(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Valiko Mizandari - "Tango of Death" on vibrato synth)
JM:
Hello and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. And I'm J.M. here with Gretchen and Nate, and we are talking about Soviet science fiction stories from the 1920s. If you want to hear how we started this and talked about the story "Aliens", check out the first installment.
But now our man of the hour is Vladimir Orlovsky. And that is actually a pseudonym of Vladimir Grushvitsky, who was born on June 28, 1889 in Łuków, which is now eastern Poland, which is about 50 miles away from Belarus. His father was a military veteran, and we're definitely going to see a lot of military experience in some of these stories. Not just this one, but that's definitely interesting because I think a lot of these writers are kind of war scarred. That's kind of my impression. Not just war, but like especially Anna Barkova, who was arrested like seven times or something like that. But I don't know, it's not something you normally see in the bios of the authors.
But yeah, so his father was a veterinarian in the military, and Vladimir himself took up a similar position, graduating from the Polotsk Cadet Corps in 1907. And here is where he starts a literary career with the editorship of a newspaper. So we do have a certain amount of common ground with some of our western authors, I suppose. Being a fiction author isn't really his primary thing. Again, something we see in some of these especially 20s and 30s writers who were not like super young.
He stays in the military, and he becomes an artilleryman. And he was stationed in Warsaw. Apparently he was a bit of an depressed individual, and there's reports of him being somewhat suicidal before the First World War really broke out. And he was sent to the front then, and yeah, after that, three years, the revolution. But he stays in engineering school, and he's being sent around. Again, we have such a chaotic time and place, we kind of hinted at some of this stuff when we talked about "Heart of a Dog", especially after the Civil War, after the revolution, and his chief engineer of the southern front army at that time.
After the war, though, he retired from soldiering and became a teacher, and looks like he was mostly into the chemical sciences, but also did some physics, and wrote a lot of popular science stuff, apparently, and he was a pioneer in the science of Galurgy, which has to do with the study of salts, and sodium sulfates, apparently. So he's one of the founders of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Galurgy, which is still around, and conducting research into this area.
So he stayed in academics until his death in January of 1942 when Leningrad was under siege. He's been in where he'd been living for quite some time. So in addition to all that, he did write science fiction stories, although I'm guessing it's a pretty short career in the 1920s only. In fact, from the research that you did, it looks like he only published six short stories and two novels.
Nate:
Yeah, that's what I could find, anyway.
JM:
One of the longer works was actually a longer version of "Revolt of the Atoms", which was that story that we mentioned earlier, being published in Amazing. This guy actually is the only author of our list tonight, and out of most of the Soviet authors that we mentioned, who even had any kind of name out there in the West. And yeah, well, Bleiler pretty much just dismisses it doesn't have anything to say about this guy's story. Not even sure if it's a real person, but it is. And I guess it was just hard for people to find information on these guys, especially by the time there was an interest in scholarship. 1950s. Yeah, good luck.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Making it inquiries into the Soviet Union to look up some, in some cases, completely persona non grata authors. It's just not happening. You can't really blame these people for not knowing too much about the field, but it's the way it was. Even something like the World Treasury of Science Fiction, which was published in, I think, the early 1970s. I think Donald Wollheim had something to do with it, that has a number of stories from all over the world. A lot of English and French stories, of course, but there's some translated Spanish stuff, few Russian things. A Portuguese story. It's pretty cool from what I've read, but there is an interesting sort of attitude of, oh, some of these writers are really cool, but their scene was just following the American one.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
That kind of attitude is definitely there. And maybe that's true, but they did select, you know, they just still managed to select some good stories. And who knows what you're unable to read, right? And that's also the question. What do you have access to? I mean, there's a lot of people making claims about a lot of things.
Nate:
Yeah, and I think early on, especially a lot of stuff was in the hopper with the French stuff, the German stuff, you know, all the continental European stuff, which, you know, America obviously becomes the dominant force in the 1930s and beyond with, I don't know how many pulp magazines launched during that time, but it's obviously a lot. And a lot of that stuff gets exported abroad, especially when, you know, Galaxy starts gets going and they have, you know, translations in like every country. But I mean, this early stuff, I don't think any real national scene is like the leader here. I mean, if anybody, it's Britain and France with Wells and Verne being the most prominent and significant authors from this time. So, yeah, I think at this time, pretty much everybody was doing something unique and something to add to the equation. And I don't think this early on, you know, America was really the dominant voice in the genre at all. And those obviously reasons why people might like to think that way, I just don't think that's how the story played out.
