(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: V.A Prisovsky - "Ukrainian Fantasy" on vibrato synth)
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, joined by my co-hosts, Nate and J.M. This segment is part of our episode covering five Soviet science fiction stories from the 1920s, translated by Nate. For more background on the history of Soviet sci-fi magazines during this period, please listen to the first section of this episode.
A lot of the information used for this background comes from a memoir, not of Yelyzaveta Kardynalovska, but of her sister, Tatiana. And the latter herself led a very interesting life that is captured wonderfully in her text, which I highly recommend reading.
Despite the autobiography not being written by Liza, she is very much included in Tatiana's recollections. While Tatiana, the elder of the sisters, was born in 1899, Liza was born on May 16th, 1900. Liza's father, Mykhailo Hryhorovych, was a member of the Tsarist military. He was of noble ancestry, but from impoverished family. His father, also an officer, married a peasant woman of Polish lineage, a woman that, due to her black hair, was known by the Kardynalovska sisters as black grandmother, compared to their white-haired white grandmother. This latter grandmother often told the two girl stories which influenced their character, including ones about Ukrainian heroes.
Despite Liza's father being a Tsarist military general and being fairly Russified, he was ethnically Ukrainian and took pride in being Ukrainian. As Tatiana writes, "I see how extraordinary it was that my father, though raised from early childhood in an atmosphere that propagated ultra-monarchism, maintained his independent views and love for his own people throughout his life." However, it was the girl's mother, Olha Kardynalovska, that influenced them the most throughout their childhoods, especially as their father focused on their brother, Serhii, or Seriozha, and his prospects in the future.
Liza's mother was their primary educator. As a poet and piano player, she passed her musical and literary interests on to her daughters. Due to their position as a military family, the Kardynalovskas often moved from place to place. During the beginning of their secondary education, though, Liza and Tatiana moved with their mother to Moscow to attend the Alelekova gymnasium for girls. By 1910, though, their father was transferred to the city of Temir Khan Shura, the capital of Dagestan. In this place, the family experienced the tense relationship between Russian colonial powers and the local people. Also, while settled there, Seriozha sustained an injury that would affect him for the rest of his life. During a school trip, he was accidentally hit in the left temple by a bullet from a rusty pistol another boy was playing with. He was in a coma for several months, spending nearly a year in the hospital. After his coma, Seriozha would have epileptic seizures and paralysis along the right side of his body. He also sustained brain damage, which left him with, as Tatiana writes, "the mind of an adolescent". The boy who shot him was so guilt-ridden after the event that he attempted suicide. Seriozha later died in Kiev during the German occupation, separated from the rest of his family and having starved to death.
A year after the accident, the sisters and their black grandmother moved to Kiev, where their brother and mother were already living with the latter's brother, Aliosha, his wife, Zhenia, and their daughter, Oksana. Aliosha, along with their mother, encouraged Liza and Tatiana to further artistic and literary pursuits. One thing the sisters did was write parodies of poems for Aliosha, especially those based on poems by his favorite writer, Alexei Tolstoy, who also happens to be the writer of the science fiction work, "Aelita". Aliosha was also the one who encouraged them to take courses at the Kiev Art School, where they learned to paint and sculpt.
In her memoirs, Tatiana relates her falling in love and marrying the Vsevolod Holubovych, who was the member of the Ukrainian party of socialist revolutionaries, and became one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Central Rada, the Ukrainian government that was formed upon the collapse of the monarchy in 1917. He also spurred Tatiana's pride in her Ukrainian identity as she began to learn Ukrainian during this period.
Unfortunately, the state of the Ukrainian government at this time was very unstable. The Central Rada collapsed after a year and the nation was rocked by civil war, with Kiev changing hands 17 times until it was absorbed into the developing Soviet Union in 1922. This instability, of course, made its presence known in the lives of the Kardynalovskas. Tatiana's husband had to go on the run, the family was at one point forced to separate, and Tatiana had to give birth to her first child, a daughter she named Lesia, who died shortly afterwards, alone and impoverished in an apartment in Kiev.
Despite the anger she felt towards the callous response her husband had towards finding out about her giving birth, he had sent her a message that made clear he only cared if the child was a boy. Tatiana later moved with her husband, who had deserted, to Kamianets-Podilskyi, where he worked editing a socialist newspaper, a paper on which Liza also worked. Unfortunately, the Vsevolod was eventually arrested and sent to a concentration camp, and Tatiana also was in prison for nine months due to her connection with him.
