Science fiction largely disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s. Socialist Realism left no space for Utopian dreams, or any form of moral ambiguity, and the only science fiction that was not stamped out was that which extolled Soviet technology. But the space programme of the 1950s led to a resurgence of science fiction in the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev, who was a devotee of the genre, encouraged writers to return to the traditions of the pre-Stalin years.
Ivan Efremov's Andromeda (1957) was perhaps the most important work in this new wave, and certainly one of the bestselling (with over 20 million copies sold in the Soviet Union alone). Set in a distant future, when the earth has been united with the other galaxies in a universal civilization, it portrays a cosmic paradise in which science plays a discreet role in providing for all human needs; but what emerges above all else as the purpose of existence is the eternal need of human beings for ethical relationships, freedom, beauty and creativity. Efre-mov was bitterly attacked by communist hardliners: his emphasis on spiritual values was uncomfortably close to a fundamental challenge
* It may be that the title of Zamyatin's novel We was drawn at least in part from Dostoevsky - in particular from Verkhovensky's words to Stavrogin (in The Devils, trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 42.3) where he describes his vision of the future revolutionary dictatorship ('[W]e shall consider how to erect an edifice of stone… We shall build it, we, we alone!'). Perhaps more obviously, the title may have been a reference to the revolutionary cult of the collective (the Proletkult poet Kirillov even wrote a poem by the title of 'We'). See further G. Kern, Zamyatin's We: A Collection of Critical Essays (Ann Arbor, 1988), p. 63.
to the whole materialist philosophy of the Soviet regime. But he was not alone. Science fiction was rapidly becoming the principal arena for liberal, religious and dissident critiques of the Soviet world view. In Daniel Granin's Into the Storm (1962), the physicist hero is a humanist, a Pyotr Kapitsa or an Andrei Sakharov, who understands the need to harness science to spiritual human goals. 'What,' he asks, 'distinguishes people from animals? Atomic energy? The telephone? I say - moral conscience, imagination, spiritual ideals. The human soul will not be improved because you and I are studying the earth's magnetic fields.'201
The science fiction novels of the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady and Boris) were subversively conceived as contemporary social satire in the manner of Gogol and, drawing much from Dostoevsky, as an ideological critique of the Soviet materialist Utopia. That, to be sure, is how they were received by millions of readers in the Soviet Union who had grown accustomed from years of censorship to read all literature as allegory. In Predatory Things of the Century (1965) the Strugatskys portrayed a Soviet-like society of the future, where nuclear science and technology have delivered every conceivable power to the omnipresent bureaucratic state. Since there is no longer any need for work or independent thought, the people are transformed into happy morons. Sated with consumer goods, the citizens have become spiritually dead. This same idea was taken up by the dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky in his Unguarded Thoughts (1966), a collection of aphoristic essays which renounce science and materialism for a Russian faith and native soil-type nationalism that could have come directly from the pages of Dostoevsky.
Science fiction films were equally a vehicle for challenging Soviet materialism. In Romm's Nine Days (1962), for example, some scientists engage in long debates about the moral questions posed by atomic energy. They philosophize about the means and ends of science as a whole - to the point where this very verbal film begins to resemble a scene out of Dostoevsky in which characters discuss the existence of a God. In Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Solaris (1972) the exploration of outer space becomes a moral and spiritual quest for self-knowledge, love and faith. The cosmic traveller, a scientist called Chris, journeys to a space station in the distant galaxies where scientists
have been researching the mysterious regenerative powers of a huge burning star. His journey becomes a more personal quest, as Chris rediscovers his capacity to love, when Hari, his ex-lover, whom he had driven to suicide through his emotional coldness, is brought back to life, or a mirage of it, by the powers of the star. Hari's sacrifice (she destroys herself again) releases Chris from his emotional dependence on her and allows him to return to earth (an oasis which appears in the burning star). In a spirit of atonement he kneels before his father to beg forgiveness for his sins. The earth thus emerges as the proper destination of all journeys into space. Man ventures out not to discover new worlds but to find a replica of earth in space. This affirmation of the human spirit is wonderfully conveyed in the scene on the space station where Hari looks at Bruegel's painting Hunters in the Snow which helps her to recall her former life on earth. The camera scans in detail over Bruegel's painting as Bach's F minor Choral Prelude, interspersed with the sounds of the forest and the chimes of the Rostov bells, rejoices in the beauty of our world. Solaris is not a story about space in the literal sense of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, with which it is so frequently compared. Whereas Kubrick's film looks at the cosmos from the earth, Tarkovsky's looks from the cosmos at the earth. It is a film about the human values in which every Christian culture, even Soviet Russia's, sees its redemption.
In his cinematic credo, Sculpting in Time (1986), Tarkovsky compares the artist to a priest whose mission it is to reveal the beauty that is 'hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth'.202 Such a statement is in the tradition of the Russian artist stretching back to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and beyond - to the medieval icon painters such as the one whose life and art Tarkovsky celebrated in his masterpiece, Andrei Rublev (1966). Tarkovsky's films are like icons, in effect. To contemplate their visual beauty and symbolic imagery, as one is compelled to do by the slowness of their action, is to join in the artist's own quest for a spiritual ideal. 'Art must give man hope and faith', the director wrote.203 All his films are about journeys in search of moral truth. Like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, Andrei Rublev abandons the monastery and goes into the world to live the truth of Christian love and brotherhood among his fellow Russians under Mongol rule. 'Truth has to be lived, not taught. Prepare for battle!'
Tarkovsky said that Hermann Hesse's line from The Glass Bead Game (1943) 'could well have served as an epigraph to Andrei Rublev'.204
The same religious theme is at the centre of Stalker (1979), which, in Tarkovsky's own description, he meant to be a discourse on 'the existence of God in man'.205 The stalker of the film's title guides a scientist and a writer to 'the zone', a supernatural wilderness abandoned by the state after some industrial catastrophe. He is straight out of the Russian tradition of the Holy Fool. He lives alone in poverty, despised by a society where everyone has long ceased to believe in God, and yet he derives a spiritual power from his religious faith. He understands that the heart of 'the zone' is just an empty room in a deserted house. But, as he tells his travelling companions, the basis of true faith is the belief in the Promised Land: it is the journey and not the arrival. The need for faith, for something to believe in outside of themselves, had defined the Russian people, in their mythic understanding of themselves, since the days of Gogol and the 'Russian soul'. Tarkovsky revived this national myth as a counter to the value system of the Soviet regime, with its alien ideas of rational materialism. 'Modern mass culture', Tarkovsky wrote, 'is crippling people's souls, it is erecting barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.'206 This spiritual consciousness, he believed, was the contribution Russia might give to the West - an idea embodied in the last iconic image of his film Nostalgia (1983), in which a Russian peasant house is portrayed inside a ruined Italian cathedral.