Visions of the Future: Malthusian Thought Experiments in Russian Literature (1840–1960) 9798887190563

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Thomas Malthus, the Problem of Population, and Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Concise Overview
2. Vladimir Odoevsky’s Russian Nights (1844): Thought Experiments Inspired by Malthus and Bentham
3. Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevsky: Utopian Dreams in What Is to Be Done? (1863)
4. Revolution on Earth and Mars: Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908) and Aleksei Tolstoy’s Aelita (1923)
5. A Peasant Utopia: Alexander Chaianov’s My Brother Aleksei’s Journey (1920)
6. Overpopulation in Nina Berberova’s Short Story “In Memory of Schliemann” (1958), in the Context of Malthusian Theory
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE M A LT HUSI A N T HOUGH T E X PE R I M EN TS I N RUS SI A N L I T E R AT U R E (1 8 4 0 – 1 9 6 0)

Series Studies in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History

Series Editor Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary, University of London)

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE M A LT HUSI A N T HOUGH T E X PE R I M EN TS I N RUS SI A N L I T E R AT U R E (1 8 4 0 – 1 9 6 0)

Natasha Grigorian

BOSTON 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Grigorian, Natasha, author. Title: Visions of the future: Malthusian thought experiments in Russian literature (1840-1960) / Natasha Grigorian. Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023. | Series: Studies in comparative literature and intellectual history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022041568 (print) | LCCN 2022041569 (ebook) | ISBN 9798887190556 (hardback) | ISBN 9798887190563 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9798887190570 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Future, The, in literature. | Utopias in literature. | Dystopias in literature. | Russian literature--19th century--History and criticism. | Russian literature--20th century--History and criticism. | Malthus, T. R. (Thomas Robert), 1766-1834--Influence. | Thought experiments. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PG2987.F88 G75 2023 (print) | LCC PG2987.F88 (ebook) | DDC 891.709/003--dc23/eng/20221101 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041568 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041569 Сopyright © 2023, Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 9798887190556 (hardback) ISBN 9798887190563 (Adobe PDF) ISBN 9798887190570 (ePub)   Cover design by Ivan Grave Book design by PHi Business Solutions Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii Introduction1 1. Thomas Malthus, the Problem of Population, and Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Concise Overview 21 2. Vladimir Odoevsky’s Russian Nights (1844): Thought Experiments Inspired by Malthus and Bentham 33 3. Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevsky: Utopian Dreams in What Is to Be Done? (1863) 55 4. Revolution on Earth and Mars: Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908) and Aleksei Tolstoy’s Aelita (1923) 69 5. A Peasant Utopia: Alexander Chaianov’s My Brother Aleksei’s Journey (1920)83 6. Overpopulation in Nina Berberova’s Short Story “In Memory of Schliemann” (1958), in the Context of Malthusian Theory 94 Conclusion105 Bibliography113 Index123

So go ahead and tell everyone: this is what the future holds, the future is radiant and wonderful. You should all love it, yearn for it, work for it, accelerate its approach, and transfer as much from it into the present as you possibly can: your present life will be radiant and good, rich in joy and pleasure exactly in proportion to your ability to infuse some future into it while you still have time. —Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?; Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, chapter 4.16 Говори же всем: вот что в будущем, будущее светло и прекрасно. Любите его, стремитесь к нему, работайте для него, приближайте его, переносите из него в настоящее, сколько можете перенести: настолько будет светла и добра, богата радостью и наслаждением ваша жизнь, насколько вы успеете перенести в неё из будущего. —Николай Чернышевский, Что делать?

Acknowledgments

This book project arose from my participation in an interdisciplinary DFG research group based at the University of Konstanz (2012-2014): “What If – On the Meaning, Relevance, and Epistemology of Counterfactual Claims and Thought Experiments.” I would like to extend my warmest thanks to those colleagues who have provided thought-provoking discussions, perceptive insights, and criticism while this book was being researched and written: first of all, Riccardo Nicolosi; Jurij Murašov; Wolfgang Spohn; Julian Reiss; John Beatty; Mirja Lecke; Maria Mikhailova; Fedor Poljakov; Muireann Maguire; Natalia Mikhalenko; Eliane Fitzé; the anonymous peer reviewers of the book manuscript; and many others. Some of the chapters of this book develop the argumentation of my articles listed in the Bibliography. My deepest gratitude is reserved for my family and friends, for their love, moral support, and unwavering faith in me throughout my research.

Introduction

A suffocating smell of sulphur flooded the room. The hands of the large wall clock began to move faster and faster and soon disappeared out of sight in their frenzied rotating motion. The pages of the loose-leaf calendar were being noisily torn off on their own and were flying up to the ceiling, filling the room with a whirlwind of paper. The walls got somehow distorted and started to tremble. […] Exhausted by his effort, Aleksei collapsed onto some sofa, which had never been there before, and lost consciousness.1 This is the way in which Alexander Chaianov’s protagonist Aleksei ends up in the future land of peasant utopia, as an unknown force transports him from the year 1921 to 1984. While spending a quiet evening in his Moscow apartment at the end of a long day, Aleksei, a civil servant in the newly established Soviet Russia, is musing over a volume of Herzen. He then asks aloud, presumably with the volume’s author in mind, if liberal thinkers can come up with a viable alternative to socialism. No sooner has he uttered these words that time and space become displaced as described above. The point is that sometimes a rhetorical question addressed to a utopian writer can bring about dramatic life changes and propel us along a completely unexpected path, lined with inspiring new insights and acute disillusionment alike. The questions that this book is about to examine all start with “What if ”: What if Aleksei were sent to the ideal future? What if the ideal future of humanity turned out to be a less than ideal disaster? And what if such experimentation in thoughts, conveyed via literary fiction, could give us new knowledge and instruct us about the best future choices?

1

“В комнaте удушливо зaпaхло серой. Стрелки больших стенных чaсов зaвертелись всё быстрее и быстрее и в неистовом врaщении скрылись из глaз. Листки отрывного кaлендaря с шумом отрывaлись сaми собой и взвивaлись кверху, вихрями бумaги нaполняя комнaту. Стены кaк-то искaзились и дрожaли. […] Истощённый усилиями, Алексей опустился нa кaкой-то дивaн, никогдa не бывший здесь рaньше, и сознaние его покинуло.” Aleksandr Chaianov, Puteshestvie moego brata Alekseia v stranu krest′ianskoi utopii (Moscow: Kniga po trebovaniiu, 2012), 5. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. See also the discussion of this passage in chapter 5 below.

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Visions of the Future

The future of civilization has always held an irresistible fascination for the human mind. One of the aims of this book is to find out to what extent literary thought experiments can enable us to explore both future prospects and their roots in the present and the past. Modern Russian literature has produced a particularly rich and revealing array of forecasts dealing with the future evolution of society, as many generations of Russian intellectuals, especially writers, have addressed their country’s complex history in this way. The resulting literary evocations of the future are sometimes radiantly optimistic utopias, sometimes nightmarishly pessimistic dystopias, and occasionally a mixture of both: typically, a utopia that has gone wrong and turned into its antithesis. Within this broad class of visions of the future, the present study focuses on selected utopian and/or dystopian works of Russian prose fiction written between 1840 and 1960. These include both under-researched and well-known short stories and novels by Vladimir Odoevsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Alexander Bogdanov, Aleksei Tolstoy, Alexander Chaianov, and Nina Berberova. Most of the chosen texts can be considered to contain a counterfactual thought experiment: in other words, a systematic and intrinsically plausible narrative based on unreal assumptions and attempting to prove or disprove a particular hypothesis or to argue a specific point. In the works in question, a characteristic starting point for such a counterfactual scenario is as follows: “X is an event or a series of events that has never taken place and probably never will. For purely experimental purposes, let us suppose that X happened. Now, if X were the case, then Y would occur…” This is a specific variety of the more general category of thought experiments, which can be concisely defined as mental constructs, expressed in language and giving a possible detailed narrative answer to the question “What if X occurred?,” where X is an event that may or may not take place, including any impossible events. Thought experiments and counterfactual reasoning play an important cognitive role both in the social and in the natural sciences,2 having contributed to great discoveries such as those by Galileo and Einstein, to name but a few. And yet the significance of (counterfactual) thought experiments in literary fiction has rarely been analyzed to date, especially with close attention to specific texts and their stylistic features. This is precisely what this book does: by connecting literary fiction and those great achievements of science that have been brought

2

For more detail, see, for example, Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, and Tilmann Köppe, eds., Counterfactual Thinking—Counterfactual Writing (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2011); and Thomas Macho and Annette Wunschel, eds., Science and Fiction. Über Gedankenexperimente in Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Literatur (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2004).

Introduction

about by thought experimentation, this pilot study conducts a preliminary examination of the following key issues: How do thought experiments function in literary works? And how do such works change the way we think? In fact, thought experiments in the social and natural sciences often use a procedure that is of fundamental importance to literary fiction and can be considered to be a distinctive feature of literature: that of narrative development. In other words, they simply tell a good, or at least convincing, story. If this strategy can bring about major breakthroughs in the sciences, then surely similarly illuminating processes must be taking place in literature? This is one of the central questions to be investigated, on the example of a representative corpus of Russian texts that serve as an appropriate test case for this task. The topicality of this approach becomes particularly evident if we consider the current worldwide emphasis on interdisciplinarity and impact as key features of scholarly research. In this instance, the subject area of literary studies gains a significant interdisciplinary dimension thanks to a cross-fertilization with philosophy and scientific method; and literary analysis ultimately strives to achieve an impact on human thought and its wider applications by shedding light on the cognitive uses of specific narrative methods and forms. In the latest literary-theoretical scholarship in the field, counterfactual thought experiments are typically defined as “mental arrangements that […] cannot be realized” and that have the following structure: “If a then b, where the antecedent a and the consequent b are more or less elaborate verbal expressions [and] at least one of the assumptions is, at the moment they are made and relative to a certain (shared) knowledge, obviously false to both the author and the addressee.”3 At the same time, it is worth recalling the famous definition of the thought experiment given by Ernst Mach, the German philosopher, around 1905. He presents the thought experiment as a method that bridges the gap between reality and the imagination and is therefore shared by the arts and the sciences. This definition stands at the origin of the term and its wide-ranging uses in modern philosophy of science and related fields:

3

Andrea Albrecht and Lutz Danneberg, “First Steps toward an Explication of Counterfactual Imagination,” in Counterfactual Thinking—Counterfactual Writing, ed. Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, and Tilmann Köppe (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2011), 13–14. As Albrecht and Danneberg point out, a counterfactual thought experiment thus defined strongly overlaps, and even coincides, with what they call a counterfactual imagination (ibid., 12–14).

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Beside the physical experiment, there is also another type of experiment, which is being extensively conducted on a higher intellectual level—the thought experiment. The project maker, the dreamer, the novelist, and the poet of social or technical utopias all engage in thought experimentation. Yet the solid businessman and the serious inventor or researcher also do the same. They all imagine certain circumstances and associate with this imaginary vision the expectation, or the supposition, that particular consequences may take place. […] It is much easier for us to control our thoughts than to influence physical facts. We experiment with thoughts at a lower cost, so to speak. Therefore, it is not surprising that the thought experiment is often conducted before the physical experiment, with the former acting as preparation for the latter.4 In addition to the idea that thought experiments are as important as real, physical experiments, Mach also suggests that an underlying distinctive feature of most thought experiments is variation, or the playing out of multiple alternative scenarios: “As we can see, the fundamental method of the thought experiment is the same as that of the physical experiment: that is, the method of variation. Via a variation of circumstances, continuous if possible, we can expand the scope of the idea (expectation) that is associated with them […].”5 For the purposes of this study, I will also assume that a (literary) thought experiment aims to produce some kind of reader response and has a specific scholarly or ideological hypothesis as its starting point, which it attempts to confirm and/or undermine using a range of stylistic and rhetorical means. This book analyzes the selected 4

5

“Außer dem physischen Experiment gibt es noch ein anderes, welches auf höherer intellektueller Stufe in ausgedehntem Maße geübt wird—das Gedankenexperiment. Der Projektenmacher, der Erbauer von Luftschlössern, der Romanschreiber, der Dichter sozialer oder technischer Utopien experimentiert in Gedanken. Aber auch der solide Kaufmann, der ernste Erfinder oder Forscher tut dasselbe. Alle stellen sich Umstände vor, und knüpfen an diese Vorstellung die Erwartung, Vermutung gewisser Folgen. […] Unsere Vorstellungen haben wir leichter und bequemer zur Hand, als die physikalischen Tatsachen. Wir experimentieren mit den Gedanken sozusagen mit geringeren Kosten. So dürfen wir uns also nicht wundern, daß das Gedankenexperiment vielfach dem physischen Experiment vorausgeht, und dasselbe vorbereitet.” Ernst Mach, “Über Gedankenexperimente,” in his Erkenntnis und Irrtum—Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung (Leipzig: Barth, 1906), 186–187. “Wie man sieht, ist die Grundmethode des Gedankenexperimentes, ebenso wie jene des physischen Experimentes, die Methode der Variation. Durch wenn möglich kontinuierliche Variation der Umstände wird das Geltungsbereich einer an dieselben geknüpften Vorstellung (Erwartung) erweitert. […]” Ibid., 191.

Introduction

narratives on the structural and stylistic level so as to show what epistemic and cultural value these thought experiments have within and beyond their fictional framework. At this point, it is important to differentiate between thought experiment and utopia and/or dystopia. Undoubtedly, thought experiments have much in common with utopias and dystopias: as we have seen above, even Ernst Mach points out that “the poet of social or technical utopias” engages in thought experimentation. Thought experiments, utopias, and dystopias all have a rhetorical function, which means that they all try to bring across a particular point and to influence the opinions of their readers in some way. A utopia is a text that depicts an imaginary perfect state or society, while a dystopia evokes exactly the opposite: an imaginary society in which everything has gone wrong. Some, but not all, utopias and dystopias are written in the format of thought experiments, but not all thought experiments are utopias or dystopias. The crucial difference is that utopias and dystopias primarily presuppose an evocation or even a description of a state of things, which implies a static vision of an imaginary society. Such an evocation or description may be present in a thought experiment, but there is another absolutely essential condition that every thought experiment has to meet: a thought experiment must contain a narrative (this is possible, but not at all obligatory for a utopian or dystopian text). So in contrast to the inherently static evocation, which is sufficient for utopias and dystopias, a thought experiment always implies a dynamic evolution of a narrative, which unfolds as assumption a precipitates consequences b, c, and so on. Moreover, as Mach explains in our quotation above, a thought experiment is often characterized by the principle of variation, or the playing out of multiple alternative scenarios. So frequently, it is not enough to give merely a single narrative: instead, in a thought experiment, we tend to be confronted with several narratives simultaneously, which constitute several alternative paths of evolution that may unfold under particular circumstances. The texts chosen for this book are all utopias and/or dystopias written in the thought experiment format: and this is what distinguishes them from the vast body of utopian and dystopian writing that is otherwise available. The dynamic nature of the thought experiment also permits to override a rigid distinction between a utopia and a dystopia: as we shall see, several of our chosen texts start off as a utopia that eventually treacherously turns into a dystopia, or threatens to do so. While this may disrupt a classification into utopian and dystopian texts, such a transformation fits perfectly naturally into the unfolding narrative of a thought experiment, as part of its dynamic evolution. Ultimately, approaching our chosen texts as thought experiments, rather than simply as utopias or

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dystopias, enables us to see them as part of a larger international constellation of thought experimentation, not only in literature, but also in the social and natural sciences. We gain major new insights as a result: 1) we unravel the ingenious experiment-related techniques that these texts use to influence and convince the reader; 2) consequently, we gain a deeper understanding of the underlying ideological agenda of these texts; 3) we discover further new dimensions in these works as we begin to see how they position themselves towards Thomas Malthus, both as the inventor of the rhetorical thought experiment and the author of the notorious theory of population—this key aspect will be discussed next. With regard to the thought experiment format, the selected texts can all be linked to An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Malthus, in which the British economist and philosopher conducts a series of counterfactual thought experiments—some of the first of their kind—relating in vivid narrative form the downfall of an initially perfect imaginary society.6 Malthus uses his thought experiments for argumentative purposes, with the aim of persuading his readers of the accuracy of his population theory and the inadequacy of other social theories, such as William Godwin’s egalitarianism, as depicted in his book An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Throughout his Essay, Malthus argues that if a society is very prosperous and food production is at its maximum, population will grow exponentially, thereby causing a drastic decrease in prosperity, which is then followed by a drop in population growth. Consequently, if population size is to remain in proportion to the world’s resources, poverty and misery will always exist, according to Malthus. One of his persistent ideas is that humanity is subject not only to an inevitable shortage of resources, but also to accompanying famines, wars, and epidemics, all of which allegedly contribute to keeping population growth in check. In the age of the coronavirus pandemic, this point of view unexpectedly assumes a startling new relevance, even though Malthus’s population theory has largely lost its power of persuasion by now, as will be discussed below. Consequently, any creative responses to Malthus in Russian fiction become more topical and interesting than ever in the post-2020 world. The literary texts analyzed in the present study have been chosen because they both focus on visions of the future and meet the following key criteria, all of

6

See Riccardo Nicolosi, “Kontrafaktische Überbevölkerungsphantasien. Gedankenexperimente zwischen Wissenschaft und Literatur am Beispiel von Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) und Vladimir Odoevskijs Poslednee samoubijstvo (Der letzte Selbstmord, 1844),” Scientia poetica 17 (2013): 55.

