, because the essence of the poetry of his novels is in the fantastic ideas themselves. The secret of his literary mastery lies in the skill with which he mastered science fiction material. Belyaev had a keen sense of its inner aesthetics; he knew how to extract not only the rational, but also all the artistic and emotional potential of a fantastic idea. Belyaev’s scientific premise is not just the starting point of an entertaining story, but the grain of the entire artistic structure of the work. His successful novels unfold from this seed in such a way that a fantastic idea “programs” seemingly artistically the most neutral details. That is why his best novels are integral and complete, and that is why they retain their poetic appeal even after their scientific basis becomes outdated.
With a metaphor, sometimes symbolic, often expressed already in the title (“Amphibian Man,” “Leap into Nothing”), Belyaev seemed to crown the fantastic transformation of the original scientific premise. One of his stories, buried in old magazines, is entitled "Death's Head" - after the name of the butterfly that an entomologist chased (and got lost in the jungle). But the “dead head” is also a symbol of a person’s loss of his mind in the silence of uninhabited forests. “The White Savage” (the title of another story) is not only a white-skinned person, it is also a bright human nature against the dark background of capitalist civilization. By the way, Belyaev in this story used the motifs of the American writer E. Burroughs, whose novels about the ape-man Tarzan were a resounding success in the 20s. The Soviet science fiction writer managed to give a banal adventure collision an unexpectedly deep and instructive - scientifically and socially - twist. In 1926, the World Pathfinder magazine began publishing his fantastic film story “The Island of Lost Ships” - a “free translation” of the American action film, as stated in the preface. In the usual melodrama with chases and shooting, Belyaev put a lot of information about shipbuilding, about the life of the sea and translated the adventure romance into an educational plan.
Belyaev’s ineradicable curiosity for the unknown always sought support in fact, in logic. scientific knowledge, plot was used mainly as an entertaining form of serious content. However, his fictional plot was often based on fact. The impetus for the adventure plot of one of the early works “ Last Man from Atlantis" (1926) could have been a clipping from the French newspaper Le Figaro: "A society for the study and exploitation of Atlantis has been organized in Paris." Belyaev forces the expedition to find in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean a description of the life and death of the supposed continent. The writer drew the material from the book of the French scientist R. Devigne “Atlantis, the Vanished Continent,” published in 1926 in Russian translation. The plot developed on its basis served as the frame for the main idea, also taken from Devigne (Belyaev gives it at the beginning of the novel): “It is necessary... to find the sacred land in which the common ancestors of the most ancient nations of Europe, Africa and America sleep.” The novel unfolds as a fantastic realization of this truly great and noble scientific task.
Devigne drew the appearance of Atlantis very vividly. In a certain sense, this was a ready-made science fiction adaptation of the legend, and Belyaev used its fragments. He subjected the text to literary editing, and developed some details that were not noticeable in Devigne into whole images. Devigne mentioned, for example, that in the language of the ancient tribes of America (the supposed descendants of the Atlanteans), the Moon was called Sel. Under the pen of Belyaev, Sel turned into the beautiful daughter of the ruler of Atlantis.
Belyaev retained the desire of a popular scientist not to break away from scientific sources. Devigne, for example, attributes the legend of the golden temple gardens, according to legend, hidden from the devastating invasion of the Spaniards into the inaccessible mountainous countries of South America, to the fragments of the history of the Atlanteans. Belyaev moved these gardens to Atlantis itself. His imagination strictly follows real possibilities ancient world. There was or was not Atlantis, there were or were not gardens in it, where leaves and birds were minted from gold, but it is reliably known that the high culture of metal processing goes back to ancient times.
For all that, Belyaev, as the famous Soviet atlantologist N. Zhirov wrote to the author of these lines, “introduced a lot of his own into the novel, especially the use of the nature of mountain ranges as sculptures. By this, he seemed to anticipate the discovery of my Peruvian friend, Dr. Daniel Ruso, who discovered in Peru giant sculptures reminiscent of Belyaev’s (of course, on a smaller scale).” Belyaev’s sculpture of Poseidonis, carved from a single rock, towers over the main city of the Atlanteans.
This is, of course, a particularity, although a remarkable one. What is more significant is that Belyaev, unlike Devin, found the social spring of the plot. In Devigne, convicts are chained to the oars of the armada that is leaving the dying Atlantis; in Belyaev, there are slaves. Atlantis in his novel is the heart of a colossal slave empire. All the blood, all the sweat of dozens of kingdoms comes here. Something similar happened in the Roman Empire, the empires of Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, and Genghis Khan. And Belyaev shows how one of these “Towers of Babel” collapsed. In his novel, a geological disaster only sets in motion a tangle of contradictions, at the center of which is a slave revolt.
One of the leaders of the uprising was the royal slave Adishirna-Guanche. A brilliant mechanic, architect and scientist, he gave his beloved Cely amazing golden gardens. The extraordinary fate of the young people is soon pushed aside by an apocalyptic catastrophe. The death of Atlantis is described with great drama. But Belyaev also needs this in order to return the flow of the novel to the original idea. He leads the reader to the harsh shores of the Old World - a dilapidated ship with a surviving Atlantean washed up there. The strange stranger told the blond northern savages “wonderful stories about the Golden Age, when people lived... without knowing worries and needs... about Golden gardens with golden apples...”. People cherished the legend. Atlas won deep respect with his knowledge; he taught them to cultivate the land and make fire. This is how the biblical myth about the divine origin of reason can be explained, very rationally. The relay of knowledge circled the world, then dying down for millennia, then flaring up again, slowly raising man above nature. It was this educational thought that Belyaev put into the fictional adventures of the Atlanteans.
