Page 107 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

88 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED
presumably in anticipation of the film’s potential to attract rival bids as a ‘Soviet
29
Caligari’.

4
TOLSTOI–‘UNLUCKY IN CINEMA’
Alexei Tolstoi’s involvement, however token this turned out to be, was clearly part
of the original Aelita ‘package’ and a vital ingredient in the cultural politics of the
project. a minor aristocrat and distant relative of Lev Tolstoy from the south-east
steppe, was already an established author of popular verse, novels and plays
before 1917, when he joined the White Army and worked in the propaganda
department of Denikin’s staff. Moving to Paris after Denikin’s defeat, he continued
to write prolifically for the émigré Russian press and published the first volume of a
Bildungsroman sequence, The Road to Calvary, tracing the fate of the Russian
intelligentsia across the years of war and revolution.
He also began to modify his public attitude towards the Soviet state, joining the
émigré group ‘Changing Landmarks’ [Smenovekhovtsy] and writing:

[since] there is no other government in Russia…except the Bolshevik …we
have to do everything to help the last phase of the Russian Revolution take a
direction that would make our nation stronger, enrich Russian life, and
obtain from the Revolution all its good and just elements. 30

Tolstoi contributed a series of similarly conciliatory articles to the Berlin Russian
paper Nakanune [On the Eve] in 1922; and in November of that year he joined
Mayakovsky and others at a celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Revolution,
where he read from his work in progress, Aelita. The full text then appeared in
three consecutive issues of the Soviet journal Krasnaya nov’ [Red Virgin Soil], by
which time Tolstoi had made his peace with the Soviet regime and returned to live
in Moscow. The NEP policy of encouraging ‘repentant émigrés’ to return was
bearing fruit, although bitterly contested by such ‘left’ groups as ‘On Guard’ [Na
postu] and LEF.
Science fiction had become perhaps the dominant genre of Soviet literature,
finding a new popular audience in the market conditions of NEP publishing and
serving a wide range of functions, from propaganda to escapist entertainment. 31
Tolstoi’s first venture shrewdly combined material he knew well with a scattering of
exotic inventions and ill-disguised borrowings. The novel tells of an expedition to
Mars undertaken by a resourceful engineer Los, whose wife has recently died, and
32
who is accompanied by a restless ex-soldier Gusev. On Mars, or Tuma, they
encounter a decaying society, which was first seeded by the invading Magatsitls, as
they fled the destruction of Earth’s Atlantis. While Los falls in love with Aelita,
daughter of the Martian ruler Tuskub, his companion Gusev captivates her maid.
But a rising by the oppressed Martian proletariat, under the leadership of an
engineer, interrupts these idylls and leads to civil war in which Gusev takes