Upon the release, the two terminated their marriage, which had been affected by the traumatic events they'd experienced. While working for the paper Peasant Truth, Tatiana met the writer Serhii Pylypenko, who would become her second husband. Liza herself also married and had a daughter, Roksolana. She, likewise, parted ways with her husband and the sisters started living together. The two sisters worked on original pieces and translations, occasionally collaborating with each other. They co-wrote a fantasy work, "We Want Sun!", which I believe you said, Nate, you had translated a story called "Sunshine!" that might be that word?
Nate:
Yeah, the title, the story, I've referred to it as "Sunshine!" in the translation I posted online. I didn't actually read the story. It's one word in Ukrainian, so I don't know if, like, there's one part in the story where somebody's like, "what do we want?" And they're like, "we want sun!"
So, you know, sometimes translations work like that, where the title is often the last part of the story I translate. I'm just because, like, I don't know how it's going to fit in the context of the story, like, when I haven't read the story. So, yeah, that is probably, I would say, like, 98% that story that she's referring to. But yeah, the word is just one word in Ukrainian.
Gretchen:
They also might have co-wrote the story that we will be covering here, although it is only attributed to Liza Kardynalovska.
The 1930s saw more misfortune for Ukraine as Stalin viewed the rising Ukrainian national identity as a threat to the Soviet Union. In effort to quell this national movement, the Soviet Union engineered the Holodomor famine, which took place in 1932 and 1933, killing between three to five million people. Tatiana's second husband provided aid for people impacted by the famine, as well as continued to be involved in pro-Ukraine action, leading to his arrest in 1933. Tatiana was also fired from her job and exiled from Soviet Ukraine. While in exile, she heard that her husband was shot.
Her memoirs end here, but her life continued to deliver hardships, as though she managed to return from exile, the eventual Nazi invasion of Ukraine led to both her and her two daughters being detained in labor camps. They were able to flee as the Soviet army advanced, first to Italy and then to the United States, where Tatiana gained a position at Harvard. Liza, however, remained in the Soviet Union in Ukraine. The two sisters briefly met in the 1970s after 30 years apart. Liza died shortly after in 1971, while Tatiana passed away in 1993.
The story we're looking at, by Liza and potentially Tatiana Kardynalovska, is "The Death of the Happy City", which was published in the Ukrainian-language magazine, The Universe, on December 15th, 1926. And it is the shortest work, I believe, out of all of them?
Nate:
Yeah, by far.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Okay, yeah. Makes sense.
Nate:
Yeah, that was one of the reasons why I decided to translate this one and not the other two that they possibly wrote together, although the speculation that they co-wrote this one and the other one that's not "Sunshine!"/"We Want Sun!", is kind of thin. The author of that paper, which is in Ukrainian language, we'll link to it on the blogspot, it's S.V. Zhigun, basically speculates that in the Ukrainian-language version of Tatiana's memoirs, they also included this story and some of the others. But I wasn't able to find the Ukrainian text of the memoirs. I was just able to find the English one, which I thought was going to be the other way around. I didn't realize there wasn't English translation of the memoirs, and I was all planning to go to New York to try to get the Ukrainian one that's held in the depths of New York Public somewhere. But I don't know if that wasn't necessary. And the questions that would have arisen by looking at the Ukrainian, I guess, were minor compared to just digesting the text, which, yeah, it's a great, great memoir. I really suggest everybody read this, especially if you're interested in these kind of stories.
Gretchen:
I was about to say, I'm really glad that you could find the English version, because it was a great read.
Nate:
Yeah, it's really powerful. And it doesn't really talk a lot or really at all about science fiction. So I kind of wonder what went in their minds for this. She cites off a bunch of literary influences, but none of them are really genre fiction. They're all classics that you'd expect, like Leo Tolstoy...
JM:
I mean, again, we sort of had the case of somebody who this was definitely a minor thing for them. She didn't even mention it in the memoirs that she wrote these kind of stories, right? So I don't know, like, it is definitely a case of the story behind the author being really compelling. But the story itself, this time around, I didn't, this is my least favorite, I didn't really, I don't know. I mean, again, Nate, what you're saying is true. When there are short stories like this, like, I'm not going to lose my temper over the fact that I read this because it's not a 500 page book, right? But I don't know, this for me was kind of, I don't know, it was interesting, like, had the aspect of a fable to it, a folktale almost. And it also kind of made me think of, like, the Abraham Merritt style of lost world treasure hunting kind of thing, and never really get to see any of that in the story. They just talk about it. And that was kind of my favorite part was the opening stuff with the person trying to convince his financial backers that there was a whole bunch of gold there, even though he didn't really want to, because he, I don't know, we'll have to get into it when we talk about the story.