Belyaev studied (he was a lawyer by training), performed on the amateur stage, was fond of music, worked in an orphanage and in the criminal investigation department, studied many things, and most importantly - life in those years when Tsiolkovsky in provincial Kaluga nurtured grandiose plans for space exploration, when Lenin, in hungry Moscow, talked with his comrade-in-arms F. Zander (the prototype of engineer Leo Zander in Belyaev’s novel “Leap into Nothing”), when Wells observed with skepticism and sympathy the first steps of the great “Soviet experiment.” The passionate journalistic essay “The Lights of Socialism, or Mr. Wells in the Darkness,” in which Belyaev polemicized against Wells’s famous book “Russia in the Darkness” and defended the Leninist dream, is only one of many evidence of Belyaev’s active connection with revolutionary Russia.
It is difficult to name a novel or story where Belyaev missed an opportunity to emphasize the superiority of socialism over capitalism and the strength of the communist worldview. And he did it with conviction and unobtrusively. It is well known that “The Head of Professor Dowell” and “Amphibian Man” are real socially revealing novels, “Leap into Nothing” and “Lord of the World” are imbued with anti-fascist motives. But few people know that in the novel “Underwater Farmers” (1930) and in the essay “The Earth is Burning” (1931) Belyaev responded in a unique way to the outstanding event of that time - the socialist transformation of the village.
There are few people left who personally knew Belyaev in his early years. In occupied Pushkin, near the walls of besieged Leningrad, the writer died and his archive died along with him. But the main witnesses remained - books. And was it not himself among the Russian intellectuals who recognized Soviet power that Belyaev had in mind when he put a significant confession into the mouth of Professor Ivan Semenovich Wagner? German militarists kidnapped the scientist and are tempting him to change Soviet Russia - in the name of “our old European culture,” which the Bolsheviks are supposedly “destroying.”
“Never before,” answered Wagner, “have so many scientific expeditions plied the length and breadth of great country... Never has the boldest creative thought met such attention and support... And you?..
- Yes, he himself is a Bolshevik! - exclaimed the narrow-minded general.”
Yes, Professor Wagner experienced doubts. But he also saw the creative role of Bolshevism - and it coincides with the goal of true science and culture! Belyaev, like his hero, decisively took the side of the Soviet regime, and the last lines he published were in defense of the Soviet Motherland from the Nazi invasion.
The writer came to the ideas of communism his own way. Socialism turned out to be consonant with his love for the creative power of scientific creativity. As a child, Jules Verne instilled in him a belief in the omnipotence of humane reason. And the Bolsheviks’ intransigence in the revival of Russia inspired him with confidence that the most daring utopias were being realized in his homeland. It was this civic and philosophical optimism that determined the direction of Belyaev’s romance.
Under other conditions, the plot of “The Head of Professor Dowell” or “Amphibian Man” could result in an autobiographical drama. The writer was seriously ill and at times experienced, as he recalled in one of his articles, “the sensation of a head without a body.” The image of Ichthyander, Belyaev’s biographer O. Orlov astutely noted, “was the longing of a man forever shackled with a gutta-percha orthopedic corset, a longing for health, for boundless physical and spiritual freedom.” But how amazingly the writer melted his personal tragedy! Belyaev had the bright gift of extracting an optimistic dream even from bitter experiences.
Unlike readers, and among them were scientists, literary criticism at one time did not understand two best novels Belyaeva. Regarding Professor Salvator’s dog, with the attached body of a monkey, they shrugged their shoulders in disgust: what are these monsters for? And in the 60s, a photograph circulated around the world that could have become an illustration for Belyaev’s novel: Soviet physician V. Demikhov implanted the upper part of a puppy’s body into an adult dog...
And Belyaev was also reproached for backwardness!
“The story and novel “The Head of Professor Dowell,” he answered, “was written by me fifteen years ago, when there were no experiments not only by S. S. Bryukhonenko, but also by his predecessors on reviving isolated organs. First I wrote a story that featured only an animated head. Only when transforming the story into a novel did I dare to create two-person people (the head of one person grafted onto the body of another. - A.B.)... And what I find most sad is not that the book is published in the form of a novel now, but that it just now published. In due time she would, of course, play a big role ... "
Belyaev was not exaggerating. It’s not for nothing that the novel “The Head of Professor Dowell” was discussed at the First Leningrad medical institute. The value of the novel was, of course, not in the surgical recipes, there are none in it, but in the bold challenge to science contained in this metaphor: a head that continues to live, a brain that does not stop thinking when the body has already collapsed. IN tragic story Professor Dowell Belyaev put in the optimistic idea of the immortality of human thought. (In one of the stories about Professor Wagner, the brain of the professor’s assistant is placed in the skull of an elephant. In this half-joking plot, what is also serious is not so much the fantastic operation itself, but again the metaphorically expressed task: to prolong the creative age of thought, the work of the mind.)