JM:
I think somebody like Brian Aldiss might certainly agree with you on that.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
Nothing great to say about the 1920s US magazines, especially Amazing. Yeah, so among some Orlovsky's other stories include translated titles like "Timmy's Disease", which is supposed to involve someone gaining strange powers from a mysterious malady, "Off Air", which you read a description of some of these, right?
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. That one sounds like it'd be like a precursor to "Rendezvous with Rama" where like the strange derelict appears in the sky. And everybody's like, wow, what's that weird thing? I don't know. Some of these are just like a two sentence description. So it's hard to say without actually reading the story.
JM:
Yeah, the future weapon type stuff seems to have been something he was into. And we see that in quite a few others as well, I think.
Nate:
Sure.
JM:
Definitely always good cautionary tales, telling people what the future of war might be like, especially when you have experience with it a lot.
Nate:
Yeah, first hand.
JM:
People would be very interesting to know what the future of war might be like. But yeah, so we're doing a story called a "Steckerite", which was published in the March-April 1929 issue of the World of Adventure magazine. It has some illustrations too, which is pretty cool. That's some pretty over the top expressions.
Nate:
Yeah, no, this is definitely a horror story.
Gretchen:
Yes.
Nate:
I don't know. Sometimes when I am reading a story like a movie immediately comes to my mind and this is total Amicus horror starring Peter Cushing. I mean, it just has that vibe 100%.
Gretchen:
Yeah, you can really get the suspense from it.
JM:
Yeah, usually these ones sometimes they would have an odd like slightly more science fiction oriented story to them. And yeah, this definitely has that man has to learn a terrible lesson kind of feeling to it. It's very much pulling on the reader's sympathies. I think a lot like kind of really stacking the deck against this character before they torture him to death.
Nate:
You're talking about a boo-hiss character a couple of episodes back. This guy's just such an evil bastard.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and he tortures animals.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
There's even a picture of a poor mouse. Right?
Nate:
Yeah, that's that's a lead off image of the title here, the mouse in the jar.
Gretchen:
Look what he's doing to this poor creature.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, that was pretty much all the stuff that they cut out out of this story when they later republished it is all the gore scenes. Oh, it gets pretty bloody at points. And the only reason I found out that that's what they cut out is I was about to post it on a blogspot and I was just trying to place up where the illustrations were in the story. And I was like, wait a minute, I don't remember this passage here, reading it, it's like, wow, this kind of, wait, how did I miss this? And then it's like, all right, okay, they cut out a good fourth of the story. So I had to go back and...
JM:
So wait a minute, who cut out the gore?
Nate:
It was probably a later republication. I think this one was also published in The Seeker. Let me just check the fantlab record real quick. No, it wasn't the Seeker. It was some journal looks like Chemistry and Life from 1987.
JM:
Interesting.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Well, it's cool to know that the chemistry students were getting these coolest stories about deadly nerve gas and stuff. Yeah, I mean, the chemical side of things isn't really gone into here. But the fact that it's a very terrible chemical weapon that like it's just horrible to think about is definitely front and center. So yeah, written in the 20s, I don't know, the writer had a lot of experience of some of the gas used in World War One.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, mustard gas sounds like horrible by all accounts. I mean, just like what it does to you not only physically, what it does to you mentally.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, it just sounds totally, totally awful in every sense.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Steckerite doesn't sound too far off.
Nate:
No, no, it sounds worse.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
This is like a natural extension of that pretty much.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
So I'll just get into it. We'll finish talking about it after.
Nate:
Sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Stecker is the name of our main character and he's hanging out with his friend Geisler and I think they're having a meal somewhere and drinks. It's not really, I can't tell if it's a conference or just a social gathering or something.
Nate:
I got the sense it was like a beer hall. That's what the illustration makes it looks like. They're just, you know, having a beer chatting about chemical weapons.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, as you will.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do that with my friends all the time.
