The Decline of Atlantis and the Rise of the East: The “Revival in Flames” in A. N. Tolstoy’s Aelita

Abstract

Before the official adoption of socialist realism, Soviet science fiction was characterized by a greater degree of flexibility. Therefore, its authors experimented with various thought-provoking cultural concepts. Such can be said about A. N. Tolstoy’s novel Aelita, initially published in 1923 with the subtitle The Decline of Mars. The novel undoubtedly belongs to the very top of the Soviet SF canon, although it achieved such fame only after the author redacted it to fit the official literary dogma. Tolstoy’s multi-layered modernist work concealed commentary on the contemporary socio-political situation in Europe and Russia—“a non-political apologetics of Russia,” as E. Tolstaya writes. The ideological background of the novel revolves around the ideas of the “Skifstvo” and “Smenovekhovstvo” movements. The idea of new “hot blood” from the East, from newly-formed Soviet Russia, meant to revive the declining Western civilization, is embodied both in the novel’s mystical and occult story about the revival of “softened” Martian civilization, and in typical SF-adventure plot where Soviet space travelers try to revitalize the dying planet—in the crucible of the Martian workers’ revolution. The goal of this article is to put the novel’s narrative pattern of “civilization’s apocalyptic revival” in the context of recurring mythologems and ideologemes of European and Russian culture, but also in the context of Tolstoy’s own personal and literary journey.