And criticism turned the matter around as if Belyaev literally proposes “to make one living out of two dead people,” thereby leading the reader “into the realm of idealistic dreams” about mechanical personal immortality. Belyaev was well aware of the difference between the idea of eternal existence and life extension. In a review of G. Grebnev’s science fiction novel “Arctania,” he himself noted that it would be a mistake to interpret the hypothesis of the famous Soviet physician S. Bryukhonenko about the revival of the “unjustifiably dead” in the spirit of a person achieving personal immortality. Many years later, already in our time, in disputes around some fantastic works, the opinion was expressed that immortality for an individual, biologically dubious, could also lead to a weakening of humanity’s concern for descendants and, in general, would most likely be the beginning of degeneration.
Cybernetics gave the idea of brain transplantation a new basis. In the short story by A. and B. Strugatsky “Candles in front of the control panel” (1960), the genius of a scientist is transferred to an artificial brain. With the last breath of a person, the bio-cybernetic machine will live with his individuality, his scientific temperament. Unusual, scary and, for now, fabulous. But now, academician N. Amosov believes, cybernetics can help in surgical head transplantation. As we see, science at a new level is again returning to the idea of “Professor Dowell’s Head”.
This novel is valuable not only because it attracted and continues to attract the attention of the general public to an exciting scientific problem. Today, perhaps, it is even more important that Belyaev well developed the social, psychological, moral, and ethical aspects of such an experiment. Academician N. Amosov once said that if a brain transplant were offered to him personally and it would be impossible to attach his head to a new body, in order to preserve the happiness of thinking, he would resign himself to the eternal immobility of an isolated head. The challenge of creating a dual organism raises even more complex human problems. Belyaev’s novels, as it were, put them in advance for the widest discussion and, as such, continue to be in the field of view of scientists (see, for example, the article by E. Kandel “Brain Transplant” in the Literary Gazette of January 31, 1968).
The purpose of science fiction, said Alexander Belyaev, is to serve humanism in the large, comprehensive sense of the word. Active humanism was the guiding star of his work. It is interesting to compare the plot of “Amphibian Man” with the plot of one novel retold by the poet Valery Bryusov in the drafts of an unpublished article “The Limits of Fantasy,” dating back to approximately 1912–1913. Bryusov was a great connoisseur of science fiction and wrote science fiction works himself. The hero of the novel, the title and name of which he, unfortunately, does not name (in square brackets we give letters and parts of words unfinished in Bryusov’s draft manuscript), “was a young man for whom one lung was artificially replaced by an apasu gill. He could live underwater. An entire organization was formed to enslave the world with its help. Assistants to the “human shark” in different parts of the globe sat underwater in diving suits connected by telegraph. The submariner, declaring war on the whole world, blew up F. island with mines and brought panic to the whole world. Thanks to the help of the Japanese, the shark man was captured; the doctors removed the shark’s gills from his body, he became an ordinary person, and the formidable organization disintegrated.”
It is possible that only an adventurous skeleton has been preserved in the retelling. In Belyaev’s novel, the center of gravity is in human destiny Ichthyander and the human purpose of Professor Salvator’s experiments. The brilliant doctor “mutilated” the Indian boy not out of dubious interests of pure science, as some critics “understood” Belyaev in his time. When asked by the prosecutor how the idea of creating a fish man came to him and what goals he pursued, the professor answered:
“The thought is still the same - man is not perfect. Having received great advantages in the process of evolutionary development compared to his animal ancestors, man at the same time lost much of what he had at the lower stages of animal development... The first fish among people and the first man among fish, Ichthyander could not help but feel loneliness. But if other people had followed him into the ocean, life would have become completely different. Then people would easily defeat the mighty element - water. Do you know what this element is, what power it is?”
We, thinking about the distant future, when man inevitably faces the task of improving his own nature, cannot help but sympathize with Salvator, no matter how controversial his ideas are from a medical-biological point of view and no matter how utopian they are in the world of class hatred. However, the author should not be confused with him. Although, however, Salvator, dreaming of making humanity happy, knows the value of the world in which he lives.
“I was in no hurry to get into the dock,” he explains why he was in no hurry to make his experiments public, “... I was afraid that my invention would do more harm than good under the conditions of our social system. A struggle has already begun around Ichthyander... Ichthyander would have been taken away by the generals and admirals in order to force the amphibian man to sink warships. No, I could not make Ichthyander and the ichthyanders a common property in a country where struggle and greed turn the highest discoveries into evil, increasing the amount of human suffering.”
The novel attracts not only its social-critical sharpness, not only the drama of Salvator and Ichthyander. Salvator is also close to us with his revolutionary thought as a scientist: “Do you seem to attribute to yourself the qualities of an omnipotent deity?” - the prosecutor asked him. Yes, Salvator “appropriated” not to himself, but to science, divine power over nature. But he is not a “superman”, like Dr. Moreau in the famous novel by H.G. Wells, and not a sentimental philanthropist. Probably, a person will entrust the remaking of himself not only to the surgeon’s knife, but that is not the point. What is important for us is the very attempt by Salvator, Ichthyander’s second father, on the “divine” nature of his son. Belyaev's merit is that he put forward the idea of interfering in the “holy of holies” - human nature - and ignited it with poetic inspiration. The animal adapts to its environment. The mind begins when it adapts the environment. But the highest development of the mind is self-improvement. Social revolution and spiritual improvement will open the door to man's biological revolution. This is how “Amphibian Man” is read today.