JM:
Whenever I go to a party, I want to talk about what is it, murders and executions.
Nate:
Right, right, yeah.
Gretchen:
Typical pub talk.
JM:
"American Psycho" reference there. But yeah, Stecker, he's a hard man or so it seems. And yeah, he's a chemical engineer working on toxic agents and poison gases. And he thinks the death of a few, even a few million or nothing on the scales of history. Very lofty about it. War is eternal and you may as well face the facts, he tells his buddy. And he reveals a secret as he chugs his beer. And he's been working on a substance and he loftily calls it, yes, Steckerite. Because after all, despite what I just said, I want to leave my mark on history.
So, it can completely incapacitate and demoralize the enemy. It burns agonizingly on contact and kills instantly when inhaled. So, they sit there among the blissful eaters and the Stecker's is justifiably disturbed. And he thinks about anthills. And I got a flashback of the really cool Theodore Sturgeon story, "Mr. Costello, Hero". And I don't know, we'll do that on the podcast one day. I'm not going to go into this story now because it'd be quite a tangent, but it has to do with guy and anthills. Maybe a hero, but probably not. Definitely a product of the 1950s, just as this is a product of the other post-war.
Nate:
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
JM:
But Stecker is hanging in the laboratory late in the evening. And he's kind of half-working, half-relaxing. And the lab is full of experimental animals and dangerous gas cylinders everywhere. And it really sounds like a nice place to relax and have a smoke and put your feet up. This guy.
So, Stecker is lazily having a smoke and idly kills a rat in a box with the gas, observing. He seems pretty indifferent to anything. So, why does he do it? Who knows? He just sadism, really. He says he's recording stuff, but there's nothing to record because it's the same as all the other findings. Just kill another creature. He meets the attendant, who's this surly younger guy who's a new person on the staff. And Stecker goes into an upper area where more experiments are conducted. And here we get a dog in a cage that's being finitely and cruelly exposed to his poison gas. And this is brutal. It's so obviously like, I'm going to make you as uncomfortable and queasy about this guy as I possibly can.
Here's what he thinks is the attendant leaving, and he needs to do big, puttering about stuff. And he almost dozes off. But suddenly his complacency is shattered by the sound of the dog howling in fear and pain. Frightened, he pulls back a curtain to see a column of venomous gas swirling upward slowly towards him. And yeah, they would definitely do this on one of those old British horror film productions. They're like swirling fog coming up.
Nate:
Hammer, Amicus, all those British film companies love setting their stories in like turn of the century Germany, or like 19th century Germany. And here we get a couple of cruel German scientists who... Yeah, again, Peter Cushing is like perfect for this role 100%.
JM:
So there's no escape except back down where the door is. And the air is already filled with gas. The stuff will instantly eat through his clothes if he tries to go anywhere near it. And of course he can't inhale the stuff, or it's instant death for him. So the rest of the story is a kind of bizarre... I guess you could almost call it a cat and mouse game.
Stecker's indifference and cold blood in this rapidly evaporates in the face of the inescapable misfortune that faces him. And he finds himself cowering with some loose rats climbing onto the desk as they got billows under the curtains and risings. So he finds a hammer somewhere and he hopelessly uses it to chip away at the bricks. And wonders if he should end it all, jump into the gas, and just let it take him quickly. I don't know, knowing that the author had some suicidal impulses did kind of make this part hit home a little more admittedly, but it was pretty powerful as it is, so... It's really getting into some existential anguish here. And you have to wonder, like... You can read about some of the supposed chemical and biological weapons that are being produced nowadays, right? And it's just insane. I don't know, it's just absolutely mad that that's even a thing. But humans.
So he remembers the cry of the recently deceased rat and knows it'll hurt and quivers with fear. Work does bring relief, though, as he batters away at the wall hoping to somehow tunnel his way out, I guess. But soon it won't be possible to stand on the desk. And he realizes he didn't pick up the stool, which he definitely should have done. So the hole's not very big yet, and getting the stool is an intensely painful experience, but he does it. But he wastes more time in recovery. He's lost track of time completely by now, of course, and he doesn't know when all this began. He doesn't know if the expansion of the gas is decreasing in speed or not. But that would be good, if true, I suppose.