Introduction

which makes these works ideal for studying thought experiments in literary fiction: 1) in the same way as Malthus, the chosen texts employ thought experiments within an argumentative framework; 2) moreover, all of the authors mention Malthus and/or the problem of (over)population directly in the text; 3) most of the authors also discuss Malthus’s theory in detail in their personal and/or critical writings, which will be cited later in this book when relevant. For our pilot study, argumentative clarity and concision are more important than quantity, which is why the number of chosen works is limited. Without a doubt, other excellent texts meeting similar criteria can be analyzed in future research on thought experiments, building on the conclusions made in this book. And yet, despite the fruitful connections with Malthus mentioned above, the Russian writers often arrive at conclusions that are quite different from those in the Essay. In mainstream Western scholarship, it is often intuitively assumed that much of Malthus’s pragmatic pessimism is inherently rational, despite a longstanding tradition of Malthus critique on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the historical and social conditions in Russia have always been so radically different from those that Malthus takes for granted, that his ideas have readily prompted numerous alternative views and scenarios in Russian in the course of the two hundred years since the publication of the Essay in 1798. A selective comparative analysis of Malthus’s theory and its literary reception in Russia, as undertaken in the present study, therefore generates new refreshing insights, in particular on the meta-level of argumentative reasoning and cognitive structures: the book tests the proposition that, in literary fiction, thought experiments act as evidence that may change the reader’s degree of belief in a particular hypothesis or its negation, with special attention to future forecasts. Independently from this persuasive effect, literary thought experiments may clarify specific intellectual contexts or undermine the intellectual validity of entire classes of conceptual constructs. The method used for the analysis is interdisciplinary, combining critical tools from the disciplines of literary studies and philosophy. First of all, a number of foundational philosophical terms are employed within the fabric of literary analysis, in particular concepts such as probability and evidence.7 Similarly, a 7

On probability, see, in particular, Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine Daston, John Beatty, and Lorenz Kruger, The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); as well as Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); idem, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and idem, An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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differentiation between three different types of thought experiments in literary fiction is used to try and assess to what extent the selected texts imply a plausible connection to empirical reality. Specifically, we are going to distinguish between counterfactual thought experiments, hypothetical thought experiments, and fictional models. In this context, it is worth noting, as based on the standard analytical approach used in philosophy, that thought experiments can be either counterfactual (showing something that will never take place in reality) or hypothetical (portraying a development that has some probability of being true). A closely related notion is that of models, which “usually offer an idealized simplification or abstraction with regard to an intended purpose.”8 The process of “simplification or abstraction” is what thought experiments (of both types) and models have in common. However, in the case of fictional models, “What is crucial here is the claim that the resemblance between the model and the modelled leads to true assertions.”9 In other words, among the three kinds of constructs in question, which can all overlap with each other, models have the strongest link to reality: we shall assume that a fictional model creates a step-by-step approximation of a real scenario that is most likely to unfold under specific circumstances. In a nutshell, all literary thought experiments play out a story based on the initial question “what if,” as discussed above. However, a counterfactual thought experiment contains a narrative that is improbable or impossible; a hypothetical thought experiment demonstrates a probable sequence of events, while the plot of a fictional model is as close to an accurate prediction of real developments as possible. Accordingly, some of this book’s novelty will result from such attention to modality, which can be defined as the distinctive degree of realizability or plausibility that one may associate with the utopian projects described in the chosen works of fiction.10 On the one hand, this characteristic modality of literary thought experiments is different from that of literary representation 2001). Probability appears in the present study not in the mathematical sense, but mainly in terms of a discussion of the extent to which certain reader responses are more or less likely—so it is a critical commentary that works with estimated probabilities, rather than with certainties. In this way, a balance between interpretative openness and closure is preserved. On evidence, see Julian Reiss, “Empirical Evidence: Its Nature and Sources,” in The Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences, ed. Ian C. Jarvie and Jesús Zamora-Bonilla (London: SAGE, 2011), 551–576. 8 Albrecht and Danneberg, “First Steps,” 22. 9 Ibid. 10 On modality in literature, see Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); idem, La Pensée du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003); idem, The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). On modality from a philosophical point of view, see, for example, Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

Introduction

generally, and, on the other hand, it will be argued that the scenarios of utopian (and/or dystopian) thought experiments in literature are not always intended to be considered as unequivocally impossible. This focus on the modal ambiguity of utopia and dystopia leads to a dialectical twenty-first-century development of the traditional premises of utopian thought and writing, starting from Plato and underpinned by the etymology of “utopia” as meaning a “non-place” or a “non-existent place,” famously coined by Sir Thomas More. At the same time, the thought experiments analyzed remain inherently literary, which is why the critical method also encompasses a detailed analysis of narrative strategies, as based on the long-established strength of literary scholarship: the close commentary. In this book, three key conceptual tools will be used to make the commentary both textually and theoretically grounded in the specific thought experiment context: reader response; reductio ad absurdum; and the somatic effect of literature. All of these aspects are concerned with the interaction between the text and the reader: in each case, we consider this interaction from a somewhat different angle. For the purposes of this study, it will be assumed that reader response is the broadest category, a category that encompasses both reductio ad absurdum, as a rhetorical strategy aiming to produce the reader’s disbelief, and somatic effect, as an inherent quality of dramatic literary representation triggering the reader’s empathy with the characters portrayed. While reductio ad absurdum and somatic effect are helpful conceptual tools that are closely linked with two major (and contrasting) types of reader response (disbelief and empathy), other features of literary discourse will be analyzed, too, with close attention to the kinds of reader response they may generate. The rhetorical device of reductio ad absurdum, a favorite technique of classical Greek thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, primarily consists in accepting a particular assumption as correct (a feature shared with thought experiments) and then playing out its logical development until it becomes clear that the initial premise results in ridiculous, absurd, or untenable consequences; therefore, the original assumption contains contradictions and must be false. In the chosen texts, the strong rhetorical orientation of reductio ad absurdum typically supports the argumentative purpose of the literary thought experiment at hand, which is one of the reasons why the effect of the text on the reader is of crucial importance. This is also true for those texts that do not necessarily feature a reductio ad absurdum, since they still strive to have an effect on the reader as the thought experiment unfolds. I shall therefore apply reader response theories, especially those by Wolfgang Iser and Michael Riffaterre, to evaluate the overall epistemic and cultural impact of the thought experiments in question on the reader. In an essay first published in 1974, Wolfgang Iser provides

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a highly relevant description of the reading process as a joint venture of author and reader: “the literary work has two poles, […] the artistic and the esthetic: the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the esthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader […]—though this [realization] in turn is acted upon by the different patterns of the text. The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence […]” (emphasis added).11 The phrase in italics pinpoints the effect of the text on the reader, which Iser further highlights as follows: What is normally meant by “identification” is the establishment of affinities between oneself and someone outside oneself—a familiar ground on which we are able to experience the unfamiliar. The author’s aim, though, is to convey the experience and, above all, an attitude toward that experience. Consequently, “identification” is not an end in itself, but a stratagem by means of which the author stimulates attitudes in the reader [emphasis added].12 Paraphrasing Georges Poulet and then giving his own interpretation, Iser pithily concludes: “the thoughts of the author take place subjectively in the reader, who thinks what he is not. […] These are the ways in which reading literature gives us the chance to formulate the unformulated.”13 Iser’s work has been a lasting inspiration for a host of effective reader response-oriented textual analysis approaches that have been invented since. Elaine Nardocchio has brought together a remarkable constellation of such approaches in her edited volume of 1992, Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension.14 Among the many excellent essays of this book, several are particularly relevant to the present study. Rosanne Potter’s method is based on traditional rhetorical analysis, more precisely on “the correlations of reader

11 Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” [1974], in ReaderResponse Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 50. 12 Ibid., 65. 13 Ibid., 66–68. For an overview of some of the most significant theories of reader response, see Elaine Nardocchio, “Introduction” and “The Critic as Expert: Part II,” in Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension, ed. Elaine Nardocchio (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 1–11, 265–278. 14 Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension, ed. Elaine Nardocchio (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992).

Introduction

responses with semantic and syntactic data.”15 She concludes: “My research confirms Iser’s view of the text as an aesthetic object which makes the reader react. One way dramatic texts make expert and non-expert readers react is through contrasts between the presence and the absence of easily-recognized features in the dialogue assigned to characters.”16 Indeed, in my own method I am similarly going to focus on specific patterns of language and meaning in prose texts that attract the attention of the reader. In the course of her analysis, Potter also notes a key practical feature that most reader response approaches have to adopt: “When one seeks the common cues, the ones that work on all readers, a coarser sieve will limit fine distinctions and keep related impressions together.”17 Teresa Snelgrove’s method in the same volume involves a statistical analysis of narrative patterns, focusing on the frequency of occurrence of different types of narrative structures in the text.18 While statistical analysis is beyond the scope of our discussion of thought experiments, Teresa Snelgrove makes a significant comment on the connection between figurative language and reader response. Indeed, this connection is essential to the method to be used in the present study: “Similes and metaphors, which also contribute to narrative complexity, are usually classed as comment modes since they clearly indicate the presence of a guiding aesthetic hand and usually appeal to something within the realm of the reader’s experience that exists independently of the fiction.”19 Another important factor that shapes reader response is empathy: “Readers respond to private rhythms by reconstructing the emotions felt by the characters. Although their abilities to empathise might differ widely, all readers possess the mechanism to construct the emotion once they have recognised the patterns.”20 Empathy receives in-depth attention in László Halász’s article in the same volume. On the basis of thorough empirical research involving the reading of short stories by Maupassant and Kafka by several test groups of individuals, Halász concludes that literary texts elicit much stronger empathy and a more pronounced emotional response than other types of texts:

15 Rosanne G. Potter, “Reader Responses to Dialogue,” in Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension, ed. Elaine Nardocchio (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 16. 16 Ibid., 28. 17 Ibid. 18 Teresa Snelgrove, “Reading Structures: The Systematic Analysis of the Structure of Narrative Texts,” in Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension, ed. Elaine Nardocchio (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 120. 19 Ibid., 130–131. 20 Ibid., 133.

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As for the empathetic judgment of the character’s behavior, the short story readers could imagine themselves in the place of the master, but not in the place of the manservant, to a greater extent than the paraphrase and summary readers could. […] While “actor” and “fiction” were the most frequent categories as among the literary text readers [sic], “observer” plus “hearsay” and “non-fiction” were typical among the expository-descriptive text readers. […] Literary text readers could be sharply separated from the other two text readers […] by the higher ratio of the use of more personal linguistic forms, words expressing feelings and emotions, and more detailed responses.21 So empirical research by both Snelgrove and Halász supports the idea that readers’ emotional involvement with characters plays a significant role in the overall effect achieved by a literary text. Furthermore, Theresa Snelgrove, Willie van Peer, László Halász, and Robert de Beaugrande all pinpoint the importance of the interplay between the expected and the unexpected within reader response. Snelgrove discusses the violation of reader expectations as a manipulative stratagem on the part of a literary text: “The reader, expecting the report of an emotion to be followed by the report of an action that has a causal relationship to the emotion, can find no such linkage, and feels at sea. The complex rhythms allow the narrator to control the reader’s response by creating confusion and/or surprise.”22 Van Peer introduces the highly pertinent theory of foregrounding in this context, whose origins he traces back to Jan Mukařovský, Roman Jakobson, the Russian Formalists, and Aristotle’s Poetics:23 The term “foregrounding” refers to the fact that literary texts, by making use of some special devices, direct the reader’s attention to their own formal or semantic structure. Some parts of the text are thereby promoted into the “foreground.” These textual

21 László Halász, “Self-Relevant Reading in Literary Understanding,” in Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension, ed. Elaine Nardocchio (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 234, 239. 22 Snelgrove, “Reading Structures: The Systematic Analysis of the Structure of Narrative Texts,” 133. 23 See Willie van Peer, “Literary Theory and Reader Response,” in Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension, ed. Elaine Nardocchio (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 139.

Introduction

locations are given more attention, and in the reader’s perception they play a relatively more important role in the act of interpretation.24 Foregrounding enables the text to have a direct effect on the reader: In general, a strong pragmatic content may be ascribed to the concept of foregrounding, referring, as it does, to the way in which a reader processes a literary text, or, alternatively, how an author may realize specific effects in the reader. The text, as a medium and prerequisite of the communicative process, still bears the traces set out by the author in order to guide the reader in a particular direction.25 Foregrounding is a dynamic notion and functions thanks to parallelism and deviation: The devices by which foregrounding is produced originate in the basic mechanisms of deviation and parallelism. The latter comes into being through repetitive structures: some verbal configurations are (partly) repeated, thereby attracting the reader’s attention, and hence being promoted into the foreground of text response. […] The second device which may cause foregrounding effects is that of deviation: some kind of rule, maxim or convention is flouted by the text. This may involve rules of the language, literary conventions, the reader’s expectation or a reference to some state the reader knows in reality to be false or improbable. It is also possible that a deviation is brought about against a pattern set up by the text itself. All these instances of deviation create some degree of surprise in the reader and are thereby drawn into the foreground.26 Referring to work by Willie van Peer and William Paulson, Halász brings our attention to the fact that “Because they are continually disrupted by new unpredictabilities, literary texts are not predictable. In literary-artistic communication, 24 Ibid., 139. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 140.

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one must construct ‘a pattern out of what interrupts patterns.’”27 Finally, Beaugrande puts forward a working hypothesis about the fundamental role of literary reading that closely coincides with the propositions of the present book: “literary reading […] may have important ‘fall out’ for other human processes, such as the acquisition and application of knowledge, or the balancing of the expected with the unexpected.28 The above approaches work in a dynamic continuity with Iser’s theory of the reading process, as well as with certain features of the critical commentary method developed by his colleague Michael Riffaterre, in particular in his 1966 essay on Baudelaire’s poem “Les Chats,” followed up in his book of 1971. Riffaterre’s method is especially suitable for the chosen corpus of works. One of its key advantages is that it can be used even without collecting extensive statistical information about the reactions of actual readers, as I will show later. Giving due credit to the inspirational ideas developed in recent research in the area of reader response criticism, in particular to the empirical studies, as discussed above, I am going to update Riffaterre’s procedure both with my own judgement and with borrowings from the somatic theory of literature by Douglas Robinson.29 Riffaterre’s key criterion for analysis is reader response, the inherent subjectivity of which he eliminates by two techniques: 1) “empty the response of its content”—that is, only the fact that a reader response has taken place is registered, and not its content;30 2) “multiply the response”—that is, one collects a statistically reliable number of “signal” responses to the same text, preferably by a group of cultivated readers, constituting a “superreader” in Riffaterre’s terminology. The “superreader” for “Les Chats” thus includes Baudelaire, other poets, translators, critics, dictionaries, students, and “other souls.”31 Riffaterre’s main terms for critically reconstructing the reading process in this way are 27 Halász, “Self-Relevant Reading in Literary Understanding,” 240, quoting William R. Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). 28 Robert de Beaugrande, “Readers Responding to Literature: Coming to Grips with Realities,” in Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension, ed. Elaine Nardocchio (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 199. 29 Douglas Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 30 This approach has been corroborated in later research and fits in well with a number of recent studies. A good example of such continuity is Rosanne Potter’s pertinent observation on the need for simplicity when designing reader response tests: “When one seeks the common cues, the ones that work on all readers, a coarser sieve will limit fine distinctions and keep related impressions together.” Potter, “Reader Responses to Dialogue,” 28. 31 Michael Riffaterre, “Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire’s ‘Les Chats,’” Yale French Studies 36–37: Structuralism (1966): 214–215.

Introduction

predictability and unpredictability: “[The] unpredictability is made possible by the fact that at every point in a sentence, the grammatical restrictions limiting the choice of the next word permit a certain degree of predictability.”32 The elements detected by the reader are therefore the unexpected ones: “And since predictability is what makes an elliptical deciphering sufficient for the reader, the elements that will not escape everyone’s attention will have to be unpredictable.”33 It is this tension between predictability and unpredictability that I am going to adapt to my analysis: specifically, my focus will be on the unexpected and striking elements of each text, since it is fairly safe to assume that these will inevitably catch the attention of most readers, by puncturing the otherwise automatic reading process. This strategy also allows to dispense with the “superreader” for the time being, at least within the scope of this study: however desirable it would be to accumulate such reader response statistics, examining them in detail would take up too much space and also negatively affect the readability of the present commentary, in particular for a wide-ranging academic audience.34 As based on a careful reading of Riffaterre’s analysis of “Les Chats”, striking elements of the text are likely to include any vivid/unexpected details or statements, contrasts, hyperboles, repetition and enumeration, word play, figurative language, and irony. The dramatic intensity created or reinforced by some of these striking elements assumes a heightened significance in the light of Douglas Robinson’s somatic (literally: body-related) theory of literature, partly grounded in Leo Tolstoy’s famous infection theory of art and in Antonio Damasio’s recent medical research. According to Damasio, a somatic transfer of feeling can happen in everyday contexts as a result of instinctive empathy that leads one to an involuntary imitation of another person’s body state.35 Robinson argues that this can also happen as a result of a verbal account; hence the potential of literature to exert somatic guidance over readers.36 In other words, whenever we listen to or read a gripping story, our emotional reaction to it is amplified by a parallel bodily

32 Ibid., 216. 33 “Et puisque la prévisibilité est ce qui fait qu’un décodage elliptique suffit au lecteur, les éléments qui ne peuvent échapper à l’attention devront être imprévisibles.” Michael Riffaterre, “Critères pour l’analyse du style,” in his Essais de stylistique structurale, transl. Daniel Delas (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), 35. 34 Significantly, Riffaterre’s brilliant analysis has attracted many supporters: for example, it is quoted at length in the Pléiade edition of Baudelaire. However, regrettably, when Riffaterre’s essay is included in anthologies, most of his “superreader” discussion is typically cut out by the editors for reasons of space. 35 Antonio R. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003), quoted in Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics, 21–23. 36 Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics, 23–26.