Belyaev conveys the revolutionary idea of the “human god” of science without didactic obsession. It is embedded in a plot that is outwardly somewhat adventurous. It is inseparable from the breathtaking pictures full of poetry when we follow the free flight of Ichthyander in the silence of the ocean depths. Continuing the Jules Verne romance of the exploration of the sea, Belyaev introduced the reader through this romance to a different, revolutionary attitude to the world. But this fantastic romance in itself had artistic, emotional and scientific value: how many enthusiasts were inspired by Belyaev’s novel to explore the blue continent!
Today, the problem of deep-sea diving without scuba gear is being developed, using air dissolved in water for breathing. Mechanical gills must remove it from there. Another underwater fantasy of Belyaev is also being realized - from the novel “Underwater Farmers” - about Soviet “ichthyanders” harvesting the underwater harvest of the Far Eastern seas. Belyaev settled his heroes on the seabed, where they built a house. Thirty years after the publication of this novel, a group of the famous deep sea explorer Cousteau spent several weeks in an underwater house. More complex experiments followed. A person must live and work under water as on land. Now this is not only a scientific, but also a national economic task, and the writer Belyaev made his contribution to people’s awareness of it.
The idea of man achieving unlimited power over his nature worried Belyaev in other works. In “Lord of the World,” the plot function of the “suggestive” machine is not the main one. The writer needed this fantastic invention by Stirner-Kaczynski for a more general fantastic idea. The last, third part of the novel is the apotheosis of the peaceful and humane use of suggestion. The former Napoleon candidate Stirner fell asleep, bowing his head on the lion's mane: “They slept peacefully, not even suspecting the secret places of their subconscious life, where the power of human thought drove everything that was terrible and dangerous in them for others.” The novel ends with these lines. “We don’t need prisons now,” says Soviet engineer Kaczynski. Its prototype was B. Kazhinsky, who, together with the famous trainer V. Durov (in Dugov’s novel), conducted experiments on changing the psyche of animals. Belyaev developed this idea: at the “prompt” of Kaczynski, Stirner, with the help of his machine, instilled in himself a different, non-aggressive personality and forgot his bad past. Former enemies began to work together on thought transmission, helping workers coordinate efforts, artists and artists - directly transmit images to viewers and listeners. Belyaev’s thought transmission is a tool of social pedagogy and organization, communist transformation of the individual and society.
In 1929, the novel “The Man Who Lost His Face” was published. Belyaev drew in it an exciting prospect of artificial influence on the endocrine glands: a person will get rid of senile infirmity, free from physical deformity. But this brought only misfortune to the talented comedian Tonio Presto. The beautiful screen star, with whom Tonio was in love and for whose sake he underwent risky treatment, was only interested in the big name of the hilarious dwarf; film companies only needed his talented ugliness. And when Tonio acquired a perfect body, he ceased to be capital. Nobody needs his beautiful soul. His changed appearance even deprived him of his rights as a legal entity: he is not recognized as Tonio Presto.
So far it was a collision in the spirit of Wells (remember the novel “Food of the Gods”). Introducing Soviet ideology and a materialistic worldview into his plots, Belyaev often retained the scheme of old science fiction. Ichthyander was hiding in the ocean from the “justice” of swindlers, Salvator went to jail, Professor Dowell died. Presto, however, managed to take revenge on his persecutors: he became the head of a gang of humiliated and insulted, and with the help of Dr. Sorokin’s miracle drugs he turned an ardent racist into a black man. But this ending did not satisfy Belyaev. Reworking the novel, the writer elevated Tonio to social struggle. The artist took up directing, produced revealing films, and waged a war with film companies. Belyaev called the revised novel: “The Man Who Found His Face” (1940).
In novels, relatively speaking, on a biological theme (because, in essence, they are broader), Belyaev expressed his most daring and original ideas. But here too he was bound by the principle of scientific verisimilitude. And his head was crowded with ideas and images that did not fit into any possibilities of science and technology. Not wanting to compromise the genre of science fiction, which he took very seriously, the writer disguised his impudence with humorous situations and a playful tone. Headlines like: “The Flying Carpet”, “Created Legends and Apocrypha”, “The Devil’s Mill” - seemed to preemptively deflect the reproach of profanation of science. These were humorous stories. In them, Belyaev seemed to argue with himself - he doubted the science popularized in his novels. Here a free search was conducted, not limited either by the possibilities of science or the traditional form of science fiction. Here began that fantasy without shores, with which the modern reader is probably well acquainted. Small short stories eliminated the need to substantiate in detail certain hypotheses: fairy-tale fiction simply would not have withstood serious substantiation.
But there was still some system here. Professor Wagner's inventions are magical. And Wagner is a special person among Belyaev’s heroes. He is endowed with fabulous power over nature. He rebuilt his own body - he learned to remove fatigue toxins while awake (“The Man Who Doesn’t Sleep”). He transplanted the brain of his deceased assistant into the elephant Hoiti-Toiti (“Hoiti-Toiti”). He made material bodies permeable, and now he himself passes through walls (“The Man from the Bookcase”). And this Mephistopheles of our time survived the revolution and accepted Soviet power...
