Genre Fiction
Entertainment fiction adopts scientistic themes. Among them, resurrection of an ancient Roman (Extraordinary Story of a Resurrected Pompeian by Vasily Avenarius), global disaster (Struggle of the Worlds, 1900, by N. Kholodny; Under the Comet, 1910, by Simon Belsky), mindreading devices (a recurring theme in works by Andrey Zarin), Antarctic city-states (Under the Glass Dome, 1914, by Sergey Solomin), an elixir of longevity (Brothers of the Saint Cross, 1898, by Nikolay Shelonsky), Atlantis ("Atlantis", 1913, by Larisa Reisner).
Spaceflight remained a central science fiction topic since the 1890s in In the Ocean of Stars (1892) by Anany Lyakide, In the Moon (1893) and Dreams of Earth and Skies (1895) by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Voyage to Mars (1901) by Leonid Bogoyavlensky, "In Space" (1908) by Nikolay Morozov, Sailing Ether (1913) by Boris Krasnogorsky with its sequel, Islands of Ethereal Ocean (1914, co-authored by prominent astronomer Daniil Svyatsky).
In the 1910s Russian audience grew interested in horror fiction. Fire-Blossom, a supernatural thriller by prolific writer Alexander Amfiteatrov became a success. Vera Kryzhanovsky's occult romances that combined science fiction and reactionary elitist utopia enjoyed enormous popularity at the time. Bram Stoker's Dracula was imitated by pseudonymous "b. Olshevri" (= "more lies" in Russian) in Vampires, even before the original was translated to Russian. Early Alexander Grin's stories are mostly psychological horror (he borrowed much from Ambrose Bierce), though later on his writing drifted to less conventional and more literary kinds of fantasy.
Possible miracles of technical progress were regularly described in form of fiction by scientists: "Wonders of Electricity" (1884) by electric engineer Vladimir Chikolev, Automatic Underground Railway (1902) by Alexander Rodnykh, "Billionaire's Testament" (1904) by biology professor Porfiry Bakhmetyev. Future war stories (indistinguishable from their English, German, and French analogues) were produced mostly by the military (Cruiser "Russian Hope", 1887, and Fatal War of 18.., 1889, by retired navy officer Alexander Belomor; Big Fist or Chinese-European War, 1900, by K. Golokhvastov, Queen of the World (1908) and Kings of the Air (1909) by another retired navy officer Vladimir Semyonov; "War of Nations 1921-1923" (1912) by Ix, War of the "Ring" with the "Union" (1913) by P. R-tsky, The End of the War, 1915, by Lev Zhdanov). Threat to the World (1914) by Ivan Ryapasov (who styled himself "Ural Jules Verne") is very much alike Jules Verne's The Begum's Fortune, but the arch-enemy is an Englishman. Jules Verne was so widely read that Anton Chekhov has written a parody on him, and Konstantin Sluchevsky produced a sequel - "Captain Nemo in Russia" (1898).
-
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
-
Alexander Grin
-
Alexander Bogdanov
-
Valery Bryusov
Read more about this topic: Soviet Science Fiction, Late 19th, Early 20th Century
Famous quotes containing the words genre and/or fiction:
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)
“... all fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.”
—Shirley Abbott (b. 1934)