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response, such as an increased heart rate or involuntary tears. Indeed, in 2011, there has been further evidence for this in medical research by M. Wallentin and others.37 Whenever such a somatic effect takes place, it makes the “stratagem by means of which the author stimulates attitudes in the reader,” as noted by Iser (see above), particularly powerful. The somatic theory resonates with and further reinforces the critical statements on reader empathy discussed above. The present study fills a significant niche in existing literary and interdisciplinary scholarship in the relevant field. In recent years, scholarship has tended to examine either the counterfactual dimension of literature, or the role of thought experiments in relation to literature, but very rarely the two aspects together. Indeed, the very term “(counterfactual) thought experiment” is unusual for literary studies and is typically found in research in the philosophy and history of science, where it forms part of a long-standing tradition going back to Ernst Mach38 and David Lewis,39 among many other outstanding thinkers. On the level of literary theory and criticism, notable exceptions to this rule are the writings of those scholars who have provided some of the first definitions of counterfactual imagination,40 have worked with counterfactuality as an interdisciplinary concept,41 or have broadly addressed the interrelation of thought experiments and literature.42 Adjacent fields of research, in which first-rate work has been

37 This research team based in Denmark found that while listening to emotionally intense parts of a story, readers respond with changes in heart rate variability, as well as increased brain activity in a network of regions involved in the processing of fear. See Mikkel Wallentin, Andreas Højlund Nielsen, Peter Vuust, Anders Dohn, Andreas Roepstorff, and Torben Ellegaard Lund, “Amygdala and Heart Rate Variability Responses from Listening to Emotionally Intense Parts of a Story,” NeuroImage 58, no. 3 (2011): 963–973. 38 Mach, “Über Gedankenexperimente”; and Ernst Mach, “Über Umbildung und Anpassung im naturwissenschaftlichen Denken,” in his Populärwissenschaftliche Vorlesungen (Leipzig: Barth, 1923), 245–265. 39 David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973); David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 37–46. 40 See, for example, Lutz Danneberg, “Überlegungen zu kontrafaktischen Imaginationen in argumentativen Kontexten und zu Beispielen ihrer Funktion in der Denkgeschichte,” Paragrana, Beiheft 2 (2006): 73–100; Albrecht and Danneberg, “First Steps.” 41 Such as Birke, Butter, and Köppe, Counterfactual Thinking. 42 For instance, Macho and Wunschel, Science and Fiction; S. Weigel, “Das Gedankenexperiment: Nagelprobe auf die facultas fingiendi in Wissenschaft und Literatur,” in Science and Fiction. Über Gedankenexperimente in Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Literatur, ed. Thomas Macho and Annette Wunschel (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2004), 183–205; Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge. Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); Karin Krauthausen, “Wirkliche Fiktionen. Gedankenexperimente in Wissenschaft und Literatur,” in Experiment und Literatur. Themen, Methoden, Theorien, ed. Michael Gamper (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 278–320; F. Schmieder, “Experimentalsysteme in Wissenschaft und Literatur,” in Experiment und

Introduction

completed in recent years, include the following: literature and experiment, with a focus on mutual influence;43 literature and science, with the (thought) experiment as a link between them;44 and studies of alternative histories, in particular in prose fiction.45 These first-class studies have provided excellent theoretical insights into the relationship between literature and experiment in global terms, with some of the authors also analyzing the significance of (counterfactual) thought experiments for literature. However, with few exceptions (to be discussed later as relevant), the most widespread approach has been to consider overall trends and patterns in the given context, rather than to provide close readings of literary texts showing how thought experiments operate inside a work of fiction. In this way, the ground has been paved for close textual analysis of relevant literary works that function as (counterfactual) thought experiments. This type of analysis

Literatur. Themen, Methoden, Theorien, ed. Michael Gamper (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 17–39; Birke, Butter, and Köppe, Counterfactual Thinking—and especially Tobias Klauk’s article in that volume, “Thought Experiments and Literature.” 43 See especially Richard Stites, “Fantasy and Revolution. Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction,” in Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, ed. Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites, transl. Charles Rougle (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 1–16; Marcus Krause and Nicolas Pethes, eds., Literarische Experimentalkulturen. Poetologien des Experiments im 19. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2005); Riccardo Nicolosi, “Das Blut der Karamazovs. Vererbung, Experiment und Naturalismus in Dostoevskijs letztem Roman.” In Laien—Lektüren—Laboratorien. Wissenschaften und Künste in Russland 1860–1960, ed. Matthias Schwartz, Wladimir Velminski, and Torben Philipp (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 2008), 147–180; Michael Gamper, ed., Experiment und Literatur. Themen, Methoden, Theorien (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010); Michael Gamper, Martina Wernli, and Jörg Zimmer, eds., “Wir sind Experimente: wollen wir es auch sein!” Experiment und Literatur II 1790–1890 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010); Riccardo Nicolosi, “Experimente mit Experimenten. Émile Zolas Experimentalroman in Russland,” in “Wir sind Experimente: wollen wir es auch sein!” Experiment und Literatur II 1790–1890, ed. Michael Gamper, Martina Wernli, and Jörg Zimmer (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 367–388. 44 Macho and Wunschel, Science and Fiction; Schmieder, “Experimentalsysteme.” 45 Jörg Helbig, Der parahistorische Roman. Ein literarhistorischer und gattungstypologischer Beitrag zur Allotopieforschung (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 1988); Karen Hellekson, The Alternate History. Refiguring Historical Time (Kent, OH, and London: Kent State University Press, 2001); Christof Rodiek, Erfundene Vergangenheit. Kontrafaktische Geschichtsdarstellung (Uchronie) in der Literatur (Frankfurt/M: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997); Gavriel Rosenfeld, “Why Do We Ask ‘What if ’? Reflections on the Function of Alternate History,” History and Theory 41 (2002): 90–103; Andreas Martin Widmann, Kontrafaktische Geschichtsdarstellung. Untersuchungen an Romanen von Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Brussig, Michael Kleeberg, Philip Roth und Christoph Ransmayr (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009); for theoretical approaches, see also Danneberg, “Überlegungen zu kontrafaktischen Imaginationen”; Lubomir Doležel, Possible Worlds of Fiction and History. The Postmodern Stage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Albrecht and Danneberg, “First Steps.”

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constitutes a newly emerging research area (see below) and is undertaken by the present study within its chosen topic. Regarding the specific issue of Malthusian thought experiments in Russian culture, there is similarly plenty of scope for new research. In the case of An Essay on the Principle of Population, scholarship has rarely pointed out that Malthus makes use of thought experiments as part of his polemic,46 and hardly any attention has been paid to the counterfactual dimension of his argument. In those excellent works that deal with Malthusian narratives in English-language literature,47 the counterfactual and imaginative potential of Malthus’s theory similarly typically lies outside the agenda. Malthusian narratives in Russian literature provide a further rich, but underexplored ground for testing the proposition that literary thought experiments are a valuable epistemic tool, which works in constant dialogue with the social and natural sciences. There are quite a number of excellent studies that have examined the importance of Malthus’s population theory in Russia.48 Yet it still remains to be said that a significant share of the Russian Malthusian debate takes place in literary works. The latter often reuse the thought experiment format as a rhetorical weapon directed against Malthus, or pointed in entirely new alternative directions. Several studies have referred to Odoevsky’s short story “The Last Suicide” (1844) in this context,49 yet they have not pinpointed the close connection between this text and a specific counterfactual thought experiment conducted by Malthus in chapter X of his Essay. The latter link has ultimately been made by Riccardo Nicolosi,50 who is also the author of a series of important critical works devoted to thought experiments 46 See Geoffrey Gilbert, “The Critique of Equalitarian Society in Malthus’s Essay,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 20, no. 1 (1990): 35–55. 47 Christopher Morash, Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); S. Colella, “Intimations of Mortality: The Malthusian Plot in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24, no. 1 (2002): 17–32; Brian Stableford, “Ecology and Dystopia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. G. Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 259–281. 48 For example, G. M. Korostelev, et al., eds., Kritika mal′tuzianskikh i neomal′tuzianskikh vzgliadov: Rossiia XIX–nachala XX v. (Moscow: Statistika, 1978); Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 49 Winfried Baumann, Die Zukunftsperspektiven des Fürsten V.F. Odoevskij (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 1980); T. Grob, “Das disziplinierte Chaos. V. F. Odoevskijs literarische Phantastik und das Paradox der romantischen Phantasie,” in Gedächtnis und Phantasma: Festschrift für Renate Lachmann, ed. S. K. Frank et al. (Munich: Sagner, 2001), 287–318. 50 Riccardo Nicolosi, “Kontrafaktische Überbevölkerungsphantasien. Gedankenexperimente zwischen Wissenschaft und Literatur am Beispiel von Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) und Vladimir Odoevskijs Poslednee samoubijstvo (Der letzte Selbstmord, 1844),” Scientia poetica 17 (2013): 50–74.

Introduction

in Russian literature, focusing primarily on the Russian Naturalist novel, as inspired by Émile Zola and his school in France.51 The present study attempts to build on these achievements by examining a different corpus of literary works with the help of a tailor-made methodology. Following this approach, this book will explore the following central questions: What are the initial conditions that compel authors to make use of thought experiments in literary fiction? How are such thought experiments structured and what are their key features? What different varieties of thought experiments are employed and can a typology be worked out? What are the intrinsic connections between thought experiments, utopian/dystopian writing, and future forecasts? And of what epistemic and cultural value are literary thought experiments both within and beyond their original historical and artistic setting? In the six chapters that follow, works by the chosen authors, including Malthus, will be closely analyzed in this context, with reference to relevant personal and critical writings as needed.

51 Riccardo Nicolosi, “Genealogisches Sterben. Zum wissenschaftlichen und literarischen Narrativ der Degeneration,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 60 (2007): 137–174; Riccardo Nicolosi, “Genuesische Lastträger, Hottentottinnen und Kamele. Wissenschaftsrhetorik am Beispiel Cesare Lombrosos,” in Rhetorik als kulturelle Praxis, ed. Renate Lachmann, Riccardo Nicolosi, and Susanne Strätling (Munich: W. Fink, 2008), 309–325; Nicolosi, “Das Blut der Karamazovs”; Nicolosi, “Experimente mit Experimenten”; Riccardo Nicolosi, “Nervöse Entartung. Narrative Modelle von Neurasthenie und Degeneration im Russland des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Neurasthenie. Die Krankheit der Moderne und die moderne Literatur, ed. Maximilian Bergengruen, Klaus Müller-Wille, and Caroline Pross (Freiburg: Rombach, 2010), 103–138.

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CHAPTER 1

Thomas Malthus, the Problem of Population, and Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Concise Overview

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) is both a fascinating and a controversial figure whose life and works are marked by a series of contrasts. His father, Daniel Malthus, was an open-minded and enlightened country gentleman, whose friends included such distinguished liberal thinkers as David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yet this privileged environment prompted a paradoxical reaction of protest on the part of the young Malthus, who went on to spend a lifetime arguing against the ideas of egalitarian and progressive liberalism. His intellectual interests were also as heterogeneous as they were impressive: while he graduated from the University of Cambridge with an honors degree in mathematics in 1788, he took holy orders and started his career as a clergyman shortly after his graduation. He continued to read and write widely, and in 1798, he published An Essay on the Principle of Population, which sparked off a notorious controversy that has been going on until the present day. And as if this was not sufficient, Malthus became professor of history and political economy at the East India College in Hertfordshire in 1805. In the Essay on the Principle of Population, all these diverse interests reach something of a culmination, as the text pulls together preoccupations current in political economy, sociology, history, religious philosophy, and ethics. Malthus typically incorporates counterfactual thought experiments into the textual fabric of his argumentation: specifically, these short memorable pieces of narrative demonstrate the mechanisms of population growth that prevent human society

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from achieving homogeneous prosperity and universal happiness. The Essay is based on two postulata: First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state.1 These two basic facts then form the basis for Malthus’s well-known theory of population: Assuming, then, my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.2 Malthus then argues that a series of checks operate so as to reduce population whenever it becomes too large in relation to the means of subsistence: these include preventive checks, such as moral restraint, which prevents individuals from starting a family, and positive checks, such as vice and misery (this includes epidemics and wars), all of which lead to lower birth and/or higher mortality rates.3 It is well known that the Essay reformulated and developed ideas that had been expressed by a number of prominent thinkers before Malthus, with whose work he was thoroughly familiar. These influences include, first and foremost, David Hume, Robert Wallace, Benjamin Franklin, and Adam Smith, all of whom wrote in detail on the problem of population.4 A brief overview of relevant writings shows to what extent the argument proposed by Malthus is original and in what Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798], ed. Geoffrey Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12. 2 Ibid., 13. 3 Ibid., 31, 45. 4 See Philip Appleman, ed., An Essay on the Principle of Population: Influences on Malthus, Selections from Malthus’ Work, Nineteenth-Century Comment, Malthus in the Twenty-First

1

Thomas Malthus, the Problem of Population, and Counter factual Thought E x periments

ways he builds on existing theories. David Hume’s essay “Of the Populousness of Antient Nations,” published in discourse X of his book Political Discourses (1752), suggests, in line with Malthusian theory, that population growth is a powerful force, which can nevertheless be subject to restraints. Yet, in contrast to Malthus, Hume goes on to add that a wise government will strive to minimize such restraints and that a prosperous society will naturally have strong population growth, which is thus seen as a prerequisite for social welfare: “wherever there are most happiness and virtue, and the wisest institutions, there will also be most people.”5 Robert Wallace, in his Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, in Ancient and Modern Times (1753) basically concurs with Hume’s view that the fewer checks there are on population increase, the better, and that the faster a population grows, the more prosperous a society, and vice versa: “the cultivation of […] virtues not only makes individuals happy; from what has been maintained in the preceding dissertation, it appears, further, to be the surest way of rendering the earth populous, and making society flourish.”6 Wallace goes a step further than Hume by evoking the individual factors that affect population growth, such as the degree of cultivation in a society or civilization; the climate; and the nature of political institutions. In this way he anticipates Malthus’s conception of “checks.” Wallace presents a much broader argument in his 1761 work, Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence, in which he sketches a utopian egalitarian society. Despite showing how this utopia could be “sustained for many generations,”7 he predicts its eventual downfall as a result of overpopulation: “Under a perfect government, the inconveniences of having a family would be so entirely removed […] that […] in general, mankind would increase so prodigiously, that the earth would at last be overstocked, and become unable to support its numerous inhabitants.”8 Malthus will develop this idea in a much more detailed and systematic manner, complete with mathematical evidence.

Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), xiii–xxv for a detailed account of these and other influences on Malthus. 5 David Hume, Political Discourses (Edinburgh: Kincaid and Donaldson, 1752), 160. 6 Robert Wallace, A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, in Ancient and Modern Times [1753] (Edinburgh and London: Constable, 1809), 162. 7 In the words of Geoffrey Gilbert (see Malthus, An Essay, xii). 8 Robert Wallace, Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence [1761] (see his Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence: 1761. To Which is Added Ignorance and Superstition, a Source of Violence and Cruelty, a Sermon Preached in the High Church of Edinburgh, January 6, 1746 [New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969], 114); quoted in Malthus, An Essay, xii.

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Benjamin Franklin, in his essay Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries (1755), comes even closer to the Essay on the Principle of Population when he argues that the main restraint on the power of population growth is provided by the available means of subsistence, and that twenty-five years is likely to be a typical doubling period for population. Even his language, with its use of the verb “suppose,” foreshadows Malthusian thought experiments: “This million doubling, suppose but once in twenty-five years, will in another century be more than the people of England.”9 Yet his evaluation of such growth is still positive, as a rapidly increasing population is seen as a source of tremendous power: “What an accession of Power to the British empire by the Sea as well as Land!”10 Demographic scepticism eventually appears in the work of Adam Smith, in particular his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith focuses in particular on the ways in which the overall number of laborers and other factors affect wages. However, in the process, he also defines the correlation between species growth and means of subsistence, pointing out the direct relevance of this principle to humans, as well as its effect on infant mortality among the poor: “Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it. But in civilized society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce.”11 Maintaining this pragmatic tone, quite distinct from the reverent stance of the thinkers quoted above, Smith goes on to conclude that population growth may be too fast or too slow and is regulated by the law of supply and demand that governs the economy: “It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men; quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast.”12 Malthus will eventually consider human society with a very similar pragmatic detachment

9 Benjamin Franklin, Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries [1755], in his The Works of Benjamin Franklin: Containing Several Political and Historical Tracts Not Included in Any Former Edition, and Many Letters, Official and Private Not Hitherto Published; with Notes and a Life of the Author, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston: Whittemore, Niles, and Hall, 1856), vol. 2, 319. 10 Ibid. 11 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776], in his The Works of Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S. of London and Edinburgh (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1812), vol. 2, 121. 12 Ibid., 122.

Thomas Malthus, the Problem of Population, and Counter factual Thought E x periments

and will highlight especially the instances when demographic growth “advances too fast,” thus working out the famous principle of population. However, much as Malthus is indebted to his colleagues who anticipated his theory, the final impetus for the writing of the Essay was provided by the work of two liberal philosophers to whose ideas he was strongly opposed: William Godwin and Marquis de Condorcet. In the wake of the Reign of Terror in France, which brought bitter disillusionment with the ideals of the French Revolution to many, three publications appeared: William Godwin’s book An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (first edition, 1793), followed by his essay “Of Avarice and Profusion” (1797); and Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, 1795). Indeed, it is not accidental that Malthus’s original title of 1798 is as follows, presenting his treatise as a direct response to Godwin and Condorcet: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. This extended title spells out the author’s key agenda that is omitted from the shorter modern title of the text: specifically, the principle of population is of interest insofar as it is potentially an argument against any future improvement of society. It is this deep mistrust of the future, as embedded in the first edition of the Essay, that will later provoke such strong reactions to Malthusian theory both in the West and in Russia, simultaneously encouraging a blossoming of literary thought experiments that will attempt to disprove or counterbalance Malthus.13 Like Wallace, Condorcet argues in favor of a prosperous, enlightened, and technologically advanced egalitarian society, while also pointing out that it may suffer from overpopulation in the far future: “With all this progress in industry and welfare which establishes a happier proportion between men’s talents and their needs, each successive generation will have larger possessions […] and  […] the number of people will increase. Might there not then come a moment […] when, the number of people in the world finally exceeding the means of subsistence, there will in consequence ensue a continual diminution of happiness and population, a true retrogression, or at best an oscillation between

13 On the reception of Malthus’s Essay in the English-speaking world from 1798 to the present day, see Geoffrey Gilbert (Malthus, An Essay, xix–xxv) and Philip Appleman (Appleman, An Essay, xviii–xxviii). On Malthus reception in Russia, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Korostelev et al., Kritika mal′tuzianskikh i neomal′tuzianskikh vzgliadov; and Todes, Darwin without Malthus.