Between the fantastic humorous scenes emerges an image no less significant than the humanist Salvator in the novel “Amphibian Man”, or the anti-fascist Leo Zander in the novel “Leap into Nothing”. Even a little autobiographical - and at the same time akin to a medieval alchemist. In some episodes, Professor Wagner almost appears as Baron Munchausen, while others are so realistic that they remind one of very real enthusiastic scientists of the difficult post-revolutionary years (“The Man Who Doesn’t Sleep”). This is what makes us, readers, layer by layer remove the masking veils of humor and adventure from Wagner’s wonders. This complex fusion of fairy tales with scientific fantasy makes us feel some degree of the possible in the impossible. Like, isn’t there also some kind of germ of a discovery hidden in such a “scientific fairy tale”? The figure of Wagner arose from Belyaev to disguise and at the same time express this idea. It is difficult to understand otherwise why she went through a whole cycle of short stories, it is difficult to find another explanation for the fact that the author of good science fiction works suddenly turned to such fiction.
“The inventions of Professor Wagner” were, as it were, the strokes of a new face of knowledge, which was still vaguely visible behind the classical profile of science at the beginning of the 20th century. The figure of Wagner captured the return of fantastic literature, after Julierne's eccentric scientists and practical scientists in Wells's novels, to some features of the sorcerer-warlock. His mysterious omnipotence is akin to the spirit of science of our 20th century, which aimed at “ common sense" of the last century. Having discovered the relativity of the axioms of old natural science, modern science has unleashed truly fabulous forces, equally capable of lifting a person to heaven and plunging him into hell. Belyaev caught, although he hardly fully realized, the drama of the Wagners who acquired such power.
The author of "Jump into Nothing" and "The Air Seller", "The Island of Lost Ships" and "The Man Who Found His Face", "The Lapel Remedy" and "Mr. Laughter", Belyaev, mastered a wide range of funny things - from a soft smile to poisonous irony. Many pages of his novels and stories capture the talent of a satirist. It is close in nature to a science fiction writer, and Belyaev had a talent for making people laugh in life. The writer often reinterpreted humorous images and collisions into fantastic ones and, conversely, fantastic ones into satirical and revealing ones.
In the novel “Leap into Nothing,” the romantic plot of space travel turns into a grotesque metaphor. The capitalists loftily talk about their flight to other planets, as about saving the “pure” from the revolutionary flood, they call the rocket an ark... And the Holy Father, selecting a limited quintal of luggage, pushes spiritual food aside and fills the chest with gastronomic temptations. The attempt of “pure” financial tycoons and secular idlers, a churchman and a reactionary romantic philosopher to found a biblical colony on the “promised” planet suffered a shameful failure. Before us is a bunch of savages, ready to grab each other's throats over a handful of precious stones that are useless here on Venus.
The tradition of satirical fiction by Alexei Tolstoy and, perhaps, Mayakovsky was continued in Belyaev’s work. Some of his images of capitalists are close to Gorky’s pamphlets on the servants of the Yellow Devil. Belyaev contributed to the formation of a fantastic novel-pamphlet on Russian national soil. L. Lagin in the novel “Patent AB” followed in the footsteps of the biological hypothesis used by Belyaev in two novels about Tonio Presto. However, unlike Lagin, for Belyaev the fantastic idea was of independent value. Even in a satirical novel, he was not satisfied with using it as a mere springboard to the plot. In some of Belyaev’s early works, conventional fantastic motivations corresponded to the same conventional, popular popular grotesque in the spirit of “Mess-Mend” by Marietta Shaginyan and “Trest D.E.” Ilya Ehrenburg. In the mature “Leap into Nothing” and in the novels about Tonio Presto, realistic hyperbolization is already correlated with scientific fantasy.
Finally, Belyaev made the very nature of the funny the object of science fiction research. A cheerful person and a great joker, the writer in his youth was an outstanding amateur comedian. The psychological truth of Tonio Presto's misadventures may also have an autobiographical origin. The hero of the story “Mr. Laughter” (1937), Spalding, studying his grimaces in front of the mirror, is partly Belyaev himself, as he is depicted in humorous photographs from the family album, which are published in the eighth volume of his Collected Works.
Spalding scientifically developed the psychology of laughter and achieved world fame, but in the end he turned out to be a victim of his art - “I analyzed, machined living laughter. And thus I killed him... And I, the manufacturer of laughter, will never laugh again in my life.” However, the matter is more complicated: “Spalding was killed by the spirit of American mechanization,” the doctor noted.
In this story, Belyaev expressed confidence in the possibility of studying human emotional life at its most complex level. Thinking about “a device with which one could mechanically fabricate melodies, well, at least in the same way as the final figure on an adding machine,” the writer to some extent foresaw the capabilities of modern electronic computers (it is known that computers “compose” music ).
The artistic method of Belyaev, whose work was usually classified as lightweight, “children’s” literature, turns out to be deeper and more complex. At one pole there is a semi-fairy tale cycle about the magic of Professor Wagner, and at the other there is a series of novels, stories, studies and essays that popularized real scientific ideas. It may seem that in this second line of his work Belyaev was the forerunner of modern “close” science fiction. Its attitude: “on the edge of the possible,” declared in the 40-50s to be the main and only one, led to the reduction of science fiction literature. But Belyaev, while popularizing real trends in science and technology, did not hide behind recognized science.