Nate:
But I mean, I don't know, some of the ultra shorts out there, because this is, I think, maybe 3000 words in English, it's definitely under 3000 words in Ukrainian. And in Ukrainian, like Russian is equally terse, so my translations in English expand the word count a bit. But yeah, it's very, very short. But on the other hand, the two Latin American stories that I've in the process of translating are also about this length. And they like, both pack much more of a punch than this one does. This one's definitely very propaganda. But I guess there's downsides in the methodology of choosing to do the shortest one that I translate just because like it's going to take less time. That's just my laziness coming through. But the other two stories that they did possibly, certainly Liza wrote them, I'm not sure how much Tatiana was involved with "A Mistake", but she definitely has co-authored creditship on "Sunshine!"/"We Want Sun!" They both sound more interesting than this one. So they may be contenders for future translations going forward, especially because the pool of Ukrainian writers and the pool of women Ukrainian writers is pretty small for this time and place writing this kind of fiction.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, yeah, absolutely. The author's background is the most interesting part of this. And it was really interesting to read about them. The story itself, yeah, it's, I think it's fine. I mean, it's, it's like, again, it's short. So it's, it's just sort of, you can just sit down and read it. And I, even if it's not great, it's not taking too much of your time to read.
JM:
Well, when we talk about like the colonial attitudes and stuff, this is the one where they really come to the forefront.
Nate:
Oh, for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Big time. And I'm kind of hearing about the sisters. Where was it that they ended up for a short time there?
Gretchen:
Temir Khan Shura.
Nate:
In Dagestan.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And sort of having conflicts with the locals and stuff just kind of made me think, yeah, you know, I mean, I can see, well, we should really get into what happens first, but there's a whole thing, a way of thinking that this kind of reminded me of that. I thought it was really interesting, but I also didn't really, it kind of contributed for me to not really liking this one particularly.
Nate:
Yeah, there's definitely some issues about it with some of the attitudes.
And did you note down any of the other anecdotes from the memoirs that you wanted to read out Gretchen?
Gretchen:
There was the poem I thought I would read that they did of Tolstoy.
Nate:
Oh, yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Because it is about Liza.
Poor Liza is sad, at school she pines,
While outside a glorious morning
Announces spring—as it sparkles and shines,
It fills her with wondrous yearning.
The streetcar below rolls aloud with a noise,
The cars run along with a sputter,
The freedom out there every creature enjoys
As happy birds twitter and flutter.
And here the school mistress, still barely awake,
Is gazing at her without emotion,
And noisy schoolmates throughout recess
Annoy her with all their commotion.
A German translation in front of her lies,
But lost in her thoughts she is dreaming.
To the Prince of Albania her fancy now flies,
And beautiful visions are streaming.
She sees the Albanian mountains so steep,
Caressed by the azure-blue waters.
The sea is so calm and mysteriously deep,
And is dotted with sailing boaters.
And here comes the Prince, and he says with a smile,
“Elizabeth, dear—my sweetheart!
Oh, why is your countenance sad all the while?
Your secret to me do impart.
Perhaps the sweet sherbet we ate, my dear Beth,
Did not meet with your approbation?
Or maybe our etiquette bores you to death,
As well as our whole population?
Reveal all your thoughts and emotions, I pray,
To share them with you is my pleasure.
An Albanian sailboat on this sunny day
We will take to the sea without measure.
The sea gulls so swift and the fish we will feed
With French bread so good and nutritious,
And thus chase away with lightning speed
Your thoughts and bad mood so pernicious.”
And presently Beth and the Prince go aboard
Their yacht, with the retinue trailing.
They carry the train of her dress in accord
With rules they obey without failing.
All at once something struck like a thunderbolt
And everything instantly vanished.
Liza found herself under sudden assault
Back at school, where she had been banished.
The girls left and right, as if in a game,
All shove her and shake her, relating
That the German instructor has called out her name
Three times in a row and is waiting.
Poor Liza jumped up, grabbed the book in her hands,
But the lines of the German translation
All blurred, and she could not at all comprehend
Their sense, to her great consternation.