The rats start to climb the stool in the hope of escape and get on him. And it's horrifying! And then the light goes out, and now he can't even see the swirling mist ascending. Just smell its cloying sweetness as it draws nearer. And he only has a few matches, but he lights them mechanically and desperately one by one, and then there's nothing left. So striking the wall, striking, until his numb fingers slip and the hammer falls away, not to be retrieved.
"Save me! Save me!" He screams into the empty room as the clock strikes midnight. He experiences all sorts of psychological torment, and hears his own words about a million deaths being swallowed up by history. And he seems to feel a hand touch him from behind, voices and movements all around him. "It's terrifying to die!", is his last thought.
And yeah, that's the most doom thing we see at any of these stories, for sure.
Nate:
So Edgar Allan Poe, I mean, him standing on the table just watching the gas slowly, slowly ascend and not being able to do anything about it.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
So good.
JM:
Yeah, it is really great. But we get one final chapter, and it's the evening of the next day, and the place is cleared of gasses, and there's an investigation. And the attendant was apparently a French spy of some kind, and apparently we're on the border with French, so I don't quite know. Yeah, maybe we're, I don't know where we are exactly, but...
Nate:
Germany's not that big, you know, so I mean...
JM:
Stecker certainly sounds vaguely Germanic, so...
Nate:
Oh yeah, no, it's definitely supposed to be set in Germany. Yeah, I mean, definitely, yeah.
JM:
So, Stecker's dead, but the gas never touched him, except on his legs, where he was burned when he went to get the stool. And the gas had subsided, but he was never to know, falling onto the desk and simply expiring, I guess, out of sheer fright. And Geisler, his erstwhile friend, thinks, hopes that one day the insanity of mankind will end, which is pretty much what I just said. Definitely not, 100 years on.
Nate:
Yeah, wishful thinking.
JM:
We're just lucky that most of these weapons haven't been used, I suppose, I don't know.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean... Yeah, chemical biological agents and stuff like that are banned for a reason, and I think everybody learned that lesson in World War One. Obviously, horrible things can happen when they're unleashed. I mean, this isn't even seeing active warfare, this is just like a canister being opened by a bad-faith actor, which could easily have just been an accident or something like that, and it made the point just as well.
Yeah, no, this is a lot of fun, especially if you like that Edgar Allan Poe, Amicus horror type thing. It really, really gets in the mind of Stecker, especially when he goes into total panic mode in the last half. You're basically with him the entire time and the cloud, and that very Edgar Allan Poe feeling of the cloud just creeping and creeping and creeping closer and closer and closer. Yeah, it is great.
JM:
And you're basically being buried alive, but he's very similar to that concept, right? Yeah, I don't know if this is my favorite, it's between this one and Barkova's, I think, for me, which stories I prefer. This one was definitely a simpler story in terms of just affecting that atmosphere and calling to that horror atmosphere so well. Poe for sure, and the whole E.C. Comics kind of atmosphere. I don't know, it's kind of this aspect of horror that I'm not always entirely like I say, okay, maybe that's not really that horrifying because you want to see the bad people suffer. But in the end, you do kind of identify with him because he's going through all this torment. Like, yeah, see, I mean, that's what you get. He realized that at the end. It was too late, but he realized.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, even though he's a horrible person, because you're like stuck in his head, you start to feel the same way he feels. So you do feel that same sense of dread as the story continues.
Nate:
Yeah, he captures the panic really, really well.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Like him, I guess, putting all of his effort into doing things that are just like totally minuscule like him, like making a dent in the wall after hammering at it for an hour or something like that. And like, even if he could punch through, it would take him like days and days and days to do so.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't have been able to get through it, I'm sure. But I think he was also maybe somebody will hear me and come in. But I think it didn't take long for his the shreds of his sanity to kind of dissipate. He wasn't even thinking clearly anymore. And he dropped the hammer, the lights went out, nothing to be done now, but death is coming to me. It didn't even have to touch him.
Nate:
Yeah. The old dying of fright.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
It was not always my favorite trope, but I think it works well here. I mean, he just realized how horrible his own creation was and it was kind of too much for him.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
The concept of even selling the weapon to anybody who didn't even come up what's in the story.
