contemporary SF in the Russian and Czech contexts

 

Littrans 207, Slavic SF (Spring 2021), 4-15 Thursday

 

 

Today’s topic

We’ll discuss certain authors and works who are prominent in contemporary SF in the Russian and Czech contexts.

 

 

*** CREECA LECTURE by Sibelan Forrester ***

“Calling the Future: What Names in Russian and East European Science Fiction Reveal” Today at 4pm: this is a talk connected to an assignment for this course

A recording of the talk will be posted to CREECA’s website for those who can’t attend.

 

 

 

 

Start-of-class discussion

Reactions to the excerpts (Glukhovsky in the Russian context, Ajvaz in the Czech context) that we read?

Lecture Intro quotes

1.  “Glukhovsky succeeds admirably in portraying a claustrophobic world in which humans eke out a precarious existence by raising livestock and mushrooms on their own waste products. These luckless survivors of the war are so accustomed to living in the glare of red emergency lighting that they face permanent blindness if caught on the surface in daylight. Not without good reason, one of the characters comments on humanity’s resemblance to Wells’s Morlocks.”

 

2.  “There are no simple meanings in literature. The message that a book carries is also in its style, in the rhythm of the language. This reveals the forces that create the world that the author wants to create, or through which the author wants to communicate. This world may be purely imaginary, but at the same time it is always some kind of metaphor for our world, showing us some of its characteristics. Language can express reality, because it is not only a pale reflection

of reality it is reality in itself, it is the action, the inhalation and exhalation, the ebb and flow of forces.” (Michal Ajvaz)

 

3.  “The texts of the Czech writer Michal Ajvaz are evidence not only of a clever imagination, but also of a mind that savors the difficulty of reading—a mind for which language is not merely a vehicle for the delivery of information, but an integral part of the very world it is trying to communicate. Reading such a world means stepping inside it, letting it infect you, bruise, scrape, poison and obsess you.”

 

 

Outline of today’s class

1.  The Moscow metro: a brief introduction

2.  Dmitry Glukhovsky and Metro 2033 franchise (Russian)

3.  Michal Ajvaz (Czech)

4.  Some thoughts on the end (of the course)

 

 

Moscow metro (Московский метрополитен)

It opened in 1935 with 13 stations. It now has over 200 stations and one of the longest metro tracks in the world. Some stations are very, very deep underground. It has an average daily ridership of around 7 million people (or at least it did prior to the pandemic).

 

It was built to be a triumph of Soviet ingenuity and science, so… it’s most definitely part of the Soviet project as a sci-fi project! It was an ambitious project, both technologically and artistically. It mobilized vast numbers of people: engineers, artists, builders. Other countries in the Soviet sphere of influence constructed similar metro projects in their capital cities.

 

Stations are intricately, artistically, and uniquely designed. Tourists in Moscow often visit the most beautiful stations. This also means they’re easily identifiable by design pattern.

 

 

The metro station VDNKh

The station’s name is an abbreviation for Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy (Выставка достижений народного хозяйства). Construction on this site was begun around the same time as construction on the metro.

 

As the English translation indicates, it was an exhibition devoted to the power and prowess of the Soviet economy. The locus of action in the novella–—the home-base metro station of the protagonist—is thus culturally and historically symbolic.

 

Other metro stations mentioned in the book are also symbolic. For example, the “Red line,” which is the locus of communist resurgence in the novel (and communism is associated with red). Note also the ring line, which in the novel is the locus of power for the so-called Hanza, short for Hanseatic League: the ring line allows them to trade with all other lines, so they became, like the Germanic Hanseatic League of yore, a rich and powerful trading entity.

 

Maps of the Moscow metro with locations of key lines/stations (VDNKh is north on Yellow)

 

 

 

Dmitry Glukhovsky (b. 1979)

 

He is a Russian journalist and author. He’s a hugely successful SF/F writer in first the Russian and then a world context, and his work has become transmedia (books, video games, and soon a film).