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good and bad?”14 Interestingly, Condorcet then very cautiously suggests that birth control may present a solution to this problem: “we can assume that by then men will know that, if they have a duty towards those who are not yet born, that duty is not to give them existence but to give them happiness; their aim should be to promote the general welfare of the human race […], rather than foolishly to encumber the world with useless and wretched beings.”15 For Malthus, however, birth control would be unacceptable on religious grounds. Godwin’s Political Justice is his major work that systematically expounds his political and moral philosophy. After examining the nature of human society and government, as well as the principles of justice, equality, and private judgement over the course of eight books and nearly two volumes, Godwin devotes the final book to his utopian vision of the egalitarian society of the future. In a close affinity with Condorcet’s ideas, in this utopia, population is kept in proportion to the means of subsistence thanks to self-restraint, as both men and women are highly rational and responsible. Furthermore, this society dispenses with the institutions of private property and marriage and finally enables mankind to achieve an advanced progress in all areas, including moral and intellectual perfection: The spirit of oppression, the spirit of servility, and the spirit of fraud, these are the immediate growth of the established system of property. These are alike hostile to intellectual and moral improvement. The other vices of envy, malice and revenge are their inseparable companions. In a state of society where men lived in the midst of plenty, and where all shared alike the bounties of nature, these sentiments would inevitably expire. The narrow principle of selfishness would vanish. No man being obliged to guard his little store, or provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants, each would lose his own individual existence in the thought of the general good.16

14 Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat marquis de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind [1795], transl. June Barraclough, in his Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 137. 15 Ibid. 16 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice [1793] (Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1992), vol. 2, 810.

Thomas Malthus, the Problem of Population, and Counter factual Thought E x periments

Ultimately, Godwin imagines that human life can be prolonged indefinitely as a result, consolidating universal happiness and welfare. The essay “Of Avarice and Profusion,” which Godwin publishes in 1797 as part of his volume The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature, aims to bridge the gap between the ideal egalitarian future and the imperfect present, in which inequality is “unavoidable.”17 One of the central ideas is that the wealthy must use their money to the benefit of those who are less fortunate and society as a whole: “The use of wealth is no doubt a science attended with uncommon difficulties. But it is not less evident that, by a master in the science, it might be applied, to chear [sic] the miserable, to relieve the oppressed, to assist the manly adventurer, to advance science, and to encourage art.”18 The suggestion that money should be used to help the miserable and the oppressed is the direct opposite of Malthus’s conviction that the English Poor Law only makes the situation of the poor worse, by sustaining population growth among families that cannot afford to support their children. So, in writing the Essay, he somehow had to find ways to attack both Godwin’s idea of munificence towards the poor and his closely related egalitarian utopia. It is the implausibility of the idea of immortality that makes Godwin’s otherwise interesting and thought-provoking theory of human progress in Political Justice a ready target for Malthus’s wit and sarcasm. Geoffrey Gilbert perceptively highlights Malthus’s cunning use of double perfectibility as a rhetorical ploy. Godwin—and also Condorcet—frequently use two notions of perfectibility side by side, social and organic: the former refers to the potential of human society to achieve continuous progress in its structure (relatively feasible); while the latter constitutes man’s ability to improve the physical condition of his body from one generation to the next (much less plausible). As Gilbert remarks: “This presented an opening for Malthus. If he could impress upon readers the ‘jointness’ of the two notions of perfectibility […] and then undermine the weaker one (organic), he could effectively discredit both. The task was easily accomplished. […] A world populated by ever-wakeful, never-hungry, de-sexed immortals was too ridiculous an idea for anyone to take seriously.”19 By extension, Malthus convincingly presented Godwin’s perfect egalitarian society as equally ridiculous: “The form and structure of society which Mr Godwin describes is as essentially distinct

17 Appleman, An Essay, 10. 18 Ibid., 12. 19 Malthus, An Essay, xi.

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from any forms of society which have hitherto prevailed in the world as a being that can live without food or sleep is from man.”20 The above ploy of double perfectibility demonstrates that Malthus supports his conclusions not only with empirical evidence, such as statistics and mathematical calculations, but also with shrewd rhetorical strategies, cleverly mixing and combining these elements into a coherent argument. A further effective rhetorical strategy is his use of a number of counterfactual thought experiments. First of all, such thought experiments can be found in chapter II of the Essay, where population growth and decline are modeled in Britain contemporary to Malthus and on the whole Earth.21 A more extended thought experiment occurs in chapter X, where the same population patterns are used to demonstrate that William Godwin’s utopian society, in which “all men are equal,”22 as depicted in Political Justice, will inevitably bounce back to the default social system in Europe around 1800, governed by inequality and the institutions of private property and marriage. Malthus’s procedure can be illustrated most effectively with examples from chapter X of the Essay. In his thought experiments, he typically constructs a step by step imaginary narrative that starts with “Let us suppose”23 and then follows through the logical development of the initial assumption in a linear chronological manner, tracing relevant social changes over regular periods of time, such as twenty-five years. These changes are reported from the third person perspective by an omniscient narrator, using the present tense of the indicative mood, as can be noted in most of the quotations below: this mode of narration enhances the illusion of reality and encourages the reader to forget that the scenario is imaginary, which results in a heightened persuasive effect. The thought experiment in chapter X begins with the assumption that Godwin’s egalitarian utopia has been realized in England in its best possible version: I have already pointed out the error of supposing that no distress and difficulty would arise from an overcharged population before the earth absolutely refused to produce any more. But let us imagine for a moment Mr. Godwin’s beautiful system of equality realized in its utmost purity, and see how soon this difficulty

20 Ibid., 116. 21 Ibid., 16–18. 22 Ibid., 77. 23 Ibid.

Thomas Malthus, the Problem of Population, and Counter factual Thought E x periments

might be expected to press under so perfect a form of society. A theory that will not admit of application cannot possibly be just. Let us suppose all the causes of misery and vice in this island removed. War and contention cease. Unwholesome trades and manufactories do not exist. Crowds no longer collect together in great and pestilent cities for purposes of court intrigue, of commerce, and vicious gratifications. Simple, healthy, and rational amusements take place of drinking, gaming, and debauchery. There are no towns sufficiently large to have any prejudicial effects on the human constitution. The greater part of the happy inhabitants of this terrestrial paradise live in hamlets and farmhouses scattered over the face of the country. Every house is clean, airy, sufficiently roomy, and in a healthy situation. All men are equal. The labours of luxury are at end. And the necessary labours of agriculture are shared amicably among all.24 To reinforce the verisimilitude of the above vision, Malthus generously employs vivid description: “Every house is clean, airy, sufficiently roomy, and in a healthy situation. […] vegetable food, with meat occasionally, would satisfy the desires of a frugal people.”25 At the same time, the argument is constantly supported by abstract reasoning: “no probable reason can be assigned why the population should not double itself.”26 Having painted the beauty of the utopia, Malthus sets the population doubling period at twenty-five years and goes on to show, quite brutally, how the geometrical rate of population growth heavily outstrips the arithmetical increase in food production, leading to disastrous food shortages before the first fifty years are over: Even with this concession, however, there would be seven millions at the expiration of the second term, unprovided for. A  quantity of food equal to the frugal support of twenty-one millions, would be to be divided among twenty-eight millions. Alas! what becomes of the picture where men lived in the midst of plenty; where no man was obliged to provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants; where the narrow principle of selfishness did not exist; where Mind was delivered from her 24 Ibid., 76–77. 25 Ibid., 77. 26 Ibid., 78.

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perpetual anxiety about corporal support, and free to expatiate in the field of thought which is congenial to her. This beautiful fabric of imagination vanishes at the severe touch of truth.27 We can note the shift to the conditional tense in the first paragraph above, which suggests that the utopia would not even last for fifty years, but collapse earlier. Additionally, the use of the past tense of the indicative in the second paragraph above firmly relegates the egalitarian idyll to times gone by: the only reality that remains is the disappearance of this “beautiful fabric of imagination,” encapsulated in the present indicative of the verb “vanishes” in the last line. To highlight the disintegration and the reductio ad absurdum of the assumed utopian society and the shockingly smooth progression from utopia to dystopia, Malthus then immediately follows up with an extensive use of metaphorical language and personification, evoking the crisis at the end of the first fifty years, now entirely in the present indicative: “The spirit of benevolence […] is repressed by the chilling breath of want. […] the whole black train of vices that belong to falsehood are immediately generated […] self-love resumes his wonted empire and lords it triumphant over the world.”28 Both virtues (benevolence) and vices (want, falsehood and its consequences, and finally, self-love) are strikingly personified here, with benevolence, as the only virtue mentioned, heavily outnumbered by the various calamities. Moreover, benevolence is hardly present at all, appearing simply as a non-tangible spirit, which is then repressed to become quite non-existent. In contrast, disastrous events and corrupt human qualities all have clear sensory attributes or powers: want has a chilling breath, the vices of falsehood are black in color and appear as a solemn procession (train), while self-love is represented as the unchallenged master of the world. These personifications are all “striking elements” in the sense of Riffaterre’s method and certainly catch the reader’s attention, so as to persuade him/her of the accuracy of Malthus’s philosophical and political agenda. Malthus then stifles any objections to his line of argument by tracing the evolution of his unfortunate utopian island over two more periods of twenty-five years, which results in a final, irrefutable population catastrophe:

27 Ibid., 79–80. 28 Ibid., 80, my emphasis. For a detailed analysis of Malthus’s narrative strategies in chapter X, especially the technique of reductio ad absurdum, see Nicolosi, “Kontrafaktische Überbevölkerungsphantasien,” 55–66.

Thomas Malthus, the Problem of Population, and Counter factual Thought E x periments

If we are not yet too well convinced of the reality of this melancholy picture, let us but look for a moment into the next period of twenty-five years; and we shall see twenty-eight millions of human beings without the means of support; and before the conclusion of the first century, the population would be one hundred and twelve millions, and the food only sufficient for thirty-five millions, leaving seventy-seven millions unprovided for. In these ages want would be indeed triumphant, and rapine and murder must reign at large: and yet all this time we are supposing the produce of the earth absolutely unlimited, and the yearly increase greater than the boldest speculator can imagine.29 Yet, however watertight Malthus’s thought experiment is on its own terms, it remains first and foremost a rhetorical structure that is as reliable as the two postulata on which it is based: the geometrical ratio of population growth and the arithmetical ratio of food production increase respectively. Malthus’s further crucial assumption is that man is unable to control either of these two ratios: it is this belief that eventually turns out to be on the wrong side of history. William Godwin replied to Malthus’s Essay by publishing Of Population: An Enquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind (1820). Registering the popularity of Malthus’s ideas with great dismay, Godwin points out already in the preface to his book that the greatest harm lies in the fact that Malthus advocates passiveness in regard to social institutions, which ultimately goes counter to Christian and humanist morality: “The main and direct moral and lesson of the Essay on Population, is passiveness. […] Mr. Malthus […] has said, The evils of which you complain, do not lie within your reach to remove: they come from the laws of nature, and the unalterable impulse of human kind. […] To omit all other particulars, if we embrace his creed, we must have a new religion, and a new God.”30 It must be said in defense of Malthus that he somewhat revised his views in the light of the numerous criticisms he received before and after 1820: from the second edition of the Essay onwards, his position gradually shifts from an uncompromising defeatism to a cautious optimism, and he makes the following statement in the final, seventh edition, on which he worked until the end of his life: “But however formidable these obstacles may have appeared in some parts of this work, it is hoped that the general result of the inquiry is such as not to make us give up the improvement of human society in despair. 29 Malthus, An Essay, 80–81. 30 Appleman, An Essay, 138–139.

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The partial good which seems to be attainable is worthy of all our exertions; is sufficient to direct our efforts, and animate our prospects.”31 Despite the proven rhetorical success and influence of the Essay for over two centuries, it is now generally accepted that Malthus has fatally underestimated such key factors as birth control and the progress of technology (especially in food production) when formulating his laws of population; he has also often used inadequate statistics, which means that the two ratios that he has induced do not quite correspond to reality. However, the main trend pinpointed by Malthus is still topical over two hundred years later, which gives great credit to his genius: unchecked population growth may indeed result in overpopulation, thereby leading to serious problems and even potentially disastrous consequences.32 In subsequent chapters, we shall discuss the resonance of Malthus’s thought experiments in selected works of Russian literary fiction written between 1840 and 1960.

31 See Appleman, An Essay, 133–134. Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent references in this book will be to Malthus, An Essay, which reproduces the text of the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population. 32 For more detail on existing views concerning population growth, see Alan Osborn Dann, Malthus and the Principle of Population: A Reappraisal (PhD thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1955), 69–77; Frank W. Elwell, A Commentary on Malthus’ 1798 Essay on Population as Social Theory (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 2001): 13–86; Malthus, An Essay, vii–xxv; and Appleman, An Essay, 163–305.

CHAPTER 2

Vladimir Odoevsky’s Russian Nights (1844): Thought Experiments Inspired by Malthus and Bentham

Vladimir Odoevsky’s Russian Nights (Русские ночи, 1844) is a collection of short stories that are all elaborately encapsulated within a sophisticated multilayered frame tale. Not unlike the popular Russian matryoshka doll, each story is usually placed within a frame narrative, which in its turn forms part of a long philosophical conversation between four friends: Faust, Rostislav, Viktor, and Vyacheslav. They are all young members of the Russian aristocratic and intellectual elite in Saint Petersburg of the early nineteenth century. Faust has in his possession a collection of manuscripts left by two ambitious intellectuals after their death. The latter have recorded a series of striking experiences that they have encountered as part of their daring project to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of human life and the world. Over the course of nine nights, Faust reads out these manuscripts to his three friends, and a polemical discussion often follows. Two of the short stories thus read out portray the downfall of imaginary civilizations, with strong utopian and/or dystopian elements: “The Last Suicide” (“Последнее самоубийство”) and “A City without a Name” (“Город без имени”). Each of the two texts is constituted by a systematic and, on its own terms, plausible narrative based on the unreal assumption that a particular fictional society exists and proceeds along the path of its own history. Both works can therefore be considered to be counterfactual thought experiments, as defined in the Introduction above. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the two narratives so as to explore their epistemic and cultural value within and beyond the Russian Nights.

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As hinted by Odoevsky and aptly noted by Riccardo Nicolosi,1 “The Last Suicide” is “a development of a chapter by Malthus” (“развитие одной главы из Мальтуса”):2 specifically, Odoevsky’s story is based on chapter X of the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Malthus, in which the British economist and philosopher conducts a similar counterfactual thought experiment, as discussed in chapter 1 of this book. Indeed, two aspects of Odoevsky’s story are inspired by this Malthusian model: first, the format of a counterfactual thought experiment; and second, the focus on overpopulation as the main force behind a dystopian scenario. The same format is taken up again in “A City without a Name,” and there are also several references in the text to overpopulation as a problem; however, while Malthus can still be said to have inspired the narrative structure, the main philosophical impetus for “A City without a Name” is taken from the writings of another British thinker, Jeremy Bentham. In particular, Odoevsky’s text describes an imaginary society that is based on Bentham’s famous principle of utility, explained in such works as An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789); and it is through its singleminded pursuit of utility as the absolute goal that this society irrevocably proceeds towards its downfall.3 As we can see, despite their distinctively literary form, Odoevsky’s two short stories are both concerned with particular philosophical systems, Malthus’s theory of population and Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism, respectively. In fact, secondary literature has often pointed out that there is an elaborate philosophical agenda at the core of the Russian Nights. Early twentieth-century Odoevsky criticism, such as the groundbreaking book by Pavel Sakulin (1913), which is still a major authority on the writer today, tends to emphasize the idealist and mystical tendencies of the Russian Nights,4 especially as inspired by Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy of the 1800s. More recent scholarship points

1

2 3

4

Riccardo Nicolosi, “Kontrafaktische Überbevölkerungsphantasien. Gedankenexperimente zwischen Wissenschaft und Literatur am Beispiel von Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) und Vladimir Odoevskijs Poslednee samoubijstvo (Der letzte Selbstmord, 1844),” Scientia poetica 17 (2013): 67. Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevskii, Russkie nochi [1844], ed. Nikolai Amaev (St. Petersburg: Leonardo, 2011), 110. It can be safely assumed that Odoevsky was familiar with the two cited works by Malthus and Bentham: Odoevsky’s personal library contained Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population in two volumes (1841) and Bentham’s works in three volumes (1829–1830), all in French translation. See Katalog biblioteki V. F. Odoevskogo, ed. S. I. Kovrigina et al. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia biblioteka SSSR im. V. I. Lenina, 1988), 351, 171. See Pavel Nikitich Sakulin, Iz istorii russkogo idealizma. Kniaz′ V. F. Odoevskii. Myslitel′.— Pisatel′, vol. 1 (Moscow: M. i S. Sabashnikovy, 1913), 215–216, 219–220.

