Soviet Science Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s in the Context of Domestic and International Politics and Influences

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Science fiction was one of the most influential cultural phenomena in the Soviet Union and the socialist world after World War II. In the age of space exploration, new trends in science fiction dealt with the problems of futurology and technological development. At the same time, many of the science fiction writers, who became prominent the 1950s and 1960s, had experienced traumatic upheavals of the World War II, the Holocaust, and totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Their works, which reflected the problems of ethics and alternative models of society, often faced considerable censorship pressure. Some books by Soviet science fiction writers could only appear abroad in uncensored versions; at the same time, Western and Eastern European science fiction was widely translated and published in Russian. Thus, science fiction as a cultural phenomenon transcended the boundaries and divisions of the Cold War while remaining subject to Soviet policies and constraints. Our panel aims to approach science fiction in the USSR and Eastern Europe of the 1950s and 1960s as an object of domestic and international politics and cultural influences.
The papers in our panel focus on the understudied issues of the memory of the Holocaust and World War II in the works of science fiction writers from socialist countries, the translation and reception of Soviet science fiction in the English-speaking world during the Cold War, and the peculiarities of the censorship regime in relation to science fiction in the USSR during the 1960s.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Antony Kalashnikov, U of Waterloo (Canada)

Papers

• Science Fiction of the 'Thaw' under Censorship: Practices and Tactics of Resistance -

• Half-Lives: Remembering the Reception of Soviet Science Fiction - Muireann Maguire, U of Exeter (UK)

• Communist Society Will Remember its Past: Memory in Late Soviet Utopian Science Fiction - Antony Kalashnikov, U of Waterloo (Canada)

Discussant

• Anna Chirkova