Page 117 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

98 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED
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birth’. Indeed fantastic adventure and the characteristic Soviet genre of detection-
cum-disaster novel, the ‘Red Pinkertons’, created a short-lived common culture, at
least among urban workers and intellectuals. A good example was Marietta
Shaginyan’s Miss Mend [Mess-Mend, 1924], featuring an intrepid female detective
and Fantômas-like situations, published under the pseudo-American nom de plume
‘Jim Dollar’ with cover designs by the Constructivist Rodchenko, and filmed for
Mezhrabpom-Rus as a serial by a group consisting largely of Kuleshov alumni,
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though with Protazanov’s ‘discovery’, Ilyinsky, playing the lead. For, in the
character of the comic detective Kravtsev, realised with manic precision by one of
Meyerhold’s young actors, Protazanov had unerringly caught the cultural pulse of
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the period–Eccentric, populist and fascinated by all things American. He also
succeeded in defusing the essentially reactionary thrust of Tolstoi’s Smenovekh
nationalism and anti-Semitism, by making the film in effect a critique of ‘cosmism’.
It was the strident utopianism of the ‘proletarian’ writers promoted by
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Bogdanov’s Proletkult organisation that gave rise to this tendency, mocked by
Trotsky:

The idea here approximately is that one should feel the entire world as a
unity and oneself as an active part of that unity, with the prospect of
commanding in the future not only the earth, but the entire cosmos. All this,
of course, is very splendid and terribly big. We came from Kursk and from
Kaluga, we have conquered all Russia recently, and now we are going on
towards world revolution. But are we to stop at the boundaries of
‘planetism’? 67

Beneath its derivative surface, Tolstoi’s novel also remained faithful to a mystical
tradition in Russian fantasy and science fiction. Probably the most pervasive
source of this was the late nineteenth-century religious thinker Nikolai Fyodorov,
who preached in his ‘Philosophy of the Common Task’ a mystical, yet literal
millenarianism. The achievements of science, including travel to other planets,
victory over death and the realisation of a heavenly utopia on earth were all linked
goals in Fyodorov’s influential doctrine and their imprint can be found across a
remarkable range of Russian thought and art. Even Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the
rocket pioneer, was one of many inspired by Fyodorov and, significantly, he did
not win final support for his scientific research until he too published a
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programmatic novel, Beyond the Stars, in 1920. But there was also widespread
interest in theosophy, in Spengler’s doctrine of the decline of the West and in the
anti-Semitism of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, traces of which can all be
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found within the nostalgic romanticism of Tolstoi’s Aelita. To this extent
unreconstructed nationalists found common cause with the ‘proletarian’ poets in a
shared conviction of Soviet Russia’s destiny to conquer death, the world and the
universe. Without some understanding of this context, the particular irony of
Protazanov’s revision is lost.