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out Odoevsky’s increasing post-Romantic disillusionment with Schelling and other idealist philosophies in the 1830s and 1840s, that is, at the time when the short stories were written and published.5 In this context, most critics comment on the theories of Malthus and Bentham as central to “The Last Suicide” and “A City without a Name,” however, to my knowledge, with the exception of Riccardo Nicolosi, no one has yet attempted to analyze the two short stories as thought experiments with a philosophical basis, and this is precisely the niche that the present chapter intends to fill. The current critical consensus tends to be that the Russian Nights express a dialectical struggle between Odoevsky’s idealism and his doubts;6 at any rate, there were beliefs that he held firmly, such as those in the power of art, the potential of science, and the primordial importance of human dignity. However complex and dynamic Odoevsky’s philosophical agenda, its presence makes it justifiable to suggest that the short stories embedded in the book promote particular elements of this agenda. In other words, because Odoevsky feels very strongly about certain philosophical systems and points of view, “The Last Suicide” and “A City without a Name” have an argumentative purpose—or even a range of argumentative purposes—underlying their narrative structure: the philosophical basis of these texts is therefore encapsulated within an argumentative format. Moving towards a typology of thought experiments in literature, I shall therefore examine the two short stories as two different literary paradigms of a counterfactual thought experiment that seeks to argue a particular point, or defend a specific hypothesis. I shall also use the differentiation between counterfactual thought experiments and fictional models, as defined in the Introduction above, to look into the relationship between Odoevsky’s two texts and empirical reality. From empirical observation, there is only one step to the concept of evidence, which is another essential theoretical tool that this chapter will borrow from philosophy. Indeed, if we recall that in the social and natural sciences experiments are typically used to collect evidence in favor of or against a particular hypothesis, it makes sense to suggest that Odoevsky’s counterfactual thought experiments serve a similar purpose within narrative fiction. To apply this idea to literary studies, without claiming to achieve mathematical precision, it is worth keeping in mind that evidence can offer varying gradations of certainty, 5 See Neil Cornwell, The Life, Times, and Milieu of V. F. Odoyevsky, 1804–1869 (London: Athlone Press, 1986), 75–76; Iurii Vladimirovich Mann, “V. F. Odoevskii i ego ‘Russkie nochi,’” in his Russkaia filosofskaia estetika (Moscow: MALP, 1998), 162–165; and Slobodan Sucur, Poe, Odoyevsky, and Purloined Letters: Questions of Theory and Period Style Analysis (New York: Peter Lang 2001), 112–115. 6 See especially Mann, “Odoevskii,” 164–165.

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as becomes clear from the definition given by Julian Reiss: “‘evidence’ refers to: (1) the condition of being evident; (2) something that makes another thing evident; indication; sign; and (3) something that tends to prove; ground for belief. […] According to the second entry, scientific evidence means hint, sign, indication of, or a reason to believe (the negation of) a scientific hypothesis. According to the third, the word means (something that furnishes) proof of or good or cogent reason to believe (the negation of) a hypothesis.”7 In the present chapter, I shall mainly use meanings two and three to test the proposition that in literary fiction, counterfactual thought experiments act as evidence that may change the reader’s degree of belief in a particular hypothesis or its negation. Importantly, in literature, we can hardly ever speak of “proof ” of a theory or conjecture; however, an infinite scale of gradations from “hint” to “good or cogent reason to believe” is still possible, which is why the above definition is so helpful. In fact, Odoevsky’s text directly invites us to read the Russian Nights as a series of experiments, thereby justifying the proposed methodological approach. Specifically, Faust’s two friends, who have allegedly recorded all the tales of the book, are said to conduct an “experiment” (“опыт”) from the start: “I think that my friends,” said Faust, “had the intention to make notes with the greatest care and, meaning business, to record even the smallest relevant details from the moment that their experiment had started, in the same way as experimental scientists would.”8 At different points in the frame tale, the two friends are often compared to “experimental scientists” (“естествоиспытатели”) or else called “experimenters of the spirit” (“духоиспытатели”), a neologism coined by Odoevsky by analogy to “естествоиспытатели,” literally “those who experiment with nature.”9 A significant passage of this kind, containing a detailed comparison of the two narrators’ procedure to experimental chemistry, occurs right after the end of “A City without a Name”: 7 Julian Reiss, “Empirical Evidence: Its Nature and Sources,” in The Sage Handbook of  the Philosophy of Social Sciences, ed. Ian C. Jarvie and Jesús Zamora-Bonilla (London: SAGE, 2011), 551–552. 8 “Кажется, друзья мои,—сказал Фауст,—имели намерение очень аккуратно вести свои записи и, как люди дельные, подобно естествоиспытателям, вносить в них все малейшие подробности с той минуты, как начался их опыт.” Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 50. 9 Ibid., 50, 43, 152.

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I don’t understand what exactly these gentlemen wanted to prove with their story, said Vyacheslav.—To prove? Nothing at all! You know that during chemical experiments observers have a habit of keeping a journal where they record everything they note in the course of the experiment; without yet having the intention to prove anything, they write down every fact, whether true or deceptive…10 However valid the scientific analogies, Odoevsky’s thought experiments remain inherently literary, which is why my method will also encompass a detailed analysis of narrative strategies in the two short stories. My commentary will focus on three key aspects: reader response; reductio ad absurdum; and the somatic effect of literature, as discussed in the Introduction. Specifically, I will consider a selective synthesis of striking elements and somatic effects as functioning within the narrative structure of reductio ad absurdum. The classical rhetorical device of reductio ad absurdum is particularly crucial here, as it is used conspicuously both in chapter X of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and in the two chosen stories by Odoevsky, as has been noted by Riccardo Nicolosi.11 As we have seen in chapter 1 of this book, Malthus’s thought experiments in the Essay already feature some of the unexpected elements that are bound to attract the reader’s attention according to Riffaterre, in particular, vivid description, metaphorical language, and personification. This pattern is naturally even more characteristic of Odoevsky’s style in “The Last Suicide,” which uses Malthus’s very own rhetorical weapons to test his population theory in a counterfactual thought experiment that is decidedly literary. What strikes the reader even before “The Last Suicide” begins is the fact that the narrator of the story, a young economist, is explicitly presented in the frame tale as an unreliable source, moreover, as someone who is mentally disturbed as a result of unrequited love:

10 “—Я не понимаю, что эти господа хотели доказать своей историей, сказал Вячеслав.— Доказать? решительно ничего! Вы знаете, при химических опытах наблюдатели имеют обыкновение вести журнал всего, что ни заметят они при производстве опыта; не имея ещё в виду ничего доказывать, они записывают каждый факт, истинный или обманчивый…” Ibid., 152. 11 Nicolosi, “Kontrafaktische Überbevölkerungsphantasien,” 54, 72.

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It seems that his mental derangement began from this moment onwards; the affliction of offended love was conflated with the affliction of the dissatisfied mind, and this appalling state of body and spirit poured itself out onto paper in the form of a monstrous creation, to which he himself gave the title of “The Last Suicide.”12 The words and expressions that I have highlighted in italics are all highly negative, with more or less explicit connotations of mental illness, anguish, and crime; moreover, the last four epithets proceed along an ascending scale of dramatic intensity: “mental derangement”; “offended,” “dissatisfied,” “appalling,” and, finally, “monstrous.” These comments reach the reader in a very mediated way: they are contained in a letter that someone who knew the unfortunate economist addresses to Faust’s two friends, the “experimenters.” Faust then reads out both this letter and the economist’s own writings to Rostislav, Viktor, and Vyacheslav. The above characterization of the insane economist thus gains authenticity as the letter constitutes a slice of real life, as it were; at the same time, Odoevsky, the actual author, distances himself by delegating all responsibility to his narrators, which makes the reader’s (apparently unguided) deciphering of this complex network all the more important. Naturally, the effect of the frame tale comments is precisely to coax the reader into a particular set of interpretations. Once we have been told that the next story will be told by a mentally deranged person, the letter adds what seems to be a throwaway comment, suggesting that “The Last Suicide” presents a logical development of Malthus’s population theory: This work is nothing other but a development of a chapter from Malthus, a straightforward development, however, undisguised by the ruses of dialectics, which Malthus used as a preventive weapon against the mankind that he had insulted.13 Hence the reader is prepared in advance for a story that is likely to be absurd and shocking, and at the same time directly inspired by Malthus.

12 “С этой минуты, кажется, началось расстройство ума его; болезнь оскорблённой любви слилась с болезнию неудовлетворённого разума, и это страшное состояние организма излилось на бумагу в виде чудовищного создания, которому он сам дал название ‘Последнего самоубийства.’” Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 109–110, emphasis added. 13 “Это сочинение есть не иное что, как развитие одной главы из Мальтуса, но развитие откровенное, не прикрытое хитростями диалектики, которые Мальтус употреблял как предохранительное орудие против человечества, им оскорблённого.” Ibid., 110.

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“The Last Suicide” is thus a counterfactual thought experiment that relates, in narrative form, an imagined dystopian degradation of human society in a distant future. Structurally, the narrative is divided into two sections: the first section sketches the sad state reached by mankind, while the second one evokes the suicidal arguments of “prophets of despair,” followed by the arrival of the “messiah of despair” and the ultimate self-destruction of humanity.14 It is hinted from the start that such a dystopian vision constitutes the realization of Malthusian forecasts, or, rather, confirms some of the implications of his population theory, as the time has come when the means of subsistence are no longer adequate to demographic growth: The time came that nineteenth-century philosophers had predicted: the human race had multiplied; the works of nature no longer corresponded to the needs of mankind.15 The entire Earth is shown to be irrevocably plagued by overpopulation, despite advanced technological progress that enables man to use all the available land for agriculture in highly efficient ways. Striking contrasts (desert—fertile farmland, ice—rich soil, warmth—frost) pinpoint the extraordinary achievements of science and technology, only in order to say that all is in vain, since there is still not enough food: […] long ago had Arabian sandy plains been transformed into fertile farmland; long ago had glaciers of the North been covered with rich soil; thanks to the incredible efforts of chemical science, artificial warmth had long ago brought life to the realm of eternal frost… but all in vain […].16 Against the background of this nightmarish hopelessness, the procedure of reductio ad absurdum—especially in the literal sense of “reducing to absurdity”— is used on many different levels, constantly attracting the reader’s attention to the aberration of the situation by overturning his/her expectations. Hyperbole 14 Ibid., 116, 121. 15 “Наступило время, предсказанное философами XIX века: род человеческий размножился; потерялась соразмерность между произведениями природы и потребностями человечества.” Ibid., 111. 16 “[…] давно уже аравийские песчаные степи обратились в плодоносные пажити; давно уже льды севера покрылись туком земли; неимоверными усилиями химии искусственная теплота живила царство вечного хлада… но всё тщетно […].” Ibid.

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permeates the description of the ridiculous extremes into which mankind falls to obtain more food, as everything the reader knows about human society is deliberately turned on its head. While the wisest of men earnestly look for ways to live without food, everyone else destroys all houses and buildings, including museums, libraries, and hospitals, to make way for land that can be farmed: […] the wisest of men were looking for ways to continue living without food, and no one was laughing at them.17 Soon it appeared to man that buildings were an excessive luxury; he put his house on fire and with manic joy fertilized the soil with the ashes of his home; all was destroyed: artistic masterpieces, products of educated life, spacious book depositories, hospitals—everything that could take up space—and the whole Earth was transformed into a single fertile farmland.18 The topsy-turvy (im)moral values that accompany this destruction of civilization appear even more absurd, as birth leads to mourning, and death is met with jubilation: Everyone saw in his fellow human an enemy who was ready to take away one’s last means of wretched subsistence: a father wept at the news that his son was born; daughters rejoiced at their mother’s deathbed; but more often, a mother stifled her child at birth, and the father applauded her. Suicides were granted the rank of heroes. Charity became equivalent to extremist thinking, sneering at life was now a typical greeting, and love was considered to be a crime.19

17 “[…] мудрейшие искали средства продолжать существование без пищи, и над ними никто не смеялся.” Ibid., 112. 18 “Скоро здания показались человеку излишнею роскошью; он зажигал дом свой и с дикою радостию утучнял землю пеплом своего жилища; погибли чудеса искусства, произведения образованной жизни, обширные книгохранилища, больницы,—всё, что могло занимать какое-либо пространство,—и вся земля обратилась в одну обширную, плодоносную пажить.” Ibid. 19 “Каждый в собрате своем видел врага, готового отнять у него последнее средство для бедственной жизни: отец с рыданием узнавал о рождении сына; дочери прядали при смертном одре матери; но чаще мать удушала дитя свое при его рождении, и отец рукоплескал ей. Самоубийцы внесены были в число героев. Благотворительность сделалась вольнодумством, насмешка над жизнию—обыкновенным приветствием, любовь— преступлением.” Ibid., 113.

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The sheer piling up of such miniature descriptions of everyday events within long enumerative sentences further amplifies the shock of the nightmarish scenario upon the reader, making him/her wonder whether all of this should be viewed as too ridiculous and somehow too bad to be true. However, this feeling of unreality paradoxically goes hand in hand with an empathetic realization of the full extent of the disaster, as the schematic evocation of society in the opening pages above culminates in a dramatic subplot at the end of the first section. In this close-up scene complete with character description and dialogue, we witness a desperate young father who is being chased by a furious mob for the most unlikely reasons: he has just rescued a man from death; even worse, it turns out that he is married; and moreover, he has children. According to the absurd logic of the dystopia, all the people whom the young man rescues or sustains take away food from the rest of society, which makes him a misanthrope and a multiple criminal: “—Children! Children!—it was called from all sides.—He has children!—His unlawful children are eating our bread!”20 The scene ends with a stark image of the pursued man’s family, who have all starved to death by the time the crowd storms into their dugout: They came, they stormed in—on the bare ground there lay two dead children, their mother next to them; her teeth were pressed onto the hand of a newborn baby.—The father broke loose from the crowd and rushed to the corpses, while the mob moved away with laughter, throwing mud and stones at him.21 The violence of this episode, further reinforced by the overturning of moral expectations, inevitably holds the reader’s attention, while the somatic effect of fear and anguish may well persist beyond the reading of the text. The rest of the narrative builds up this initial violence even further. Prophetic individuals advocating mankind’s self-destruction as the only solution to global famine eventually find a strong leader in the “messiah of despair”: we note the deliberate contrast to Christ as the messiah of hope and love, yet another indication of the absurdity that pervades the entire scenario. Under the new leader’s command, the ongoing disintegration of society reaches its apocalyptic climax:

20 “—Дети! дети!—раздалось со всех сторон.—У него есть дети!—Его беззаконные дети съедают хлеб наш!” Ibid., 114. 21 “—Пришли, ворвались,—на голой земле лежали два мертвых ребёнка, возле них мать; ее зубы стиснули руку грудного младенца.—Отец вырвался из толпы, бросился к трупам, и толпа с хохотом удалилась, бросая в него грязь и каменья.” Ibid., 115.

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Finally he arrived, the messiah of despair! Chilly was his gaze, loud was his voice, and his words made the last ruins of ancient beliefs disappear instantly. He swiftly pronounced the last word of mankind’s last thought—and everything came into motion— man called upon all the efforts of ancient craft, all the ancient achievements of evil and revenge, upon everything that had ever been able to cause the death of human beings, and vaults were erected under a thin layer of ground, and skilfully refined saltpeter, sulphur, and coal filled them from one end of the equator to the other one.22 The death of one family is followed by the skilfully planned and executed suicide of all humanity. The final explosion that annihilates Earth is temporarily postponed by yet another dramatic subplot, which shows a young couple still eager to live: Suddenly, from under a block of earth, a young couple appeared that had recently been spared by a furious mob; pale, exhausted, reminiscent of corpse shadows, they still held each other in a tight embrace. “We want to live and love amidst suffering,”— they exclaimed and begged mankind on their knees to call off its moment of revenge […].23 In contrast to their gloomy and inhuman surroundings, the couple are presented in attractive poetic language, typically used in Romantic love poems: “юная чета” (“a young couple”), “они ещё сжимали друг друга в объятиях” (“they still held each other in a tight embrace”). This highlights the fact that these two young people are the only remaining embodiment of sanity and humanity amidst a society that has literally gone mad (not unlike its narrator, the 22 “Наконец, явился он, мессия отчаяния! Хладен был взор его, громок голос, и от слов его мгновенно исчезали последние развалины древних поверий. Быстро вымолвил он последнее слово последней мысли человечества—и всё пришло в движение,—призваны были все усилия древнего искусства, все древние успехи злобы и мщения, всё, что когда-либо могло умерщвлять человека, и своды пресеклись под лёгким слоем земли, и искусством утончённая селитра, сера и уголь наполнили их от конца экватора до другого.” Ibid., 121. 23 “Вдруг из-под глыбы земли явилась юная чета, недавно пощажённая неистовою толпою; бледные, истощённые, как тени мертвецов, они ещё сжимали друг друга в объятиях. ‘Мы хотим жить и любить посреди страданий,’—восклицали они и на коленях умоляли человечество остановить минуту его отмщения […].” Ibid.

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unfortunate economist). So, unless the reader is plagued by suicidal thoughts, he/she is bound to identify with the couple. The emotional intensity and the resulting somatic effect of this identification, echoing our earlier empathy for the young father, are reinforced by the lovers’ direct speech and symbolic kneeling, so rich in connotations of mercy and forgiveness. Ultimately, partly thanks to the couple’s poignant appearance, the triumph of escalating violence and destruction in the text is likely to induce a reverse reaction and even a feeling of protest in most readers. Juxtaposed with the natural human desire to live, the dystopian nightmare is reduced to absurdity and loses its credibility. Indeed, perhaps herein lies the crucial contradiction that Odoevsky’s narrative uncovers within itself, in accordance with the classical procedure of reductio ad absurdum: the “last suicide” contradicts one of the most basic human instincts, that of self-preservation. Fittingly, the frame tale comes back to Malthus shortly after the end of the story, suggesting quite explicitly that his theory is nothing less than “complete nonsense” (“Мальтусова теория есть полная нелепость”).24 Of course, this is merely Faust’s opinion, and the readers are left to judge for themselves as to how to interpret Faust’s conclusion that bears directly on the dystopian scenario above: By the way, if Malthus’s theory is accurate, then the human race will indeed soon have no other option but to put gunpowder under itself and to blow itself up, or else to come up with an alternative, equally effective method for justifying Malthus’s system.25 Despite the tongue-in-cheek ambiguity of this conditional sentence, having witnessed the horror of what it actually means for mankind to “blow itself up” in the dramatic narrative of “The Last Suicide,” the reader will be all too tempted to grant that if apocalypse inevitably follows from accepting Malthus’s theory as accurate, then perhaps rejecting the theory is a better alternative. Overall, in terms of the most likely reader response, the counterfactual thought experiment of “The Last Suicide” emerges as evidence implicitly indicating that the following negative hypothesis may well be true: “Malthus’s theory of

24 Ibid., 125. 25 “А между тем, если теория Мальтуса справедлива, то действительно скоро человеческому роду не останется ничего другого, как подложить под себя пороху и взлететь на воздух, или приискать другое, столь же действительное средство для оправдания Мальтусовой системы.” Ibid., 126.

