Electricity: Between Fact and Fiction in Fin-de-Siècle Russian Literature
Anindita
Banerjee
With the call for electrification of the nation in 1921,
electricity became coterminous with progress and new enlightenment in
Bol&soft;&shachek;evik Russia. The proposed paper reconstructs a
prehistory of this metaphor through an examination of its genesis and
evolution in Russian literary culture from the 1880s to the early
1920s. In order to analyze the emergence of electricity as a cultural
and literary metaphor, I have chosen to focus on the mediatory role
played by its representation in literature that bridged the realms of
fictionalization and implementation. The paper traces the emerging
relationship between literary constructs of electricity, its conceived
role as a primary tool for transforming collective consciousness, and
actual technological development in Russian culture of the
period. Taking the method used by Richard Stites to study cultural
metaphors in his work Utopia and Revolution as a point of
departure, the paper focuses upon the dialogic referential course of
evolution of electricity in its literary incarnations and as a
cultural entity. The study incorporates a spectrum of sources
comprised not only of subsequently canonized writers and texts, but
also of popular science fiction, millenarian philosophy, mass media
images, state policy and propaganda. It reconstructs the process
whereby the electricity metaphor in twentieth-century Russian
literature derived from and contributed to its resultant collective
perception. The literary texts examined include poetry (Zinaida
Gippius's Èlektri&chachek;estvo, Valerij Brjusov's
Pri èlektri&chachek;estve), late
nineteenth-century science fiction (&Chachek;exov's
Letaju&shachek;&chachek;ie ostrova, Konstantin
Slu&chachek;evskij's Kapitan Nemo v Rossii,
V. &Shachek;elonskij's V strane poluno&chachek;i), and
twentieth-century science fiction (Brjusov's Respublika
ju&zhachek;nogo kresta, Vosstanie
ma&shachek;in, Mjate&zhachek; ma&shachek;in,
Sem&soft; zemnyx soblaznov; Velimir Xlebnikov's prose
cycle Kol iz budu&shachek;&chachek;ego, Andrej Platonov's
Rodina èlektri&chachek;estva). Non-literary
sources survey, in addition to a number of both serious
and popular
periodicals of the period, philosophical
treatises (Nikolaj Fedorov's Filosofija
ob&shachek;&chachek;ego dela, Lenin's Materialism i
èmpiriokriticizm).