The furious German pulled out the grade sheet
And entered without hesitation
The fateful grade “F,” which no one can delete,
Leaving Liza without consolation.
Nate:
I love it. They write poetry about each other. It's so...
Gretchen:
Yeah it's just I love the the image of you know them reading this out to their you know uncle in their living room it's just really sweet.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah so I guess before we get into the story there's two incidents that I want to relate real quick one has to do with their time in Dagestan. So this is when they were like five or six when they witness this grisly murder and Tatiana says:
"There were many Kirghiz people among the local inhabitants. Once we were walking with our nanny along the wooden sidewalk when we suddenly heard screams and spotted two Kirghiz men. One had a bloody knife in his hand and was chasing the other. Nanny scooped us under the arms and flew like a bullet onto our porch. We all rushed inside and our nanny bolted the door. Almost immediately there was a tremendous banging on the door, and we heard one of the men pleading to be let in. We were frozen with fear. Nanny made no move toward the door, and soon the porch was quiet. After some time, we peeked out the window. There was the body of the murdered Kirghiz, lying on the porch in a big pool of blood."
And maybe a more funny, happy incident as when they're in Moscow, so around 10 or 11, where they have an encounter with the great author Leo Tolstoy.
JM:
Makes you wonder how many Russians had an I almost met Tolstoy story.
Nate:
Yeah, there's one that appears in Solzhenitsyn too. Apparently he just likes to walk around and just kind of meet with people.
But it says:
"We love to walk around it's (that's Moscow's) quiet streets with our mother. Leo Tolstoy came to Moscow at that time and settled in the same area. It was said that on his walks along the streets he enjoyed meeting and chatting with children. One morning we spotted Tolstoy walking along dressed in a Russian peasant shirt. He looked just like the photographs of him we had seen in books so we recognized him immediately. Speaking quietly mother urged us to go and greet him. But we were overcome by frightened shyness and hesitated. What if he asks us which of his books we've read or talks about ones that we don't know? Mother tried convincing us that Tolstoy would not ask such questions but we refused to budge. While we sparred back and forth Tolstoy passed by and the opportunity vanished. We never came across him again. Later as an adult I greatly regretted that I had the chance to meet him slip by."
JM:
One thing that's weird about that now in retrospect too is now we're like, oh why is this creepy old writer guy showing such an interest in talking to young children. And he's like, no he's creepy. I'm not really, the writer just wants to talk to you and speak up. And they can because of course they're embarrassed.
Nate:
In front of a great national hero.
JM:
Yeah that was pretty normal too.
Gretchen:
Two interesting little Tolstoy bits there. Different Tolstoy's.
Nate:
Two very important ones. I don't think we're going to be covering War and Peace on the podcast anytime soon. I do want to cover Aelita. We found some cool stuff related to it already that's made into a film that I think is more interesting than good. But again that's for a later episode.
So yeah, why don't we talk about this one?
Gretchen:
Yes.
"The Death of the Happy City" begins with a man named Ark recounting a story to two other men. A story he doubts will be believed. He tells of a place known as Redrot Island. An island closed off from the rest of the world that Ark only encountered after a plane crash. He shows the two others his only piece of evidence, a bag of sand that is determined to be 30 or 40% gold. Encouraged by the regained interest of his listeners who, of course, as greedy capitalists that's the thing that really gets their attention.
JM:
Oh yeah, these businessmen are like they remind me of the way that the Ferrengi are in early Star Trek. Really over the top and evil, conniving.
Gretchen:
Yeah, just show us the gold.
Nate:
Yeah, where's the profit?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
But he continues by claiming that the inhabitants of the island despite never having utilized electricity have done so with atomic energy. Here one of the other men interrupts. They are again only interested in the gold. Ark explains that a city on the island, Ao-Gol, or "The Happy City" as it's translated, has created a dam out of mainly gold as that is the only use they found for the metal on their island. He describes taking a large amount of gold with him before leaving the island despite the dangers that surround it, the dangers that also have kept the rest of the world away from it.
He knows of one area is possible to pass through though, and wants to organize an intentional expedition there. The two men agree to be his backers concerned with the promise of the wealth that the gold of Redrot will bring them.
The story transitions to the perspective of a man who is native to the Happy City, Onoa. Onoa wakes in the morning and joins a woman, Aimee, as they walk to public work which every citizen is expected to perform each day. He tells her that he saw Ark in a dream and they wonder whether the man made it back to a strange land. Aimee also wonders whether she herself will ever be able to visit that land, a desire that many in the city have after encountering Ark.