He wrote to Tsiolkovsky that in the novel “Leap into Nothing” he “made an attempt, without going into independent fantasy, to present modern views on the possibility of interplanetary communications, based mainly on your works.” Without going into independent fantasy... But at one time, even such an outstanding engineer as Academician A. N. Krylov declared Tsiolkovsky’s projects scientifically untenable.
On this occasion, Tsiolkovsky wrote:
“... Academician Krylov, borrowing from O. Eberhard’s article, proves through the mouth of this professor that cosmic speeds are impossible, because the amount of explosive will exceed the most reactive device many times.”
So, rocket navigation is a chimera?
“Exactly right,” continued Tsiolkovsky, “if you take gunpowder for calculation. But the opposite conclusions will be obtained if the gunpowder is replaced, for example, with liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The scientist needed gunpowder to refute the universally accepted truth.”
Tsiolkovsky was decades ahead of his time - and not so much technical capabilities as narrow ideas about the feasibility, the necessity of this or that invention for humanity. And the science fiction writer Belyaev saw this second, human face of the “universally recognized truth” better than other specialists. For example, Tsiolkovsky’s all-metal airship is reliable, economical, durable - it still plows the ocean of air only in Belyaev’s novel.
The novel “Airship” began to be published in the magazine “Around the World” at the end of 1934. Soon the editors received a letter from Kaluga:
“The story... is wittyly written and scientific enough to inspire imagination. Let me express my pleasure to Comrade. Belyaev and the venerable editors of the magazine. I ask Comrade Belyaev to send me by cash on delivery his other fantastic story dedicated to interplanetary wanderings, which I could not get anywhere. I hope to find good in it too...”
It was the novel "Leap into Nothing."
“Dear Konstantin Eduardovich! - Belyaev answered. -...I am very grateful to you for your feedback and attention... I even had the idea of dedicating this novel to you, but I was afraid that it “wouldn’t be worth it.” And I was not mistaken: although the novel met with a warm reception among readers, Yak[ov] I[idorovich] Perelman gave a rather negative review about it in issue No. 10 of the newspaper “Literary Leningrad” (dated February 28)... But now, since you yourself about you ask, I willingly fulfill your request and send the novel to your judgment. The novel is currently being republished in a second edition, and I would very much like to ask you to provide your comments and corrections... Both I and the publishing house would be very grateful to you if you would also write a preface to the second edition of the novel (if, of course, you think that the novel deserves your introduction).Sincerely respecting you A. Belyaev"
The review mentioned by Belyaev by Ya. Perelman, a famous popularizer of science who contributed greatly to the spread of the idea of space exploration, was biased and contradictory. Perelman either demanded strict adherence to what was practically feasible, then reproached Belyaev for popularizing what had long been known, or rejected what was new and original.
Perelman, apparently, was dissatisfied that “The Jump” did not reflect the possibility that Tsiolkovsky had just discovered to achieve cosmic speeds using ordinary industrial fuel. Before that, Tsiolkovsky (as can be seen from his objections to Academician Krylov) pinned his hopes on a very dangerous and expensive pair - liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Tsiolkovsky published his discovery in the Tekhnika newspaper in May 1935. Naturally, in the novel, which was published in 1933, this new idea of Tsiolkovsky could not be taken into account.
The main thing, however, is not this, but the fact that Perelman approached the work of science fiction from the point of view of his own purely popularization task, into which science fiction, of course, does not fit. And here he was not consistent either. Perelman contrasted “Leap into Nothing” with O. V. Gayle’s novel “Moon Flight” as an example of scientific popularization. Meanwhile, the German author was based on the works of his compatriot G. Oberth, which were not at all the last word in science. Here are excerpts from Tsiolkovsky’s letter to Perelman dated June 17, 1924:
“Dear Yakov Isidorovich, I am writing to you mainly to say a little about the work of Oberth and Goddard (American pioneer of rocket technology - A.B.) ... Firstly, many important questions about the rocket are not even touched upon theoretically. Oberth’s drawing is only suitable for illustrating fantastic stories...” That is, Oberth should have been illustrating Guile, and not vice versa. Tsiolkovsky lists Oberth's numerous borrowings from his works. Consequently, Guile took it not even from second, but from third hands and, in any case, could not serve as an example for Belyaev. Belyaev was thoroughly familiar with the works of Tsiolkovsky. Back in 1930, he dedicated the essay “Citizen of the Ethereal Island” to him.
Tsiolkovsky’s preface to the second edition of “A Leap into Nothing” (the reader will find it on page 319 of this book) is in all respects the opposite of Perelman’s review. The famous scientist wrote that Belyaev’s novel seemed to be “the most meaningful and scientific” of all the works about space travel known to him then. In a letter to Belyaev, Tsiolkovsky added (we quote a draft of the letter preserved in the archive): “As for dedicating it to me, I consider it your kindness and an honor for myself.”
The support inspired Belyaev. “Your warm response to my novel,” he replied, “gives me strength in the difficult struggle to create science fiction works.” Tsiolkovsky consulted on the second edition of “Leap into Nothing” and went into details.
“I have already corrected the text according to your comments,” Belyaev said in another letter. “In the second edition, the editors only slightly lighten the “scientific load” - they remove “Hans’s Diary” and some lengths in the text, which, in the opinion of readers, are somewhat heavy for a work of fiction.”