 

He began writing Metro 2033 when he was 18 years old. He initially published it for free on his website in 2002, and it has been estimated that over two million read the book for free there. In 2005, itt was printed by a respectable publishing house in Russia. By 2010, it had sold over 500,000 copies in Russia alone. Foreign rights have been sold to more than twenty countries.

There are several other books in the Metro series.

 

 

His main home is Moscow, but he travels frequently. He’s something of a polyglot: in addition to Russian, he speaks English, French, German, Armenian, and Hebrew (and some Spanish).

 

He has published other books besides those in the Metro series. These include: Dusk (2007), which he wrote chapter by chapter on his blog as online experimental fiction; Tales of the Motherland (2010), which is a collection of stories that satirize contemporary Russian realities; Future (2013), a dystopian novel that takes place in the 25^th century when people are immortal (and if they have a child, one of the parents must agree to give up that immortality); and Text (2017), his first non-SF/F book.

 

Metro 2033 (and 2034 and 2035)

So what’s going on in this book? We’ve read the first chapter (at least) and already have an idea. The year is 2013, and a nuclear war has forced most of Moscow’s surviving population underground to the metro stations in search of refuge. This is, by the way, plausible: the Moscow metro was designed with this contingency in mind.

 

Metro 2034 takes place a year after the events in the first book; it was published in Russia in 2009. Metro 2035 is the sequel to 2034, but it’s also a book written for the video game Metro: Last Light, and it was published in Russian in 2015.

What can we say about the Metro series? There is strong and effective estrangement. You can’t ever look at the metro, which is an everyday experience for an awful lot of Russians, in the same way!

 

There is also a strong mix of SF and F. The main premise is the former, but the rest of the plot is much closer to the latter.

 

Glukhovsky was strongly influenced by the works of the Strugatsky brothers—and also Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The atmosphere is “claustrophic” (people live, after all, in metro tunnels) and also there is tension, suspense, anticipation. This is rather like the Zone in Stalker, except with Glukhovsky you know that something will eventually happen… and it does. Glukhovsky intentionally borrows the term/concept “stalker” from the Strugatskys for one of the characters.

 

Does it live up to SF’s potential? Is there a cognitive aspect to the estrangement? Perhaps so, but I think it’s rather superficial or shallow. If you’ve read the book(s) and want to convince me otherwise in your final project, I’m certainly open to the dialogue.

 

The Metro 2033 franchise

One critic has written: “Bizarrely, one thing Metro 2033 doesn’t often feel like is a novel.” And indeed, the Metro series has spawned several video games. Metro 2033, released in 2010, was the first: it is played from a first-person perspective, players control Artyom, they encounter human and mutant enemies, they must wear a gas mask to explore the Earth’s surface. Metro: Last Light, released in 2013, was the second.

 

Has anyone played these and would you like to tell us about them? I don’t play video games, but I read that the second game has two alternate endings in Artyom’s final confrontation with the Dark Ones (let’s try not engage in spoilers, though, if some want to put this series on their summer reading-lists).

 

The Metro series has also generated fan fiction: there are lots of novels and short stories that extend and elaborate the basic premise in various ways. Somewhat surprisingly, Glukhovsky is

not against these: he has said that they form part of the “Metro 2033 universe.” The series has also inspired other writers to set similar stories in their cities’ metro systems.

 

In short, the series has been—and continues to be—a sensation. In fact, there is a film being made now that has a tentative release date in 2022. Glukhovsky has said that he turned down film offers for years, but he finally found a company that would make the film the way he wants. In August 2019, he said: “Our ambitions turned out to be similar: to create a world-class blockbuster and stun even those who have read the trilogy and know it by heart.” So stay tuned!

 

 

Michal Ajvaz (b. 1949 in Prague)

He is a Czech/Russian novelist, poet, translator, and academic researcher. His writing is in the literary mainstream, and he has won major awards for it in the Czech context, including the Jaroslav Seifert Prize, the Czech Republic’s highest literary honor, in 2005.