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population is wrong, especially if projected onto the future of human society.” To come back to the definition of evidence quoted above, this is closest to meaning two: “hint, sign, indication of or a reason to believe (the negation of) a scientific hypothesis.”26 In other words, Odoevsky’s literary thought experiment is likely to increase the reader’s scepticism towards Malthus’s arguments. Specifically, in contrast to Malthus, Odoevsky strongly believes that the mechanisms of population growth, as pinpointed by Malthus, do not necessarily contradict the existence of a homogeneously prosperous society in the distant future. Malthus’s normative claim that a significant proportion of human population must always be miserable is projected onto the future in “The Last Suicide” and is exaggerated to such an extent as to be reduced to absurdity: since everything that is typical of human nature is thereby turned on its head, it follows that Malthus’s original claim runs contrary to human nature (contains contradictions) and therefore must be false.27 At least this is the logic of Odoevsky’s thought experiment. If the reader thinks of Malthus’s assumption as normative, he/she will perhaps be persuaded by Odoevsky; however, those readers who believe that Malthus’s postulation is firmly grounded in empirical reality may remain unconvinced. What matters to the literary critic is not whether Malthus (or Odoevsky) is right or wrong, but how precisely a thought experiment embedded within a work of narrative fiction acts upon the reader’s mind. The frame tale then proceeds to link “The Last Suicide” and “A City without a Name” as Faust explains that the latter similarly traces the practical application of a philosophical system, but by a different logical thinker, who enjoys a solid reputation not unlike that of Malthus.28 Of course, by the next night, when “A City without a Name” is read out, we know that this is Jeremy Bentham, a liberal philosopher and a contemporary of Malthus. Bentham’s philosophy of utilitarianism is grounded in what he calls the principle of utility, or the greatest happiness principle, as defined in his book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789):

26 Reiss, “Empirical Evidence,” 552. 27 As we have seen in chapter 1 above, Malthus argues that if population size is to remain in proportion to the world’s resources, poverty and misery will always exist in human society. This is where Odoevsky the humanist indignantly disagrees, even though he does not provide an alternative scenario. With hindsight, it can be argued that a technologically advanced society may dramatically increase food production while keeping population growth close to zero thanks to smart birth control and education. However, the issue remains notoriously contentious to this day. 28 Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 126.

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Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. […] By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.29 In other words, in contrast to Malthus’s gloomy conviction that a large proportion of mankind must and will always be miserable, Bentham optimistically aims for the greatest happiness of each and every individual, constituted by maximal pleasure and minimal pain; and on the practical level, he asserts that society should be constructed in such a way as to be of the greatest utility to this happiness. Following Faust’s introductory hint above, the narrative of “A City without a Name” is embedded within another complex frame tale: this time, Faust reads out the travel notes of his two friends, the “experimenters,” who record their journey across a mountainous area, perhaps somewhere in Canada, and their ensuing encounter with a strange man wearing a black cloak and spending all his time on top of a steep cliff. The man eventually explains to the travelers that this cliff is the site where his dearest homeland existed in the past: alas, nothing remains from the once blooming civilization except a few stones overgrown with grass.30 He then agrees to tell the travelers the story of this city that has lost everything, even its name. As the text unravels, a perceptive reader will notice that there is a supernatural quality not only about the man’s appearance, but also about the fact that he outlives a civilization that has apparently existed for several centuries (he was there when it was founded, and he is still living long

29 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, with a new introduction by F. Rosen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11–12. 30 Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 129.

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after its destruction): “Several centuries had passed.”31 It is also noteworthy that he is called a “hermit,” a “preacher,” and an “orator” and has been banned from a local village because his “sermon” has been too critical of the existing social order.32 Slobodan Sucur argues very interestingly that these and similar details concur to undermine the narrator’s reliability (which would make him similar to the unreliable deranged economist of “The Last Suicide”): “the spectator figure, who appears more than human, is undermined in his authorial endeavor to give us a history of the Benthamite civilization that he is describing.”33 This may well be the case, but it is also possible to see the narrator’s instability in this text as a kind of prophetic madness favored by the Romantics, even if Odoevsky distances himself from such notions. Perhaps prophetic madness belongs to the past along with the Benthamite civilization, but at least it enables the narrator to give an instructive account of the colony. At any rate, most readers will focus much more on the narrative itself than on the narrator’s status and will be bound to note the remarkable coherence and lucidity of the account. The story thus told by the man in a black cloak starts off as an idyllic utopia inspired entirely by Bentham’s principle of utility, the chief goal of which is universal happiness. The description of the principle is provided in an ardent speech given by Bentham himself: Yes, utility is the major force underlying all human actions! What is useless is harmful, and what is useful is allowed. This is the only firm basis for society! Utility and only utility—let this be your first and last law! Let it be the origin of all your decrees, your occupations, and your mores; let utility replace the shaky foundations of the so-called conscience and the so-called innate feeling, let it replace all poetic gibberish and all the fabrications of philanthropists—and society will achieve solid prosperity.34

31 “Протекло несколько столетий.” Ibid., 148. Indeed, this seems to be an inconsistency in Odoevsky’s text, since the city could only have been founded after Bentham had formulated his theory, so in the 1780s at the earliest, and the colony must have been destroyed by the 1820s, when Faust’s two friends—dead by the 1840s—were conducting their investigation. So in principle, only forty or fifty years must have passed, and the man in a black cloak does not need to be immortal to survive this long. However, for some reason, Odoevsky has greatly extended the time scheme, which does endow his narrator with a supernatural aura. 32 Ibid., 151–152. 33 Sucur, Poe, Odoyevsky, and Purloined Letters, 112. 34 “Да, польза есть существенный двигатель всех действий человека! Что бесполезно—то вредно, что полезно—то позволено. Вот единственное твёрдое основание общества! Польза и одна польза—да будет вашим и первым и последним законом! Пусть из неё

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On the surface, the well-meant striving towards everything that is useful and towards a “solid prosperity” of society seems admirable enough, especially considering that Bentham’s ideas are repeatedly called “brilliant” later in the text (“brilliant conclusions” [“блистательные выводы”], “to realize a brilliant system” [“осуществить блистательную систему”]).35 However, a careful reader will notice that the entire speech above is permeated by stinging irony, Odoevsky’s rather than Bentham’s: there is a suspiciously single-minded fixation on “utility,” conveyed by a multiple repetition of the word (“Польза и одна польза”); conscience is carelessly qualified with the metaphor of “shaky foundations” (“шаткие основания”); even worse, poetry and charitable work are pejoratively referred to as “gibberish” and “fabrications” respectively (“бредни” and “вымыслы”). This subtle ironic layer, together with our knowledge that the narrator’s city will be destroyed, are the only things that keep us vaguely uneasy as we read the first section of the story. Indeed, the opening pages of the narrator’s account try to trick the reader into believing that Bentham’s theory is a splendid one, as well as phenomenally successful in its practical application. The colony based on the utility principle is founded by Bentham’s best friend in a far corner of the world and is initially highly prosperous. This impression is reinforced by the refrain “Колония процветала” (“The colony flourished”), which typically punctuates every two or three paragraphs and sometimes even recurs within a single paragraph.36 Similarly, the Benthamite settlement is repeatedly referred to as “счастливый остров” (“a blissful island”).37 The same connotations of bliss are inherent in euphoric descriptions of the colony’s inhabitants as a social and intellectual elite, also highly skilled practically: The people who lived in this colony were all more or less welleducated individuals, gifted with an inclination towards the sciences and the arts, and distinguished by their exquisite taste and their fondness for refined pleasures. Soon the land had been farmed; huge buildings had risen from it, as if on their own; in them, every possible whim and every conceivable comfort needed for life were combined; machines, factories, libraries, all происходить будут все ваши постановления, ваши занятия, ваши нравы; пусть польза заменит шаткие основания так называемой совести, так называемого врождённого чувства, все поэтические бредни, все вымыслы филантропов—и общество достигнет прочного благоденствия.” Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 132. 35 Ibid., 132–133. 36 Ibid., 133, 134, 135, 137. 37 Ibid., 133, 134.

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appeared with an incredible speed. Bentham’s best friend, elected to be the ruler of it all, moved everything with his strong will and his bright mind.38 The epithets, nouns, and adverbial phrases that I have highlighted in italics above all strike us with associations of intelligence, refinement, and speedy efficiency. Furthermore, the reader’s sympathy and empathy are enlisted by using the first-person perspective (“we”) throughout the narrative: it is as if the narrator addresses us directly, on behalf of his fellow settlers. However, the utopian idyll only remains intact for the first five or six pages of the narrative, up to the point where another colony is established in the neighborhood of the Benthamite island. This is where the gradual transition from utopia to dystopia begins, which contains two stages: first, the prosperity of the Benthamite civilization at the expense of its neighbors’ misery; and second, the disastrous decline and destruction of the settlement. It is also during these two stages that the procedure of reductio ad absurdum is increasingly put into place, with Bentham’s principle of utility as its direct target. Indeed, a transition between two successive stages is never abrupt, but always gradual, which insidiously frustrates the reader’s expectations and makes the ultimate failure of the initially “blissful island” particularly poignant. Thus, the refrain “Колония процветала” (“The colony flourished”) still recurs and the same euphoric tone is preserved as the Benthamites begin to exploit their unfortunate neighbors and to initiate bankruptcy and invasive wars. At this stage, the utility principle is shown to be destructive to the neighbors, but not yet to the original colony itself, which, on the contrary, seems to reach the height of its power: so much so that the narrator even divulges the name of his country, Benthamia (Бентамия),39 which he has initially refused to share with the travelers, claiming that his homeland no longer has a name. The inhabitants of Benthamia still happily delude themselves into thinking that their social system is perfect in every respect. This moral blindness is highlighted via the narrator’s rueful irony. This irony is likely to be detected by the reader, who has no reason to favor the Benthamites’

38 “Все, составлявшие эту колонию, были люди более или менее образованные, одарённые любовию к наукам и искусствам, отличавшиеся изысканностию вкуса, привычкою к изящным наслаждениям. Скоро земля была возделана; огромные здания, как бы сами собою, поднялись из неё; в них соединились все прихоти, все удобства жизни; машины, фабрики, библиотеки, всё явилось с невыразимою быстротою. Избранный в правители лучший друг Бентама всё двигал своею сильною волею и своим светлым умом.” Ibid., 133, emphasis added. 39 Ibid., 138.

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interests over those of their neighbors, but it completely escapes those who have initiated the oppressive policies and intrigues in their foolish pursuit of mindless profit: “our neighbors had gone quite bankrupt, thanks to our wise and steadfast political strategy.”40 The transition to the final stage—the ultimate downfall of the colony—begins when internal disagreement and conflicts increasingly affect the “blissful island” itself. Still, even at this point, some layers of the population prosper, while others suffer and perish. However, very quickly, misery and decline begin to overwhelm all the inhabitants of the colony, precisely because of the fatal selfishness that comes to be associated with the utility principle, as all think only of their own profits and refuse to cooperate with others. Odoevsky shows how quickly Bentham’s utopian notion of utility as the principle promoting universal happiness is distorted to refer to the happiness of a specific group (the Benthamite colony), and then—even worse—becomes equivalent to the selfish interests of a specific individual. Despite Bentham’s best intentions, his utopian project therefore goes bad due to human error: And yet no one was prepared to sacrifice a part of his profits for the benefit of all, when the latter did not bring him any direct gain; and canals got obstructed; road construction remained unfinished due to a lack of communal assistance; factories and plants fell into decline; libraries were sold; theatres were closed. Necessity grew and affected everyone equally, the rich and the poor.41 In the above passage, reductio ad absurdum takes the form of a long enumerative sentence that piles up detrimental events symptomatic of economic and cultural decline (see my emphasis); the staccato syntactic structure “subject + verb” shared by all of these incidents focuses the reader’s attention on a sense of doom. This technique of incremental enumeration, increasingly used during the final stage of “A City without a Name,” is similar to the long lists that help to convey the dystopian scenario of “The Last Suicide,” but there is a crucial difference: in the latter, the conditions of human life that are ridiculed are largely the result of natural laws (at least as Malthusian theory would imply them); in the former, 40 “[…] соседи вполне разорились благодаря нашей мудрой, основательной политике” (emphasis added). Ibid., 137, emphasis added. 41 “Между тем никто не хотел пожертвовать частию своих выгод для общих, когда эти последние не доставляли ему непосредственной пользы; и каналы засорялись; дороги не оканчивались по недостатку общего содействия; фабрики, заводы упадали; библиотеки были распроданы; театры закрылись. Нужда увеличивалась и поражала равно всех, богатых и бедных.” Ibid., 141, emphasis added.

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the ideas driving the people, originating in Bentham’s theory, are shown to be both absurd and destructive. Ultimately, successive layers of civilization gradually disappear from the colony: the sciences, the arts, then commerce, the skilled crafts, and finally even agriculture are all banished step by step.42 The structure of repeated banishment dramatically demonstrates the transition from total welfare to total disaster and the extent of the destruction brought about by the utility principle. As the last vestiges of human dignity vanish, the once flourishing society is literally reduced to absurdity: first, a rough and murderous mob, and finally, a savage tribe that worships Bentham’s statue as if it were a pagan idol, complete with human sacrifices.43 In this process of decline, a number of dramatic subplots and miniature sketches involve the reader emotionally in the tragedy, potentially creating a somatic effect. Shortly after the banishment of art and science, an impassioned man wearing mourning garments appears in a square of one of the colony’s cities. His speech is quoted in full, and his appearance and dramatic gestures of despair are evoked in detail (he strews his head with ashes and finally falls down to the ground): At that time in a square of one of the cities of our state there appeared a pale man with loose hair, wearing funeral garments. “Woe,” he exclaimed, strewing his head with ashes, “woe to you, country of dishonor […]! […] Yet I hear the voice of your callous heart; my words strike your ears in vain: you will not repent—I curse you!” With these words the speaker fell down onto the ground.44 He calls himself the country’s last prophet and in his anguished speech predicts the downfall and complete dissolution of his land, partly as a result of the people’s foolishness, partly through natural disasters, such as a thunderstorm, which he presents as akin to divine punishment. He is then taken to an asylum by the police; although his prophecy begins to come true literally a few days later, as an appalling thunderstorm causes serious damage to many cities, the population 42 Ibid., 144–149. 43 Ibid., 150–151. 44 “В это время на площади одного из городов нашего государства явился человек, бледный, с распущенными волосами, в погребальной одежде. ‘Горе,—восклицал он, посыпая прахом главу свою,—горе тебе, страна нечестия […]! […] Но я слышу голос твоего огрубелого сердца; слова мои тщетно ударяют в слух твой: ты не покаешься—проклинаю тебя!’ С сими словами говоривший упал ниц на землю.” Ibid., 146–147.

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takes no notice whatsoever of his warnings. Because the prophet is the only individual to be depicted in such a direct and emotional manner in the story, the reader is likely to identify with him and to judge the absurdity of the rest of society in proportion to the truth and sincerity of his words. Indeed, his role as the voice of reason and the embodiment of genuine humanity is similar to the role of the young father and the couple in “The Last Suicide,” who also appear in dramatic subplots, as we recall. Sucur convincingly suggests that the prophet may well be the quasi-supernatural narrator himself, whom he resembles in several respects.45 In this case, it is even more self-evident that he should be ignored, locked up, and/or banished by the dystopian majority, who perceive reason as madness, and madness as reason. Finally, there are numerous illustrative sentences throughout the story, which can be seen as miniature sketches hinting at the various types of suffering that affect the settlers. Interestingly, most of these appear as fleeting Malthusian references to overpopulation and to various disasters acting as “positive checks” on demographic growth (hurricanes, epidemics, famines, and armed conflicts): Quite on the contrary, the inhabitants of interior cities, cramped in a limited space, were eager to expand the boundaries of the state and found it quite useful to start a quarrel with their neighbors—if only for the purpose of getting rid of their surplus population.46 The increased population demanded a new development of industry; whereas the industry dragged along an old, beaten track and did not correspond to the growing needs….47 Suddenly man was confronted with devastating natural phenomena: storms, poisonous winds, pestilence, famine…48

45 Sucur, Poe, Odoyevsky, and Purloined Letters, 113. 46 “Напротив, жители внутренних городов, стеснённые в малом пространстве, жаждали расширения пределов государства и находили весьма полезным затеять ссору с соседями,—хоть для того, чтоб избавиться от излишка своего народонаселения.” Odoevskii, Russkie nochi, 139. 47 “Умножившееся народонаселение требовало новых сил промышленности; а промышленность тянулась по старинной, избитой колее и не отвечала возрастающим нуждам.” Ibid., 145. 48 “Предстали пред человека нежданные, разрушительные явления природы: бури, тлетворные ветры, мор, голод…” Ibid.