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
It's just anti-war, despite what I said at the beginning of there being some propagandistic aspect to some of these. So far, I don't think we've seen too much of that. So it's made me it's really only in a couple of them that you then you come across it. And of course, we did earlier "The Defeat of Jonathan Govers", which definitely had a bit of that slant to it.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
In a charming way.
Nate:
Yeah, I think for the most part, the propaganda angle is more muted in these 20s stories than it probably would be like in the 30s and 40s stuff. There's certainly a little bit of hints here. I would even call it propaganda. But I mean, there's definitely anti-capitalist undertones as well as anti-Germanic sentiment.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And I mean, you know, that does tie...
JM:
We can laugh about it because some of it's not wrong. But you know, but again, a lot of it too is it's the 20s and people are still zealous. The repression of the 30s hasn't really kicked in yet that people are still honestly feeling like, oh, maybe we have a good thing going here. Right. So it makes sense that you would see some of that in the magazines publishing science fiction fiction of the future fiction of the days to come, which hopefully will mean socialist revolution for all, according to at least some of these writers.
Nate:
Right. And certainly the scars of World War One had not yet healed. Russia's involvement in World War One was a total disaster. And it was basically that military failure that allowed the revolution to even take place because the Russian army was basically destroyed when they tried to invade Prussia and just got, you know, annihilated. And Orlovsky was there. He was sent to the front lines when Russia invaded Prussia in 1914. And I'm sure he saw all kinds of horrible stuff during that failed campaign, which is pretty well documented how much of a disaster it was.
JM:
It's kind of interesting, too, that the really political stories in here are all set in the West.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
Because they're trying to set an example, right? And "Dowell's Head" did the same thing.
Nate:
Right. Right.
JM:
So, and we'll get to one in a minute that I think was most convincing with that out of the stories here. It's not this one, but I mean, again, that's kind of, it feels incidental to this. This one, it could have been set in Russia, and I don't think it would have made that much of a difference in this particular case. It's like, you have a driven scientist creating a weapon like this. I don't know. It's not the only discussion of this we'll see in this set of stories. "The Lord of Sound" definitely goes more into that aspect of creating such a powerful weapon or what could be a weapon.
Nate:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, definitely the future of war stuff and weapons in general play a major theme in a lot of these anti-war science fiction stories. I guess one interesting thing about the 20s Soviet stuff is I haven't really encountered too many like pro military stuff. Like, yeah, we need to be invading or defeating all of the troublesome populations like you see in like the Edisonades or whatever. That's just like clearly like racist conquest stuff. You don't really see any of that stuff in any of these stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Like you said, the scars of World War One probably made it wasn't something that people were very on board with.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Right. And plus the civil war after that was incredibly bloody and messy too. And, you know, when we talk about Ukraine in a minute, that was a whole separate war there and political situation. Yeah, I mean, a lot of trauma that makes its way to these authors and unfortunately a lot of these authors, including Orlovsky, don't survive World War Two.
JM:
Orlovsky was one of the lucky ones compared to some of our writers today.
Nate:
Yeah, dying of starvation sounds pretty horrible, but I guess in a sense, it may be better than being in the gulag for 50 years. So I don't know, not the choice I would want to make.
JM:
Yeah, this is definitely one of the ones that I would recommend. I think it's just as, it's just as horrific now and given all the things we've experienced since the 1920s. It's, yeah, it's effectiveness certainly hasn't diminished. So one of the good discoveries for sure.
Nate:
Yeah. All right, so shall we take a quick break and move a little bit west to Ukraine?
Gretchen:
Yeah, sounds good.
Bibliography:
Laboratory of Fantastika - "Vladimir Orlovsky" https://fantlab.ru/autor8584
State University of Polotsk - "Vladimir Evgrafovich Grushvisky" https://www.psu.by/ru/slavnaya-letopis/vypuskniki-kadetskogo-korpusa/grushvitskij-vladimir-evgrafovich
Music:
Mizandari, Valiko - "Tango of Death" (c. 1910s) https://dpul.princeton.edu/slavic/catalog/n870zv089
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