“I also expanded the third part of the novel - on Venus - by introducing several entertaining adventures, in order to make the novel more interesting for the general reader.”
“When correcting your comments, I made only one small digression: you write: “The speed of nebulae is about 10,000 kilometers per second,” I added this to the text, but then I write that there are nebulae with high speeds...”
The retreat, however, was not only this. Belyaev rejected Tsiolkovsky's advice to remove mention of the theory of relativity and the resulting paradox of time (when time in a rocket traveling at a speed close to the speed of light slows down relative to the earth's).
While popularizing, Belyaev did not exclude the controversial and put forward his own fantastic ideas, not borrowed from Tsiolkovsky. Perelman, for example, condemned Belyaev for the fact that in “Leap into Nothing” the rocket is accelerated to sub-light speed using intra-atomic energy that is too “problematic for technical use.” But Belyaev looked to the future: without such a powerful power plant as a nuclear engine, long-distance space flights are impossible. Modern science is persistently looking in this direction. Belyaev was more optimistic than Tsiolkovsky about the timing of man's entry into space. As he predicted, the first space flights were carried out by Tsiolkovsky’s younger contemporaries. The scientist himself, before he found the opportunity to do without hydrogen-oxygen fuel, pushed back this event by several centuries. In the episodes on Venus we will find not only adventures, but also a rather logical - for those times - look at the forms of extraterrestrial life. “Moles” melting passages in the snow with their hot bodies, six-armed ape-men in multi-story Venusian forests and other wonders - all this is not a wild, uncontrollable fantasy, but images inspired by the scientific ideas of that time. Belyaev knew that Venus is a hotter planet than the Earth, that the natural temperature contrasts on it are sharper, and if life is possible in such conditions at all, it must have developed more active adaptive characteristics. It is not necessary, of course, to have six arms, but this is, so to speak, a biologically realized metaphor.
Belyaev was interested not only in Tsiolkovsky’s space projects. Regretting the books lost during transportation, he wrote: “Among these books were, among other things, about the “remaking of the Earth,” the settlement of equatorial countries, and so on. The general public is less familiar with these ideas of yours, I would like to popularize these ideas too.”
In mid-1935, a seriously ill Belyaev wrote to Tsiolkovsky that, not being able to work, he was considering “a new novel - “The Second Moon” - about artificial satellite Earth - a permanent stratospheric station for scientific observations. I hope that you will not refuse me your friendly and valuable instructions and advice.
Forgive me for writing in pencil - I’ve been in bed for 4 months.
I sincerely wish you to get well soon, A. Belyaev, who sincerely loves and respects you.”
On the reverse side of the sheet one can hardly make out the trembling lines written by Tsiolkovsky’s weakening hand:
“Dear [Alexander Romanovich].K. Tsiolkovsky"
Thank you for your detailed answer. Your illness, like mine [inaudible], is the result of hard work. We need to work less. Regarding advice, please read my books - everything is scientific there (Goals, Beyond Earth, etc.).
Due to my weakness, I can’t promise anything.
This was one of the last letters of the dying scientist. The “Second Moon” in memory of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was named the “Star of the KETS”.
In the novels “KETS Star” (1936), “Laboratory of Dublve” (1938) and “Under the Arctic Sky” (1938), the writer wanted to introduce the theme of a communist future into his fiction at a new level. In his early novel, “Struggle on the Air,” the adventurous plot drowned out the simple utopian sketches. Now Belyaev wanted to create a novel about the future based on a good science fiction plot. Soviet social science fiction intersected with scientific and technical fiction not only in its focus on the future, but also in its method.
“Our technology of the future,” Belyaev wrote, “is only part of the social future... the social part of Soviet science fiction works should have the same scientific basis as the scientific and technical part.”
The writer understood that over time class antagonism would become a thing of the past, the opposition between physical and mental labor would disappear, etc. In a novel about communism, Belyaev said, the writer must “predict conflicts goodies among themselves, to guess at least 2-3 features in the character of the person of the future.” In a work about the relatively near future of Soviet society, he reflected, “the fight against fragments of the exploiting class, against saboteurs, spies, saboteurs, can and should be used for the plot. But a novel describing the classless society of the communist era should already have some completely new plot foundations.”
Which ones? “With this question,” Belyaev said, “I turned to dozens of authoritative people, right up to the late A.V. Lunacharsky, and at best I received an answer in the form of an abstract formula: “On the struggle between the old and the new.” The writer needed specific collisions and circumstances, this would allow him to give lively action. That is, Belyaev involuntarily gravitated towards the previous form of the fantastic novel, in which, he wrote, “everything rests on the rapid development of action, on dynamics, on the rapid change of episodes; here the heroes are known mainly not by their descriptive characteristics, not by their experiences, but by their external actions.” Here the writer could apply the techniques he had well mastered.
Belyaev understood that a socio-fiction novel should include more extensive reflections on morality, descriptions of everyday life, etc. than in an ordinary science fiction novel, and “with an abundance of descriptions, the plot cannot be too sharp, exciting, otherwise the reader will begin to miss descriptions." A contradiction arose. That is why, Belyaev said, his novel “Laboratory Dublve” “turned out to be not very entertaining in plot.”