 

Like Lem before him, his style is often compared to Borges’s, and he has been called a magical realist. Ajvaz himself denies this and sees himself more as an SF writer (and is a really big SF nerd). His books have been translated into English, French, Japanese, Italian, Croatian, Norwegian, Russian, and other languages.

 

He began publishing late in life (at the age of 40). Prior to that he worked various technical jobs: for example, as a night security guard at a parking lot and hotel handyman. It’s tough being an intellectual dissident under a repressive regime! His full-time day job is as a researcher in the Center for Theoretical Study, which is affiliated with Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences (“science” in the broad sense of knowledge, including knowledge emerging from humanistic disciplines).

 

His major novels include (with original Czech publication dates followed by English translations): The Other City (1993/2009); The Golden Age (2001/2010); Empty Streets (2004/2016); Voyage to the South (2008/English translation apparently in progress); Luxembourg

Gardens (2011/English translation apparently in progress); and Cities (2019/no English translation in progress yet).

 

What can we say about The Other City? The language is poetic, lyrical, quasi-surrealist. One critic has called it “hypnotically flowing prose.” There is a protagonist, but we never know his name. There is a plot, but it’s not a traditional one at all. The language itself is the focal point of the text, and language as a topic is a focal theme.

 

It’s a great example of experimental prose in the Slavic SF/Fantasy tradition, but it’s also… not everyone’s cup of tea! It’s intellectual, theoretical, abstract, symbolic: this is not an SF/F adventure tale with well-developed characters! It is, however, an adventure tale in terms of the intellect and the imagination.

 

Critics have pointed out that Ajvaz is interested in story-telling, but not really in characterization. The dialogue is more like monologue: it’s flat and monotone. All Ajvaz’s characters “speak in about the same voice, and their personalities are generally one-dimensional. Ajvaz seems uninterested in motivations and psychological realism; unlike most of us, his characters exist primarily to tell their stories” (Jonathan Bolton).

 

This critic goes on, however, to emphasize that the stories are worth it:

“But oh, what stories! Imagine an underground cathedral lit solely by luminous fish swimming in glass statutes. Imagine wasps that buzz behind your bathroom mirror and sting you while you’re shaving. Imagine a species of white ants that scare off predators by condensing into the form of a tiger, whose eyes turn green and emit teardrops, which alone can cure an unfortunate sickness that keeps its victims asleep most of the time… Imagine an afterlife whose inhabitants argue about whether they are in heaven or in hell; imagine that the doodles in your tenth-grade math notes had infuriated the queen of a distant land, whose top spy lures you into her clutches with a floating puppet theatre.”

 

The Other City should also remind us of Metro 2033 in one respect: it estranges the everyday reality of a beloved capital city (in Ajvaz’s case, Prague). If you know Prague and read this book,

everyday places and experiences (like riding a tram) take on new symbolic meanings. One critic says that Ajvaz “breathes new life” into a Czech literary tradition of “Prague walkers”: “Visitors who have gotten their fill of the golems, witches, and Kafka caricatures that populate Prague’s postcard stands will find in Ajvaz a new mythical geography.”

 

Some thoughts on the end (of the course, not the world)

This is the last formal class that I’ll be teaching, and so I’d like to wrap things up for this course in some way. I am, admittedly, never very good at summing up a course—sorry about that! But maybe a not so terrible way to do it is to look back on our course goals and see whether we’ve managed to meet them.

 

1.  Students will demonstrate knowledge of major works and authors of science fiction in the Slavic context.

2.  Students will demonstrate an awareness of the cultural/historical significance of these works given the contexts in which they were written.

3.  Students will develop critical-reading skills related to the analysis of texts (literature and film) and particularly to the genre of science fiction.

 

We’ve actually done these things, haven’t we?

 

 

I will add to this that I hope…

1.  … that you’ve enjoyed the readings and films (or at least some of them: we probably learn the most from readings or films that fall somewhat outside of our own comfort zone).

2.  … that you’ve discovered something new that you probably wouldn’t have otherwise.

3.  … that you’ve learned something about yourself as a reader of SF and maybe also as a reader in general, if not as a person.