Another citizen of Ao-Gol, Loe, tells Onoa of people collecting sand after the foreigner had told them that it was valuable where he comes from. The greed for gold has led, Loe says, to people dismantling the dam to collect the metal contained within it. Upon reaching the dam, which is being repaired, Onoa sees a man doing so, digging for a gold nugget at its base. When Onoa finishes his work for the day, he presents a piece of gold of his own to Aimee.
Returning to Ark, he is on his expedition searching for the island. Where Redrot was, he finds nothing there, until they come across a sailboat containing what the captain calls a monkey. Seeing this for himself, Ark realizes it is Onoa who tells Ark that Redrot is gone as the dam was dismantled and then dies. Ark's backers are furious, but Ark is not concerned with them.
And that's the end of this pretty short story.
Nate:
Very Soviet Atlantis. Not subtle at all.
Gretchen:
Look what the greed for gold will get you.
JM:
I mean, I definitely enjoy some of this kind of thing, like the kind of lost race. This is obviously kind of supposed to be remnants of Atlantis or something like that type thing. And I like that kind of stuff. But yeah, it didn't really go very well for me. I couldn't figure out the fact that it was kind of trying to be a folktale and sort of being like, be careful when you start being greedy for gold. And it's like, yeah, I get it. But I don't know. The idea is that the people that live on the island are supposed to be wise and they're supposed to be smart. And they're supposed to be like a different kind of civilization that's advanced to the point where they might even be beyond the civilization that we know to a certain extent. They don't have some of the technological things that the, I guess, capitalist situation that the protagonists are in. They don't necessarily have that, but they have other technologies. They've learned to harness the atom, right? So there's some vague talk about working on machines or something like that. But at the same time, yeah, like, they're being very stupid about this whole thing.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And I wouldn't necessarily mind if characters did dumb things, but I just kind of feel like, yeah, this is kind of part of that attitude where, okay, so, I mean, I'm getting into weird areas of like adventure fiction. The fact that, I don't know, somebody like Robert E. Howard, writing in the 1920s and 30s, had these kind of weird ideas that he put in his stories. I don't know how much he really believed in them, but you know, and like the rise and fall of empires and civilizations and stuff like that. And it's not like he was the first person to come up with this, but I mean, this is the first time I remember seeing this kind of attitude expressed, was reading some of the Solomon Kane stories. And this is kind of this, oh, at one time, it was a dominant period for these cultures. And now they've fallen into decadence, and they've fallen into almost like the Atlanteans from the "Maracot Deep" as well. They're kind of like, they have all this stuff, but they're not as smart as they should be because they're a race in dissipation, basically. I don't know, it might have some uncomfortable connotations, I suppose, when you get down to it. I don't know, I definitely think that like, I don't really understand, like, you know, she's saying that they're supposed to be wise and all smart. And yet, here they are, they've heard about this wonderful land where this guy comes from, where people value what they have, because like to them, it's nothing because they have no, I don't know, their culture has no intrinsic value for it the way the capitalist gold loving cultures do. So it's so easy to spoil them, I guess, so easy to turn it all to ruin. And just kind of like, well, wouldn't somebody step in and be like, "hey, don't tear down the dam. That's the worst idea ever".
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
I feel the same way. Yeah, it's very much like, on the one hand, there's the idea of the capitalism is like a corrupting power. But it's also, you're kind of infantilizing this entire group of people in order to say, well, look, look how bad it went for them. Like, obviously, that's what's going to happen if you ever...
JM:
All right, so I'm going to put on my libertarian hat here for a second. And I'm going to say, and it's this and "The Lord of Sound" that really brought home to me. It's paternalistic. That's what it is. It's like, it's kind of us. Oh, if only you had a real strong guiding hand to show you what was right, then everything would be awesome. But because these selfish people are all around and that's human nature, and they keep screwing everything up. So, I mean, I get it. I'm not really totally in disagreement with that philosophy. But I don't know, it's just it is paternalistic and at a large part. And, you know, again, it's kind of interesting. It comes back to rewatching a lot of Star Trek lately. And, you know, that like prime directive stuff is always coming up.
Nate:
Sure.
JM:
And you have to ask the question, well, is it are you even just being there? Is that interfering with the culture enough that you could really screw them up?
