Page 108 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 89

Figure 9 Engineer Los’s day-dream transports him to the court of Princess Aelita (Nikolai
Tsereteli and Yuliya Solntseva).

command. The insurgents are eventually routed by Tuskub’s forces and the
Earthmen barely escape. On their return home (via a splashdown on
Lake Michigan!) they are fêted as heroes, but Los pines for Aelita and is finally
rewarded, yet tormented, by a radio message from Mars in which she calls for
him.
Closer in spirit to Edgar Rice Burrough’s Martian romances (already available
in Russian translation) than the didactic Martian utopias of Bogdanov, Tolstoi’s
novel had undeniable popular appeal. Yevgeni Zamyatin, author of We [My] and a
science-fiction authority, saw its strengths as well as the obvious weaknesses:

In his latest novel, Aelita, Tolstoi attempted to transfer from the mail train to
the airplane of the fantastic, but all he managed to do was jump up and plop
back on the ground with awkwardly spread wings…. Tolstoi’s Mars is no
further than forty versts from Ryazan; there is even a shepherd there, in the
standard red shirt; there is ‘gold in the mouth’ [fillings]…. The only figure in
the novel that is alive, in the usual Tolstoian fashion, is the Red Army soldier
Gusev. He alone speaks, all the others recite. 33

Tolstoi was later to complain that he had been ‘unlucky in cinema’, and in the case
34
of Aelita he had reasonable grounds for complaint. For, whatever else it was,