In October 1917, the Bolsheviks launched a revolution that upended the Romanov dynasty and established the world’s first socialist state – a seismic rupture that generated countless questions about the future: What will society look like under socialism? How will technology transform the daily life of workers? And when will socialism give way to “true” communism? In addition to bearing on practical matters like creating new systems of governance and modes of economic production, these questions inspired a wide array of artists, filmmakers, and writers to offer their own visions of the revolution and its outcomes. Science fiction occupied a particularly important place in Soviet culture: it was tasked with imagining the technological and social progress of humanity under socialism while operating within the state’s tightly controlled ideological strictures.
From early revolutionary optimism to the philosophically ambiguous visions of the late Soviet period, the course traces how speculative fiction celebrated – and sometimes challenged – the ideological foundations of communism. Together we will read Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Red Star, a fictional account of a Russian scientist’s expedition to visit a utopian socialist society on Mars, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, which imagines the ways advancements in medical science and socialism reform and deform humanity, and the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic, an imagined history of humanity after alien contact. Students will also watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972), which compels viewers to reconsider the relationship between technology and the soul. How does situating these texts within their political, philosophical, and scientific contexts help us understand the centrality of speculative fiction to Soviet culture? In what ways did artists use their media to express hope, offer dissent, and harness the power of imagination in the Soviet Union? How did science fiction differ from the “science fact” of the space race and other revolutionary technological accomplishments of the Soviet state? And how did Soviet science fiction imagine the future of humanity?