4.  … that you’ll leave the course with a list of books/authors to read in the future and hopefully also some films to watch!

 

If you have any thoughts about the course, please don’t be shy. I’d love to hear from you, and not only in the course evaluations, which will be live soon.

 

We do have one more formal class (next Tuesday, 4-20), which features a guest speaker, Dr. Krzysztof Borowski (Polish Studies, UW-Madison). Dr. Borowski will talk to us about the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, author of The Witcher series. Like Glukhovsky’s work in Russia, Sapkowski’s has spawned a transmedia empire.

 

After that, we take some time to focus on our final projects, and our regular class time will be office hours for consultations on those projects. If you can, please try to email me in advance to let me know that you’ll be dropping in to talk about your project—and give me a hint of what we’ll be discussing so I be as prepared and helpful as possible.

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Ikarie XB-1

 

Today’s topic

We’ll discuss the Czechoslovak cult classic SF film Ikarie XB-1.

 

 

Let’s go over the quiz

1.  Ikarie is the name of: (a) the planet they’re traveling to; (b) the spaceship they’re in; (c) the captain of the spaceship; (d) the disabled spaceship they find on their journey.

2.  The crew of the ship has no women: true or false.

3.  The disabled ship they find on their journey is from the USSR: true or false.

4.  No one on the crew dies: true or false.

5.  When they arrive at their planetary destination, what do they find? Let’s discuss!

Start-of-class discussion

Guide questions to the film. Contributions?

1.  What did you like about this film and what didn’t you—and why?

2.  What later (famous) SF productions might this film have influenced and how?

3.  The film is obviously meant to be entertaining, but it also has a serious side. How do you read the message(s) of this film? To what end is SF being put here?

 

 

 

 

 

“Ikarie XB-1 is a masterclass in atmosphere, with lingering corridor shots and symmetrical set designs that no doubt inspired both Kubrick’s 2001 and Ridley Scott’s Alien.”

 

“Ikarie XB-1 is a visual masterpiece that both demands and deserves to be reevaluated within the canon of science fiction classics past and present.”

 

 

“That Ikarie XB-1 is as gripping a film as it is quite an accomplishment, especially when you consider that one of its major set pieces involves the entire crew falling asleep.”

 

 

It was inspired by a Lem novel called The Magellanic Cloud (1955). Lem’s novel has basically the same plot, but the ship is much larger and so is the crew (which is also multiethnic and gender-diverse), and the ship is sent from a society that is implied to be a world-wide socialist utopia. Another commonality is the theme of human idealism.

 

 

In Lem’s novel, however, the ship is called Gea (Gaia). While both ships reach the new world and initially encounter clouds, the first contact scenarios are very different. Lem’s book is much more philosophical and critical about human history on Earth. There are other differences as well.

 

 

Other East Central European SF films at around the same time: First Spaceship on Venus (1959, German and Polish), Storm Planet (1962, Russian), Andromeda Nebula (1967, Russian).

 

 

It’s a Cold War film: it was high-budget and meant to innovatively compete with Western cinema. At the same time, however, it’s not a propaganda film, which is somewhat surprising. It’s an optimistic film about the future of humanity that casts 20^th-century humankind in dark terms.

Ikarie “seems unconcerned with the dangers of the rest of the universe”: no alien invasions, no atomic monsters.

 

 

Another difference: “Unlike American SF films of the era, which were more often than not throwaway drive-in fare, these movies were a major undertaking for the countries that produced them, and were not only intended to be an expression of national pride, but also a source of it.”

 

Although there is some action and suspense, it is much less of a space-adventure tale than it is a film about human psychology.

 

 

The spaceship has a multinational crew of (mainly) scientists headed to Alpha Centauri to search for extraterrestrial life. The crew is diverse in terms of gender (but not race).

 

 

The film boasts special effects that were new for its time.

 

 

It’s a blending of genres: SF, thriller, romance, political drama.