Nate:
Right.
JM:
And this guy didn't really mean to do anything bad, apparently, although he wants to use these business magnates to find the place again, which seems like he's not really thinking ahead very far if he wants to save them. But I don't know. It's just, it's weird. I like a lot of the kind of stories that this reminded me of. Like, again, H. Rider Haggard came up earlier in the podcast and I actually enjoy what I've read of him. I think he's a lot of fun. It's kind of like a bit like Rudyard Kipling, you know, 19th century British, but it has a certain, even handedness to it as well, which I respect, I think.
Nate:
Yeah. I wanted to do "She" on the podcast and definitely the lost race stuff, there's like so much of it in the 19th century, which is one of the things we want to do really early on the podcast. It's just like, there's so much of it that we couldn't condense it into one episode. So we just kind of kept putting it off and putting it off.
JM:
And a lot of it's bad like "Symzonia".
Nate:
But I don't know. "She"'s supposed to be pretty good. And I wouldn't mind reading that here.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely want to do some Abraham Merritt because for me in the US pulps, he was like the master of that kind of stuff.
Nate:
Apparently in the Russian magazines, too, I mean, "The Metal Monster" got translated.
JM:
"The Metal Monster". Yeah. That's a good one, too. That's a little different. Cool title. "The Metal Monster".
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, this one, it left me feeling sort of unsatisfied with the way it ended. And then, yeah, there was like, it didn't help that the native got called a monkey at one point.
Nate:
Yeah. So I actually muted the racism for the translation. Basically, the word used in Ukrainian is the Ukrainian equivalent of the N-word. It has a different origin than the English equivalent. It doesn't really make sense grammatically in the context of that sentence. So I tried to figure out a way to, I don't know, bring it across and that was my solution.
JM:
You soften it without really softening it.
Nate:
Exactly. Right. Yeah. So I mean, there's a whole, I mean, it comes out of nowhere, too. I read that I was like, wow, okay, that's what we're doing here. But yeah, it definitely plays up the noble savage, white savior element of it, though that's, I don't know if that's exactly what she was going for with her experiences in Dagestan and places like that. At the same time, she's also saying that the socialist utopia is such a fragile state that just one suggestion from the outside world of gold being useful is enough to make the whole thing come down. Crashing around and just literally being wiped off the face of the map.
JM:
And ultimately, I think we are supposed to side with the fact that this place was really nice. It was nice when that guy was there. He had to go through poison gas and all this other stuff. And a crashed airplane, but I don't know. It's even contradictory about that because like he was eager to get back the whole time. At one point, his friend basically says, well, it was a torture to him being here.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
So it's like he left and then he started missing it. And he's like, yeah, it was really nice, wasn't it? And I want to go back there, but I don't know how. So I'm going to hire these people, promise them lots of gold. Because I'm, I don't know, like he was a pretty pathetic character in the end. He shows up and the trouble has preceded him. I mean, it didn't even take a return. They let it all get carried away and destroyed the civilization just like that. They didn't even need that much outside help. So yeah, I mean, I just, just being there, that's all it took.
Gretchen:
It is very conflicting messages because again, yeah, the society is supposed to be great, but everyone immediately wants to leave as soon as they know there's another system out there. And it does have the feeling of like a white savior plot, but the white savior is the corruptor and the person that brings the destruction. So it's very, it's very confused in it's messaging.
Nate:
Yeah. And it doesn't help the fact that it's like so short where she doesn't really have time to get any into any of this. Like it could have been a really good story if it was focused on what happens after a corrupting influence comes in.
JM:
It's an interesting story to compare this to would be the Amelia Reynolds Long that we did.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, like that one was short too, but she packed a lot into that.
Nate:
Oh yeah.
JM:
It was like it really left us thinking about what she might have meant. And it was pretty cool that she struck that balance between like telling you too much that she's totally influencing the way you think about things, but giving you enough to think about what the situation really is. And I don't know here that that aspect wasn't really there for me. So still an interesting one. I mean, I definitely like the lost race aspect. And I don't know, I was kind of on a fence about the fabulistic mythological feeling inside of it. Where it's like, you know, hey, this is what happened when they got greedy and they didn't think about the future. And I express that enough now, I'm like, well, why aren't these like ultra capitalist tycoons? Like, why don't they think more about the future of the race? Like, why wouldn't that be important to them? I never understood that sometimes. It's just like, you see that express here too. And it's just kind of like so easily, I guess, transmitted to people who would be considered the working class in a socialist institution, right?
