5. UTOPIAN FICTION AVANT-GARDE POETRY & PROSE

TODAY’S SEMINAR Presentations Lecture discussion Brief introduction to Red Star (1908) Group work on Red Star

ALEKSANDR BOGDANOV (1873-1928) Born Tula, 1873 Medical degree, 1899 Underground agent for Social Democrats Becomes a Bolshevik in 1904 Associate of Lenin but falls out with him Publishes utopian science fiction (Red Star, 1908; Engineer Menni, 1912) Part of Proletkult movement after 1917 Dies after blood transfusion goes wrong, 1928

1905 REVOLUTION

INDUSTRIALIZATION Nevsky Cotton Mill, St. Petersburg (c.1870) From http://scpasophie.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/russian-industrialization-ca-19th-and.html

URBAN LIFE V. Makovskii, ‘On the Boulevard’ (1886-87)

SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

UTOPIAN SPECULATION E. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1891) A. Bebel, The Woman and Socialism (1879) L. Braun, The Women’s Question (1891)

UTOPIAS What is a utopia? How does a utopia differ from a political manifesto?

UTOPIA V MANIFESTO “Programs tend to be tabular, static, flat, dry and singularly unemotional; if emotion is in evidence, it is usually in the form of hatred or indignation. Programs and plans are of necessity too brief and schematic to offer lyrical descriptions of a coming life. Utopian social daydreaming is something else. It is visionary in the extreme. The dreamer may be a peasant, an emperor, or a revolutionary socialist— the mechanism is the same... Sleeping dreams, reveries, daydreams, fantasies, and imagination all detach the dreamer from the immediate environment.” Richard Stites, Utopian Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.13-14.

GROUP EXERCISE Labour and Economy Health and Education Choose one of these five themes: Labour and Economy Health and Education Arts and Culture Gender and Equality History and Revolution Answer the following questions: How does Bogdanov describe the functioning of these domains in Martian society? (Or, in the case of history and revolution, how are the differences between Martian and Earth societies explained?) To what extent does this utopian writing recall Bolshevik revolutionary experiments?

UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA

NEXT WEEK Reading: John Bowlt, ed. and transl., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934 (London, 1988), pp. 54-60, 151-158, 164-166, 208- 214, 221-222, 244-249. Christina Kiaer, “Into Production!”: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism, eipcp.net (March 2009). How is artistic revolution connected to social/political revolution and the renewal of the everyday in these movements? Do these artistic movements suggest a tension between a social revolution and a revolution of the self? Are abstract art, expressed in cubo-futurism and suprematism, and constructivism opposed? Is suprematism reactionary or revolutionary?