 

 

One reviewer said the film “may well be a cornerstone of the genre, but it also bridges the gap between the psychological drama and the kitsch space film.”

 

 

The composer is Zdeněk Liška. He is also known for his collaborations with the acclaimed Czech clay-mation film-maker Jan Švankmajer (if you’re never seen his 1996 Conspirators of Pleasure, you’re really missing out).

 

 

The music has been described as “creating a suitable and engaging lounge mood at times, adding to the sense of a new age and new hope.” One reviewer has written: “The soundtrack is enjoyably creepy with bursts of jolting synth noises.”

 

 

It has sophisticated costuming and set design: a “stylistically refined fictional world of a distant future.” The film has often been praised for best spacesuit designs.

 

 

The cinematographers “create an impressionistic portrait of claustrophobia, full of ominous shadows, enclosed spaces, and a sense of individual minuteness against the eternal expanse of space.”

 

The style of film has been called “retro-futurism” or “futuristic minimalism.”

 

 

But it’s also a little campy: it features “a glorious dance sequence in which crew members in horrible meringue-like dresses perform choreographed dance sequences to somber synths.”

 

 

It had a strong influence on SF films that followed, including: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),

Solaris (1972), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979).

 

 

It also influenced TV series like Star Trek (1966) and Lost in Space (1965).

 

 

Much in the film seems familiar to us, but that’s only with the benefit of hindsight. Many of its themes and tropes became regular parts of films and TV series afterwards.

 

 

The space-opera segment of the film is the discovery and exploration of a derelict spacecraft.

 

 

The sequence is an obvious critique of the barbarism and selfishness of the (capitalist) 20^th century. At the same time, the criticism is somewhat softened: one crew member does remind another that the 20^th century also produced some great music and art.

 

 

The name Ikarie comes from the myth of Icarus. Who knows the myth? What happened to Icarus and why?

 

On the one hand, this is a decidedly odd name for a space voyage to another solar system: “a questionable choice for a craft flying towards a distant sun.” On the other, however, the Soviets celebrated Icarus in ideological propaganda of the time, particularly with reference to the space race—which is probably where the name comes from.

 

 

 

The most emphasized criticism concerns the cheesiness of the outside shots, which look like cheap models of spaceships pulled on strings… because they probably are just that. This creates a jarring juxtaposition with the beauty of interior scenes.

 

 

The film was distributed in the US by American International Pictures (AIP) in 1964, and AIP was known for revising, editing, and cutting the foreign films that it distributed. The Americanized name of the film was Voyage to the End of the Universe.

 

 

We’ll watch two trailers: the first is the Czech trailer from the 2016 restored release and the second is the AIP US trailer. How do these differ?

 

AIP also “westernized” the names of the cast and crew: Zdeněk Štepánek > Dennis Stephens, František Smolík > Francis Smolen, and Jindřich Polák > Jack Pollack…

(Godzilla vs The Thing).

 

 

Other changes to the film were more substantial. Almost 12 minutes of footage was cut. The footage of the visit to the derelict spaceship was cut and altered. The ship’s destination was changed from the “White Planet” to the “Green Planet.” Worst of all, the closing scene was recut, which resulted in a completely different ending.

 

The American version cut the last reveal and replaced it with stock video of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, which was a surprise ending: thus the “Green” Planet that Icarus discovered was, absurdly, Earth. Given this revised ending, how might we then interpret the voyage?

There’s an irony here given that the film was based on a novel by Lem and…

 

 

… the story of the film in Czech and then Americanized versions confirms Lem’s harsh critique of American SF as tending toward unserious space opera.

 

Text for end-of-class discussion

Uhlířová, “Voyage through Space, Time, and Utopian Modernism.” Contributions?

 

 

We have no formal class on Thursday, but our reflection papers are due tomorrow. If you need more time, take it: do a good job on the paper to submit something you’re proud of.

 

Finish reading Roadside Picnic (by the Strugatsky brothers) and take the Canvas quiz on it before next Tuesday’s class. We have another guest speaker to lead us in a discussion of this wonderful novella.

 

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