Revolution and Geological Transformation in Aleksei Tolstoi’s Science Fiction

• In Event: Soviet Culture in the Making: Literature, Film, and Institutions in the 1920s

Abstract

The paper focuses on a case study of Aleksei N. Tolstoi’s two major science-fiction novels, written throughout the 1920s. After the return form emigration, Tolstoi began his path as a Soviet writer with the space travel novel “Aelita” (1922–1923) and continued his engagement with science fiction, culminating in the second novel, “Giperboloid inzhenera Garina” (1925–1927). These texts are connected not only by a set of "red Pinkerton" tropes but also by a shared geological narrative that underlies their adventurous plots. In both novels, the failure or success of fictional revolutions is predetermined by millennia of struggle between human reason and the natural world, which drives the Earth's transformations. However, this shared narrative evolves significantly from the first to the second novel, reframing the colonial dimension of adventure fiction within revolutionary mythology. This paper aims to trace the formation of this mythology through geological thinking, demonstrating how it merges ideas of planetary revolution and Russian messianism into a planetary-nationalist mode of narrating revolution.

Author

• A. Mazzotti