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The stormy river of famine, with all its horrors, flooded our country. Brother killed his brother with the remains of the plough and wrested meager food from his bloodstained hands.49 Such Malthusian echoes, with their inherent emphasis on relentless natural laws, instil the reader with the belief that the utility principle will inevitably lead to the downfall of Benthamia, and that it will be detrimental to any society that singlemindedly adopts it. This is conveyed particularly effectively in the final quotation above, in which famine is metaphorically depicted as a stormy river flooding the entire country. The impact of this startling image is further reinforced by the violent scene of fratricide that follows: unfolding in a manner that has a practically cinematic visual quality to it (note the imperfective aspect of the verbs in the original, expressing continuous and/or repeated action), it brings us close to experiencing the horror of the situation directly. The apocalyptic ending dramatically confirms this total disintegration of civilization and humanity on the island: after the last of the savage tribe members die from natural disasters, even the name of the colony is obliterated from history, and all that remains is a lifeless stone in front of which the narrator spends his days in perpetual mourning.50 In the frame tale conversation that follows “A City without a Name,” Faust’s stance against Bentham’s philosophy of utilitarianism dominates the discussion, despite Vyacheslav’s and Viktor’s lukewarm protestations. Finally, everyone agrees that utility and material welfare alone, even in the broad sense accepted by Bentham, are by far insufficient for human happiness: They are in control of land and sea, of gold and ships from all over the world; it would seem that they can give man anything that his heart desires—and yet man is still dissatisfied, his existence is incomplete, his needs are not met, and he is looking for something that cannot be recorded in an accounts book.51 Ultimately, the argumentation underlying “A City without a Name” is so powerful and streamlined that Odoevsky’s counterfactual thought experiment in this 49 “Голод, со всеми его ужасами, бурной рекою разлился по стране нашей. Брат убивал брата остатком плуга и из окровавленных рук вырывал скудную пищу.” Ibid., 150. 50 Ibid., 151. 51 “В их руках и земля, и море, и золото, и корабли со всех сторон света; кажется, они всё могут доставить человеку,—а человек недоволен, существование его неполно, потребности его не удовлетворены, и он ищет чего-то, что не вносится в бухгалтерскую книгу.” Ibid., 154–155.

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text can be considered as evidence that gives good reason to believe the following negative hypothesis: “Bentham’s theory of utility is destructive when applied to social systems.” In other words, “A City without a Name” is likely to convince most readers that the principle of utility is no good as the chief idea informing governmental decisions: partly because the principle itself is too one-sided, and partly because its one-sidedness makes Bentham’s good intentions disastrously prone to misinterpretation and abuse by corrupt individuals. I would therefore suggest that within the definition of evidence that we have adopted, the epistemic status of the story is very close to meaning three: “good or cogent reason to believe (the negation of) a hypothesis.”52 In terms of a typology of literary thought experiments, this places “A City without a Name” between a counterfactual thought experiment and a fictional model, that is, a simplified conceptual construct that reflects reality as closely as possible, while occurring in literary fiction (and hence fictional). Overall, in both short stories, Malthusian thought experiments act as powerful rhetorical devices, which undermine and/or disprove particular philosophical theories. The epistemic value of these two texts therefore at least partly lies in their role as argumentative evidence that can support or discredit a hypothesis or a point of view. Within the narrative structure of such literary experiments, the scale between utopia as a most desirable goal of human social development and dystopia as the worst-case scenario serves the rhetorical function of demonstrating positive and negative effects of certain ideas to the reader. Unexpected images, figurative language, contrasts, hyperboles, and irony, to name but a few, are among the linguistic features that attract the reader’s attention by frustrating his/her expectations; such features ultimately contribute to the overall impact of the narrative argumentation and elicit a specific reader response. To discredit a theory, Odoevsky typically uses the technique of reductio ad absurdum in narrative form, which often results in an accumulation of dystopian and/or ridiculous elements and the unmasking of contradictions. Admittedly, the limitations of the persuasive effect of literary thought experiments are conditioned by the individual disposition of each reader. However, it is likely that most readers will be tempted to move closer towards the philosophical position promoted in each story, since in both texts, the logic of reasoning is reinforced by the somatic effect of literature, or rather expressed directly via somatic narrative techniques that trigger empathy and compassion. Independently from the overall strength of the persuasive effect, a literary

52 Reiss, “Empirical Evidence,” 552.

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thought experiment can provide an argumentation that expands the reader’s understanding of particular intellectual contexts. For example, on reading “The Last Suicide,” we may begin to question the validity of normative theories as a basis for future forecasts. Perhaps even more compellingly, “A City without a Name” may alert us to the danger inherent in utopian projects, which tend to be misread and corrupted when their practical realization is attempted: a startlingly prophetic insight. Indeed, in such criticism directed at entire classes of conceptual constructs lies an additional epistemic value of literary thought experiments. These are features that will be taken up again by other Russian writers who respond to Malthus, as we shall see in subsequent chapters.

CHAPTER 3

Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevsky: Utopian Dreams in What Is to Be Done? (1863)

Moving on from Odoevsky’s post-Romantic writing to the Realism of the second half of the nineteenth century in Russia, this chapter will compare and contrast Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and the utopian vision of the future in Chernyshevsky’s famous novel What Is to Be Done? (1863, Что делать?). Chernyshevsky’s future forecast appears in Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream (chapter 4.16). Going a step further than Odoevsky’s critique, some of the dream’s key passages constitute a constructive response to Malthusian theories, in particular to the dystopian counterfactual thought experiments that are characteristic of Malthus’s Essay, as we have seen. In addition to arguing that there will always be a shortage of food and other natural resources, Malthus’s vision of the future is based on the assumption that a constant struggle for existence between individuals is inevitable within human society. With reference to closely related theories by Darwin and Kropotkin, I will attempt to show that for Chernyshevsky, in contrast, one of the most fundamental principles underlying interpersonal relations is mutual help, which leads to cooperation and teamwork for the sake of the common good. While numerous studies have been devoted to Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, the novelty of my approach lies in analyzing this chapter as a thought experiment that plays out the Malthusian scenario of population growth and results in a completely different outcome. Such an analysis sheds light on Malthus’s pessimistic anthropology, on Chernyshevsky’s model of the future, and on the wider epistemic value of thought experiments.

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Malthus repeatedly emphasizes that “self-love [is] the main-spring of the great machine” of human society,1 and that mankind is constantly engaged in a struggle for existence. Human beings are governed by the same laws as plants and animals and are forced to fight and compete against each other, instead of cooperating: The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. […]2 Want pinched the less fortunate members of the society: and, at length, the impossibility of supporting such a number together became too evident to be resisted. Young scions were then pushed out from the parent-stock and instructed to explore fresh regions and to gain happier seats for themselves by their swords. […] The peaceful inhabitants of the countries on which they rushed could not long withstand the energy of men acting under such powerful motives of exertion. And when they fell in with any tribes like their own, the contest was a struggle for existence […]. The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food was more than supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled, from the constant habit of emigration.3 Indeed, Malthus’s vision of this struggle has famously inspired Charles Darwin to come up with his theory of evolution, as the latter relates in his autobiography:

1 2 3

Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798], ed. Geoffrey Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 86. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 25–26.

Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevsky

In October 1838 […] I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on […] it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.4 Yet Darwin’s enthusiasm was hardly shared in Russia. Even before the first Russian translation of Malthus’s Essay was published in 1868, his ideas met with a range of negative reactions in Russia’s intellectual circles, from indifference and scepticism to indignant disagreement. This was quite different from the many positive responses that marked much of the Malthus reception in Great Britain and Western Europe in the course of the nineteenth century, despite a reasonable number of Malthus critics in Western scholarship at the same time. Indeed, such a divergence is not surprising, as the socio-historical conditions in post1800 Russia were also very different from Britain contemporary to Malthus. In Russia, industrialization and the rise of the market economy were both in an embryonic state, in contrast to England, and so the accompanying problem of mass unemployment among the working classes—which so preoccupied Malthus—did not exist. Moreover, unlike the cramped urban spaces of London and Manchester, Russia had a vast, primarily rural, territory with an immense potential for food production. Finally, Russia’s population was falling or only growing very slowly for most of the nineteenth century, as it had been doing before 1800: so much so that many prominent Russian thinkers and economists, from Mikhail Lomonosov onwards, persistently recommended encouraging population growth in their country.5 Malthus’s vision of a struggle for existence between individuals also contradicted a fundamental way of thinking that was particularly symptomatic of Russian culture in the nineteenth century and that had been evolving for centuries as a response to harsh natural and historical conditions: specifically, the emphasis on mutual help and cooperation, reinforced by the idea of the common good and embodied in the pre-1917 social structure of the obshchina (община), a peasant community functioning as a commune.

4 5

Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1802–1882 (London: Collins, 1958), 120. For more detail, see G. M. Korostelev, et al., eds., Kritika mal′tuzianskikh i neomal′tuzianskikh vzgliadov: Rossiia XIX–nachala XX v. (Moscow: Statistika, 1978), 11–13, on which my summary above is based.

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As Alexander Herzen wrote in his essay “La Russie” (1849): “The Russian rural commune is the perfect antithesis of the famous theory formulated by Malthus: it allows everyone without exception to take a seat at its table.”6 Indeed, the idea of mutual aid constitutes a long-standing tradition in Russian science and thought, as elaborated in particular by Karl Kessler, Petr Kropotkin, and others in the course of the nineteenth century.7 Kropotkin’s book entitled Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (first published in Russian in 1902 and in English in 1904) develops ideas that have always been deeply ingrained in Russian intellectual circles before him.8 The book even goes as far as to argue that within Darwin’s theory of evolution, the struggle for existence between living organisms—including humans—should be replaced by mutual aid, especially in the face of natural adversity.9 Both Darwin and Kropotkin believed in the evolution of species, but they viewed this idea from different standpoints, as summed up by Daniel Todes in his excellent book: Darwin stepped off the Beagle into a peculiarly British scientific and cultural milieu, one in which both he and Wallace would find Malthus’s Essay on Population a reputable and inspiring source of ideas. Kropotkin, too, would eventually find himself in England—but as a visitor from a non-Malthusian culture.10 In fact, in his book, Kropotkin praises Chernyshevsky’s “remarkable essay upon Darwinism,”11 referring to “The Origin of the Theory of the Beneficence of the Struggle for Life” (1888),12 which suggests that “conditions harsh enough to

6

“La commune rurale russe […] est l’antithèse parfaite de la célèbre proposition de Malthus: elle laisse chacun sans exception prendre place à sa table.” Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen, “La Russie,” in his Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6 (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1955), 163. 7 The idea of mutual aid was current both among politically moderate scientists and among liberal/radical intellectuals in Russia contemporary to Kropotkin. See Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 130. 8 The book was preceded by Kropotkin’s articles in the British journal The Nineteenth Century: on mutual aid among animals (1890), early peoples (1891), medieval city dwellers (1892), and contemporary societies (1894). Ibid., 132. 9 This is still a struggle for life, but one in which living organisms cooperate to fight nature together. 10 Ibid., 130. 11 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution [Russian, 1902; English, 1904] (New York: Cosimo, 2009), 73–74. 12 “Происхождение теории благотворности борьбы за жизнь.”

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stimulate intraspecific competition left survivors so weakened that any evolutionary progress was impossible.”13 Chernyshevsky formulated the ideas of his essay at least fifteen years earlier, primarily in letters he wrote to his family while living in exile in Siberia. These letters show that Chernyshevsky was largely unimpressed by those aspects of Darwin’s theory that had been inspired by Malthus: “Poor Darwin reads Malthus, or some Malthusian pamphlet, and animated by the brilliant idea of the ‘beneficial results’ of hunger and illness, discovers his America: ‘organisms are improved by the struggle for life.’”14 While Chernyshevsky considered Darwin’s Malthusianism to be a “rather innocent folly” when applied to plants and animals, he was convinced that “when this foolishness is transferred to human history, it becomes bestial, inhuman.”15 The differing cultural and intellectual conditions in Russia naturally required an approach that would be dramatically different from the needs of England around 1800, and the initial negative reception of the Essay on the Principle of Population paved the way for an entire tradition of Malthus critique in Russia, which would continue throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. If Odoevsky is an early precursor of this tradition, then Chernyshevsky is one of its major exponents. Indeed, Chernyshevsky’s critique of Malthus is detailed and systematic. In his 1861 book of extended comments on Principles of Political Economy by John Stuart Mill (1848),16 Chernyshevsky devotes an entire section (six chapters) to a rigorous analysis and critical evaluation of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population.17 Chapter 1 of this section quotes chapter X of Malthus’s text at length18 and suggests that the underlying purpose of the Essay of 1798 is to defend the existing social order and its institutions, such as private property, in particular against the radical ideas of the French Revolution and its socialist supporters.19

13 Todes, Darwin without Malthus, 135. 14 Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii, Chernyshevskii v Sibiri: Perepiska s rodnymi (St.  Petersburg: Ogni, 1912–1913), vol. 1, 69. For English translation see Todes, Darwin without Malthus, 37. 15 Chernyshevskii, Chernyshevskii v Sibiri, vol. 3, 18. For English translation see Todes, Darwin without Malthus, 37. 16 This book of comments is simply entitled Основания политической экономии (Principles of Political Economy) in the Russian original. 17 These six chapters are found in Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1949), vol. 9, 251–334, and will be referred to as “Chernyshevsky’s Malthus commentary of 1861” later in this book. 18 Ibid., 258–260. 19 Ibid., 252.

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Many of Chernyshevsky’s objections to Malthus are constructive. For example, the Russian novelist disagrees with the idea that food production can only grow in an arithmetical ratio: “This is a naïve notion, which prompts a smile from anyone who has read contemporary books in agronomy.”20 In his draft notes to the same book of extended comments on Principles of Political Economy, Chernyshevsky uses contemporary scholarly works on agriculture and agronomy to argue that the progress of technology, together with innovations in the distribution of labor and the implementation of machines in farming, can and will bring food production to unprecedented heights.21 Much of Chernyshevsky’s analysis in the six chapters on the Essay on the Principle of Population is taken up by meticulous calculations and statistics, which show that Malthus’s geometrical ratio of population growth and arithmetical ratio of food production growth are both thoroughly inaccurate. In chapter 4, Chernyshevsky infers from his calculations that mankind’s future prospects are quite bright, anticipating the vision in Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream: […] let your great-grandchildren worry about their own fate. You can see that not only your generation, but also your children and grandchildren can avoid living in poverty. […] in 200 years people will laugh […] at your fears about the future, as about fears that stem solely from your lack of civilization.22 Chernyshevsky concludes that a deficit in food production is inevitable, but not due to overpopulation, as Malthus suggested, but for two completely different reasons: first, insufficient financial investment into technical improvements in agriculture, and second, an insufficient number of people working as farmers in the country. Therefore, solving the problem of population is primarily a question of an optimal organization and distribution of labor: […] humans should think not about trying to change their body, as Malthus advises, but about whether human relationships can be organized in such a way as to correspond to the 20 “Это—наивность, вызывающая улыбку у людей, читавших нынешние агрономические книги.” Ibid., 265. 21 Ibid., 742. 22 “[…] заботу о судьбе праправнуков оставьте праправнукам. Вы можете видеть, что не только вы можете, что и ваши дети и внуки могут уже обеспечить себя от нищеты. […] через 200 лет люди будут смеяться […] над вашими опасениями за будущее, как опасениями, проистекавшими только из вашей дикости.” Ibid., 307.

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needs of human nature. This is the ultimate wisdom given to us by the theory of production, before we turn to the theory of distribution.23 Indeed, Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream in the novel What Is to Be Done? portrays an alternative to Malthus’s model of social evolution and population growth. The hypothesis that provides the starting point for Chernyshevsky’s thought experiment seems to be as follows: “In the future, an egalitarian society with restrained population growth will bring happiness and prosperity to all mankind.” Indeed, this initial assumption of social equality is exactly the same as in chapter X of Malthus’s Essay, as based on Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. However, in the fourth dream, this assumption leads to a completely different outcome: Chernyshevsky uses Malthus’s own weapon of a narrative thought experiment against him. Despite the shared form of a narrative based on unreal assumptions, there is a major structural difference between the English and the Russian texts: while Malthus employs the deconstructive power of reductio ad absurdum, Chernyshevsky harnesses the mimetic potential of a sophisticated “dream within a dream” structure to suspend the reader’s disbelief and to create a convincing image of future life. Vera Pavlovna, the heroine of the novel, is remarkably ahead of her time (the 1850s–1860s): a young intellectual and liberal from Saint Petersburg, she is both happily married to a talented doctor and professionally active herself, not only in small business, but also in the medical profession. Although nearly everything Vera does is therefore virtually unthinkable for most women of her time, Chernyshevsky’s thoroughly realistic representation throughout the novel convincingly shows that her life of personal fulfillment is quite feasible and not too difficult to achieve in society contemporary to him. One of the few exceptions to this down-to-earth realistic style occurs in chapter 4.16, when Vera sees a dream in which she meets a fabulous figure, whom she calls the “radiant queen” (“светлая царица”).24 Indeed, the “radiant queen” looks exactly like Vera Pavlovna herself, but is endowed with some kind of divine aura: “Yes, Vera Pavlovna could see it now: this was her, this was her very own self, but in the

23 “[…] думать людям следует не о переделке своего организма, по совету Мальтуса, а разве о том, не могут ли быть отношения между людьми устроены так, чтобы соответствовать потребностям человеческой натуры. Вот вывод, которым напутствует нас теория производства, когда мы обращаемся к изучению теории распределения.” Ibid., 334. 24 Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii, Chto delat′? Iz rasskazov o novykh liudiakh [1863] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 289.

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guise of a goddess.”25 Perhaps this mysterious lady is the goddess of love, but more probably, this is Vera Pavlovna’s inner self, a personification of her inner intuition that is about to uncover essential truths to her. Together, Vera Pavlovna and her alter ego undertake a symbolic journey across the ages. In the process, the language of the novel preserves the reader’s impression of objective, tangible reality, but many of the events evoked are quite fantastic, including time and air travel: in terms of genre, the text is somewhere between Odoevsky’s fabulous tales and the science fiction of Bogdanov or Aleksei Tolstoy. This journey is structured as an allegorical sequence in which the “radiant queen” shows to Vera Pavlovna the evolution of human relationships—in particular those between man and woman—throughout the history of mankind.26 There are three initial stages in this evolution: the realm of Astarte (physical love); the kingdom of Aphrodite (physical love and appreciation of beauty); and the age of the Maiden, or Madonna (platonic love). Each of these three realms finds its culmination in the final stage, which is dominated by the “radiant queen” and in which men and women are at last equal and can build relationships based on passion, beauty, and mutual respect. It is the advent of this final stage in Russia that is shown to Vera Pavlovna in detail and that represents Chernyshevsky’s utopian vision of the “radiant future.”27 Because the reader has already suspended his/her disbelief to admit time travel with the goddess, the mimetic realism of this last stage suddenly appears as a credible return to everyday life, rather than as a fantastic utopia. At the same time, the four stages are all alternative scenarios of human social development and can be considered to exemplify the principle of variation within a thought experiment, as defined by Mach. Vera Pavlovna successively witnesses the first three stages and wonders whether each of them could hold the key to the future. However, all three are dismissed as incapable of providing an accurate model of human development, and only the fourth stage, where mutual respect is finally achieved, enables mankind to realize its full potential.