It was kind of like, again, though, it is that kind of paternalistic thing where it's like, and I don't necessarily meet that in the sense of male dominated. I mean, doesn't necessarily seem like the Soviets were as much maybe as the West in terms of that. But I mean, in terms of just having this attitude where you're like, you have to control people to steer them on the right path. And that's the aspects of, especially in "The Lord of Sound", which is a story that I really quite liked. But yeah, there's a lot of that in both of these.
Nate:
Yeah, not my favorite, but I do think the sisters have a really fascinating life. And I definitely like to look at some of their stuff in the future, definitely doing the Ukrainian is a lot harder and more work, as my skills in that are not as good as my Russian, even though the grammar is similar in the vocabulary is like, I don't know, 50%.
JM:
Yeah, I think we did a pretty good job of ironing out a lot of that.
Nate:
Yeah, thank you.
JM:
In the final translations. Yeah, I definitely am glad that we read this, like in talking about it, actually, again, as is often the case. I enjoy talking about it and I feel a little better about it than I did when we started oddly enough, even though we've sort of been talking about the negative sides of it and we all kind of agree. But it's just like, yeah, you know, it was cool reading this. I mean, I get it. Like, there's some of that in these stories. And I mean, we talked about various kind of mindsets in some of the American stories, like the stuff that we decided not to do, like the first Buck Rogers story, you know, or just like, yeah, I don't know, we don't really have to go there necessarily. So, I mean, it's interesting getting snapshots of that. And then definitely that kind of attitude about ancient cultures, ancient, I guess, non-western cultures was very prevalent at the time. So, interesting story for sure. Probably still my least favorite. But yeah, I go back and forth between that and "Aliens", but it doesn't matter. They're all kind of cool in their way.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I definitely would be interested to see what their other work is like to see what else they had written. Definitely a little colored, I think, by my reading of the memoir. I think it kind of softened it when I came back to it. But I'm glad that we did talk about the critique of this story.
Nate:
Yeah, and definitely read the memoirs.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
The one I want to really see work from is Barkova. I want to see her other stuff she's done. But there's quite a story behind them as well, and I think that's something we kind of see in some of these authors. Especially the two women. Well, I mean, three if you count the two sisters. Yeah, it's quite a life and some hardship, definitely.
Nate:
Yeah, so let me just read off the two descriptions that Zhigun provides us for their other stories.
So on "Sunshine!"/"We Want Sun" she says "their story is about the distant future when the sun will lose its energy and humanity will be forced to seek refuge on another planet. But an invention will help light a new sun above the earth. The implementation of this idea does not stand up to criticism because the moon ignited by the explosion becomes the new sun. It's clear that the text lacks specifics regarding technical aspects, although the organization of the flight to another planet is spelled out quite clearly."
And then on the other story that they possibly co-wrote together is "A Mistake." She describes it as "This is a story on the then popular topic of animal experiments. In it, scientists struggling with the degeneration of humanity strive to breed a human-like monkey in order to go through the evolutionary path from the beginning. They are lucky and a new creature is born for scientists. It is only a quarter human so they treat it like an animal, but their assistant believes that she can awaken human consciousness."
JM:
There's an awful lot of animal experimentation stories, aren't there?
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Makes sense. I mean, we did "Heart of a Dog." We did. Well, we talked about some other ones. We're going to do the "The Island of Doctor Moreau" and eventually so we know how much Wells was an influence on the Russians too. So this idea of animal experimentation and vivisection and the morality of it and stuff like that is certainly present at the time.
Nate:
And this one definitely seems to be calling back to the Frankenstein story too of humanity creating this creature that's treated like a monstrosity through science or whatever and the ethics of that happening. So yeah, I mean, it sounds interesting. "Mistake" is far shorter than "Sunshine!" I think "Mistake" is around the ballpark of like 4,000 words ish or "Sunshine!" is like around 10. They're both doable. Again, maybe something further down the road. Yeah, this one was while not the strongest, definitely the memoirs are absolutely fantastic read. And it's nice to recommend something in English for you to read outside of these stories for this block. Because again, as we said, there's really not a lot out there. But yeah, it's not a long book. It's maybe like 175 ish pages of memoir text plus like another 25 or so of notes. But yeah, definitely read the memoirs if nothing else. It's a really powerful story, I think.
Gretchen:
Yes.
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