Belyaev was thinking about something else. He doubted: “Will the hero of the future and his struggle captivate the reader of today, who has not yet overcome the remnants of capitalism in his own consciousness and was brought up on cruder, even physical, ideas of struggle?” Will such a reader be interested in other conflicts? Will the man of the future - “with enormous self-control, the ability to restrain himself” - seem to him “insensitive, soulless, cold, unsympathetic”?
Theoretically, Belyaev understood that the author of a social novel about the future should not adapt to the consumer of adventure fiction, but in practice he nevertheless returned to the “plot” standard, albeit somewhat modified. He replaced the pursuit of spies, on which the contemporary science fiction novel of the 30s (S. Belyaev, A. Adamov, A. Kazantsev) was based, with everyday surprises and natural obstacles. It turned out to be a compromise. Belyaev’s novels about the future are static, expositional, and with these qualities they resemble his early utopian essays “City of the Winner” and “Green Symphony”.
In one novel, we, together with an American worker and the Soviet engineer accompanying him, travel through the inhabited, mechanized North (“Under the Arctic Sky”). In another, together with the heroes who are looking for and cannot meet each other, we find ourselves in an extraterrestrial orbital laboratory (“KEC Star”). We see amazing technological achievements in people - busily pressing buttons, struggling with nature, doing research. What do they think about, what do they argue about, how do they treat each other? What will human life be like when there are no interplanetary gangsters-businessmen (“Air Seller”) and newly minted slave owners (“Amphibian Man”), contenders for world domination (“Lord of the World”) and criminal doctors (“The Head of a Professor”) in it? Dowell")? Will all that be left then is to show off the successes of free labor and accidentally get into adventures?
Asking a question about the peculiarities of human relations under communism, Belyaev could not get a more specific answer than about the struggle between the new and the old, because these relations were just beginning to emerge, they could not be completely predicted - the writer himself had to become their intelligence officer, his the work was “at the intersection” of the theory of scientific communism with a living artistic study of Soviet life. Belyaev hoped to build a model of the social future using the same method of speculative extrapolation (“... the author,” he wrote, “at his own peril and risk, is forced to extrapolate the laws of dialectical development”) that he mastered in his technical and natural science utopias. For a social science fiction novel, this path was of little use. Living reality introduces amendments to social theory that are more complex and unexpected than to natural science. The imaginary picture of the social future contained too many unknown quantities. The science fiction writer, lacking specific new ideas, was forced to return to generalities about the “struggle of opposites” and “the negation of the negation.” Belyaev's task was further complicated by the fact that the writer was addressing a relatively near future. There, he rightly noted, people should “be more reminiscent of contemporaries than people of the future.” Only comparison with living reality could give a measure of this similarity and difference.
The difficulty, then, was not one of “artistic decoration,” but one of raising the social fantasy to a more precise, more scientific level. Belyaev was inclined to somewhat mechanically transfer his observations of modernity into the future. “In one novel about the future,” he wrote, “I set out to show the diversity of tastes of a person of the future. There are no standards in everyday life... I portray some characters as lovers of ultra-modernized home furnishings - furniture, etc., others as lovers of antique furniture.” It would seem that everything is correct: to each according to his needs. But the flourishing of higher needs, quite possibly, will lead precisely to a certain standardization of the lower ones, which Belyaev speaks of. Belyaev mechanically applied the “theory of the future” to modern life, while there is a complex, dialectical connection between them. It was necessary to understand that with the satisfaction of the most pressing everyday needs, spiritual ideals would become more perfect.
Belyaev did not trivialize the ideal. This, he said, is “a socialist attitude towards work, the state and public property, love for the motherland, readiness to sacrifice in its name, heroism.” He saw close-up the basis on which the man of the future would develop, and he had interesting thoughts about the psychotype of this person. In the story “The Golden Mountain” (1929), an American journalist, observing employees of a Soviet scientific laboratory, “was increasingly surprised by these people. Their psychology seemed unusual to him. Perhaps this is the psychology of the future person? This depth of experience and at the same time the ability to quickly switch one’s attention to something else, to concentrate all one’s mental strength on one subject...”
But some of Belyaev’s guesses and declarations turned out to be artistically unrealized. Explaining why in the Dublve Laboratory he did not dare to “give characteristics of people” and instead turned his attention “to describing the cities of the future,” Belyaev admitted that he had “not enough material.” Probably, the writer knew worse those of his contemporaries who were going to Tomorrow. After all, in his previous stories he was used to a different hero. But the point was not only in his personal capabilities, but also in the small historical experience of Soviet reality at that time. A further step in understanding the man and society of the future was made by Soviet science fiction literature already in the past. But we will remember that Alexander Belyaev was a pioneer on this path.
He believed in the bright future of his Soviet Motherland. When did the Great Patriotic War, Belyaev, in patriotic articles and essays, expressed his ardent conviction of victory. The enemy invasion caught him near Leningrad, in the city of Pushkin, bedridden by illness. The writer did not live to see his liberation: he died in January 1942. But his books continued to participate in struggle and creation. His science fiction novels were retold by heart, recalls the French writer and member of the anti-fascist Resistance Jacques Bergier, by prisoners of the Mauthausen death camp. They were banned by Franco censorship. Scientists to this day turn to his fiction, reflecting on emerging discoveries. His novels continue to be read in great demand and still top the list of readers' most beloved works of Soviet science fiction.