25 “Да, Вера Павловна видела: это она сама, это она сама, но богиня.” Ibid., 281. For an illuminating commentary on Christian symbolism in this passage, see Irina Paperno, Semiotika povedeniia: Nikolai Chernyshevskii—chelovek epokhi realizma (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1996), 180–181. 26 On this allegorical sequence, see also G. E. Tamarchenko, Chernyshevskii—romanist (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976), 238–239. 27 See Chernyshevskii, Chto delat′ (Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, chapter 4.16), 290: “the future is radiant and wonderful” [“будущее светло и прекрасно”].

Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevsky

The new concept of love between the sexes goes hand in hand with “new people,”28 who combine robust physical health with emotional and intellectual refinement and who are able both to work hard and to enjoy genuine personal freedom and happiness. Still in accordance with the principle of variation, Chernyshevsky shows the life of the “new people” of the future in a range of alternative conditions, so as to make the point that whatever the initial setting of the experiment, the outcome will still be the same: Vera Pavlovna witnesses their activities in the summer and in autumn, at daytime and at night, in the North and in the South, at work and at play. A life of plenty and fulfillment is evident in all of these situations and is evoked with meticulous attention to detail: buildings are described from the outside and from the inside, complete with furniture and crockery. Special technical innovations, such as the glass and metal architecture reminiscent of the Crystal Palace of 1851, or the use of aluminium, are discussed with particular care and insight, for example: Everywhere aluminium and aluminium, and all the spaces between windows are covered with huge mirrors. And what lovely carpets on the floors! Here in this hall half of the floor is not covered, and you can see that it is made of aluminium.29 The overall effect on the reader is a mimetic illusion of reality, which contributes to the powerful credibility of the utopian vision, even if it may well be too good to be true. In terms of Riffaterre’s reader response method, Chernyshevsky’s focus shifts to a carefully cultivated sense of predictability in this context, which lulls the reader into a (false) sense of security, as it were. As a result, even the most innovative elements of the utopian society appear as something quite natural and routine, so as to persuade us that this course of social development is inevitable. In the vision witnessed by Vera Pavlovna, Chernyshevsky shows a predominantly agricultural society, which has achieved homogeneous prosperity and harmony with nature thanks to technological advances and an efficient management of resources: this is precisely the optimal distribution of labor referred to in Chernyshevsky’s Malthus commentary above. In the dream, land is being

28 The “new people” are referred to in the full title of the novel: What Is to Be Done? Tales of New People [“Что делать? Из рассказов о новых людях”]. 29 “Везде алюминий и алюминий, и все промежутки окон одеты огромными зеркалами. И какие ковры на полу! Вот в этом зале половина пола открыта, тут и видно, что он из алюминия.” Chernyshevskii, Chto delat′, 284.

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farmed with extraordinary yields and a relatively low effort, as most of the work is done by machines: How quickly their work is going! Well, it is not surprising that they are working quickly, and that they are singing, too! Machines are doing almost everything for them—they reap, and they bind the sheaves, and take them away,—people mostly just need to walk, drive, and manage the machines.30 Vast expanses of desert have been rendered fertile, also thanks to science and technology. Most people live and work in the country and only go to the few cities for entertainment. Everyone can afford to lead a life of luxury and personal fulfillment. There are many happy families with children, but population growth seems to be slow enough in order not to interfere with the general prosperity. Indeed, the following description of population patterns corresponds exactly to Chernyshevsky’s assessment of a society with a reasonably restrained population growth, as found in his Malthus commentary of 1861: Across these fields, groups of people are scattered; everywhere, there are men and women, the elderly, young people, and children together. But more young people; there are few elderly men, even fewer elderly women, and there are more children than elderly people, but still not too many.31 In an account that is very similar to the above quotation, Chernyshevsky’s Malthus commentary of 1861 suggests that relatively low numbers of children and elderly people reflect slow or even zero demographic growth: If only Malthus and his followers were capable of calculating geometric ratios themselves, instead of taking mathematics books and copying numbers whose origin and meaning they do

30 “Как быстро идёт у них работа! Но ещё бы не идти ей быстро, и ещё бы не петь им! Почти всё делают за них машины,—и жнут, и вяжут снопы, и отвозят их,—люди почти только ходят, ездят, управляют машинами.” Ibid., 285. 31 “По этим нивам рассеяны группы людей; везде мужчины и женщины, старики, молодые и дети вместе. Но больше молодых; стариков мало, старух ещё меньше, детей больше, чем стариков, но всё-таки не очень много.” Chernyhevskii, Chto delat′, 284, my emphasis. The Malthus commentary is contained in Chernyshevsky’s book of extended comments on Principles of Political Economy by John Stuart Mill, as referred to earlier in this chapter.

Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevsky

not understand, then they would not speak of periods of population doubling that equal to ten, or twelve, or even fifteen years. Such periods are as nonsensical as the supposition that an oak forest can be grown in one year. […] If a vast majority of newborn babies die in infancy as a result of poverty that prevents the population from growing, then the number of children and elderly people will constitute a smaller proportion of the population, while the proportion of people aged between fifteen and forty-five years will be relatively very high […].32 Chernyshevsky thus argues in his Malthus commentary that while birth rates may be high in a society marked by poverty, this is counterbalanced by a high infant mortality, and population growth is therefore close to zero. In such a society, there is a low proportion of children and elderly people and a high proportion of adults between fifteen and forty-five. Chernyshevsky then goes on to say that in a wealthy society, where population is increasing, birth rates are even lower, as there is a higher proportion of children and elderly people and a lower proportion of women of child-bearing age. We can see that the description of population patterns in Vera Pavlovna’s dream is somewhere between these two scenarios: “there are more children than elderly people, but still not too many”. This is ultimately closer to a non-growing society, as there are few children and elderly people; however, because there is presumably no infant mortality, there must be restrained population growth. Whatever the objective value of Chernyshevsky’s population theory, what matters here is that he reuses his slow growth model in the novel, in a direct response to Malthus. In the agricultural society of Vera Pavlovna’s dream, everyday life is typically organized according to the principles of a commune, with a large house and a single dining hall for all; however, those who prefer to spend time alone can do so if they wish. While the adult population is working hard in the fields, the elderly and the children prepare food for everyone; thanks to mutual support

32 “Если бы Мальтус и его последователи умели сами производить расчёты геометрических прогрессий, а не выписывали бы из математических книг цифры, происхождения и смысл которых не понимают сами, они не стали бы говорить о периодах удвоения ни в 10, ни в 12, ни даже в 15 лет. Эти периоды такая же нелепость, как предположение вырастить дубовый лес в один год. […] Если огромное большинство рождающихся младенцев в самом младенчестве [погибает от нужды], не дающей размножаться населению, то число детей и старых людей в составе населения образует меньшую пропорцию, а пропорция людей от 15 до 45 лет будет сравнительно очень велика […].” Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9, 295.

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and an optimal distribution of duties, children love domestic chores and adults age very slowly: More than half of the children have stayed at home to work in the household: they do nearly all domestic chores, and they really love it; with them, there are several elderly women. Incidentally, there are very few elderly men and women, because people get old very late here, their life is healthy and calm; it keeps them fresh.33 Meals are then shared by all, and at least a thousand people are all seated next to each other. The same group participates in the lavish music and dance entertainment that typically takes place every evening. The repeated emphasis on the number of people at both events—about a thousand34—highlights the communal spirit. Overall, it is a model of society in which people cooperate and help each other for the benefit of each and every individual, as well as for the common good.35 33 “Больше половины детей осталось дома заниматься хозяйством: они делают почти всё по хозяйству, они очень любят это; с ними несколько старух. А стариков и старух очень мало потому, что здесь очень поздно становятся ими, здесь здоровая и спокойная жизнь; она сохраняет свежесть.” Chernyshevskii, Chto delat′, 284–285. 34 Chernyshevskii, Chto delat′, 285, 288. 35 In his thought-provoking book of 2001, Andrew Drozd asks an entirely justified question: to what extent does Vera Pavlovna’s dream represent Chernyshevsky’s authorial voice and his own vision of the future? Drozd argues that the novelist’s own view is quite different from that of his heroine and that Chernyshevsky expressed his disapproval of utopian socialism, as represented by the dream, on many occasions in his writings. See Andrew M. Drozd, Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? A Reevaluation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 141–170. However, I find Drozd’s evidence unconvincing, as he mainly gives examples of Chernyshevsky criticizing the individual styles of particular utopian socialists, such as Saint-Simon and Fourier, rather than utopian socialism as such. Indeed, this makes it even more meaningful for Chernyshevsky to come up with his own socialist utopia in the novel. I therefore join those Chernyshevsky critics who all agree that Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream is a programmatic vision of the future in which the author largely expresses his own standpoint: see in particular Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 210–218; and Paperno, Semiotika povedeniia, 177–183; as well as Georg Lukács, Der russische Realismus in der Weltliteratur (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1964); Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Joseph Frank, “Nikolay Chernyshevsky: A Russian Utopia,” in his Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 187–200; and many others. At the same time, it remains perfectly fine for Vera Pavlovna to exhibit perhaps somewhat more idealism and youthful enthusiasm than the author would have done himself: after all, she is young, happy, and successful.

Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevsky

In these ways, Chernyshevsky’s thought experiment deconstructs Malthus’s theory and provides an alternative scenario for the future, characterized by restrained population growth, technological progress in harmony with nature, homogeneous prosperity, and universal happiness. The language of this thought experiment abounds, on the one hand, in realistic descriptions of timeless everyday human activities (the predictable: work in the fields, cooking, meals, song), and, on the other hand, in pleasant and beautiful visual images (the unexpected, especially in the context of Vera Pavlovna’s cold and cloudy Saint Petersburg: flowers and sunny landscapes, sumptuous jewellery, delicious food, attractive people, exquisite futuristic architecture). Further applying Riffaterre’s ideas, as discussed above, we can say that in the linguistic fabric of the text, this peculiar combination of the predictable and the unexpected creates a positive somatic effect by way of reader response: a sensation of enjoyment and harmony, as opposed to the empathetic anguish that, for example, Odoevsky inflicted on his readers, as discussed above. In this vision, Chernyshevsky also persuasively illustrates the idea that instead of fighting each other, human beings are capable of supporting each other, which helps them to become better (also better organized) and to lead a fulfilled life. Within such a scenario, Malthus’s claim that a significant proportion of human population must and will always be miserable seems to evaporate into thin air. Chernyshevsky’s literary thought experiment is a rhetorical means of conveying ideological critique and a constructive message to his readers. Depending on their preferences, some readers will respond by considering Chernyshevsky’s vision of the future as a desirable goal, while others may see it as a beautiful illusion—but arguably, most readers will not mind to share at least some of the positive emotions portrayed. The resulting socialist utopia is never deflated in the novel, but serves as a carefully designed anticipation of the future, somewhere on the borderline between a counterfactual and a hypothetical thought experiment. The “new people” witnessed by Vera Pavlovna in her dream act as supporting literary evidence for the forecast. Moreover, the heroine herself, her husband, and her closest friends, whose life stories are realistically told in the rest of the novel, serve as eloquent examples of the new generation that is emerging in the present and is paving the way for the future. The novelist’s ultimate purpose is to nurture such “new people” in reality and to inspire readers so that they can work towards the “radiant future.”36 If Malthus skilfully combines statistical calculations and thought experiments within one text in his Essay, Chernyshevsky responds to

36 See Chernyshevskii, Chto delat′ (Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, chapter 4.16), 290.

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Malthusian population theory in two separate stages: while calculations support a logical argument in his theoretical writings, What Is to Be Done? employs the visionary potential of literary fiction, in particular within a thought experiment, to override the impact of Malthus’s rhetoric. Just as Vladimir Odoevsky’s Russian Nights, Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream is therefore symptomatic of the Russian reaction to Malthus as a series of imaginative responses in the form of literary thought experiments.

CHAPTER 4

Revolution on Earth and Mars: Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908) and Aleksei Tolstoy’s Aelita (1923)

With several generations reading Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and popular works by other liberal and socialist writers, a yearning for change and the accompanying revolutionary thinking became firmly embedded within the minds of progressive intellectuals in Russia, in particular in the context of growing social and political discontent from about 1860 onwards. In turn-of-the-century Russian literature dealing with the future evolution of society, revolutions are often represented as inevitable milestones on the way to a prosperous and happy future. This chapter explores the portrayal of revolutionary societies on Earth and Mars in the science fiction novels Red Star (Красная звезда, 1908) by Alexander Bogdanov and Aelita (Аэлита, 1923, then 1937) by Aleksei Tolstoy. Both novels are structured around the eye-opening journey of the respective protagonists from Earth to Mars, which serves as a projection of mankind’s prospects for the coming times. In the two texts, Earth is represented by Russia in revolutionary turmoil shortly before 1917, both unsettled and hopeful. The problem of population plays a key role in both of these utopian narratives of revolution, which can be thematically and structurally linked to the counterfactual thought experiments in Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Red Star depicts a highly advanced and prosperous socialist society on Mars. Its chief problem is overpopulation, resulting from deliberately unrestrained population growth. To bring about a solution, new territories and resources are needed: when faced with a difficult choice between Earth and Venus, Martians finally choose the much more perilous colonization of the latter, so as to avoid the annihilation of Earth’s population. As Mars begins to realize its

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plan, revolution on Earth goes its own way, but an interplanetary love affair may encourage cooperation between the two worlds. In contrast, Aelita shows a mixture of feudalism and organized capitalism on Mars. The main problem is degeneration, as the population is literally dying out, despite technological progress, and so, new blood and youthful energy are needed to revive this stagnating society. A socialist revolution is attempted on Mars by two visitors from Earth, the main protagonists. In the end, revolution fails on Mars but succeeds on Earth; in an interesting parallel to Red Star, an interplanetary romance survives despite tribulations and holds the promise of a future renewal for Mars. Each of the two texts can be considered to contain a counterfactual thought experiment, which is based on the following unreal premise: “We currently think that Mars is uninhabited. For purely experimental purposes, let us suppose that there is humanoid life on Mars. Now, if this were the case, then Y would occur…” Building on such an initial assumption, the two literary thought experiments approach the problem of population from very different angles, looking for constructive solutions. I argue that in each of the two texts, the author plays out a counterfactual scenario so as to find out whether a socialist order can bring about a life and population balance on a national and even planetary scale. The chapter analyzes the selected narratives so as to look into the pragmatic significance of these thought experiments. It is well known that Bogdanov was a great champion of the ideas of Ernst Mach.1 Indeed, Mach’s conception of the thought experiment, as discussed in the Introduction above, clearly left an imprint on Bogdanov and his writing. Besides suggesting that a thought experiment often acts as preparation for a real, physical experiment, as we recall, Mach also writes that experimentation in thoughts is characterized by the procedure of idealization or abstraction (“Idealisierung oder Abstraktion”).2 All of these elements are found again in Bogdanov’s discussion of the thought experiment procedure, which he calls “abstraction” (“абстрагирование”), in his major theoretical book of 1922, Tektology: Universal Organization Science (Тектология: всеобщая организационная наука). Setting out a universally applicable theory of

1

2

On Bogdanov, Mach, and Lenin, see Gennadii Prashkevich, Krasnyi sfinks: Istoriia russkoi fantastiki ot V. F. Odoevskogo do Borisa Shterna (Novosibirsk: Svin′in i synov′ia, 2007), 68; and Viktor Iagodinskii, “Marsianin, zabroshennyi na Zemliu (O A. Bogdanove [1873–1928] i ego utopiiakh),” in V mire fantastiki: Sbornik literaturno-kriticheskikh statei i ocherkov, ed. A. Kuznetsov (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1989), 32–34. See Ernst Mach, “Über Gedankenexperimente,” in his Erkenntnis und Irrtum—Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung (Leipzig: Barth, 1906), 192.

Revolution on Earth and Mars

organization, relevant to all social and natural sciences, the book anticipates systems theory, used in a wide range of disciplines today. Here is what Bogdanov writes: The highest levels in research can be reached by the method of analytical abstraction. This method establishes fundamental laws that govern phenomena and express their characteristic patterns. This is achieved by means of “abstraction,” that is, the diversion, or removal of complicating factors. […] Abstraction is sometimes conducted in a real manner, which is the case in the precise “experiments” of the natural sciences; and sometimes only in an ideal manner, that is, in thoughts, which is, in the majority of cases, what the social sciences have to be content with.3 It is no accident that Bogdanov was interested both in tektology, literally “the science of construction,”4 and in the socialist utopia he depicted in Red Star: as Irina Paperno pointed out in 1994, Bogdanov created his theory of tektology “under the direct influence of Fedorov” and therefore not only continued the heritage of Nikolai Fedorov’s utopian “philosophy of the common cause,” but also expanded the legacy of the Symbolist “creation of life” (zhiznetvorchestvo, “жизнетворчество”) and that of the “new people,” the influential concept that originated in Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done?5 Indeed, what all of these utopian traditions have in common is the fruitful transformation of human life for the better through thought, language, and art. Moreover, most Bogdanov critics agree that the writer “played out,”6 or “laid out,”7 some of the ideas central

3 “Высшие ступени исследования достигаются методом абстрактно-аналитическим. Он устанавливает основные законы явлений, выражающие их постоянные тенденции. Средством для этого служит ‘абстрагирование’, т. е. отвлечение, удаление осложняющих моментов […]. Абстрагирование выполняется иногда реально, как это бывает в точных ‘экспериментах’ естественных наук; иногда же только идеально, т. е. мысленно, чем в огромном большинстве случаев принуждены ограничиваться науки социальные.” Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, Tektologiia: Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka (Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Z. I. Grzhebina, 1922), 85–86. 4 “Учение о строительстве.” Ibid., 65. 5 See Irina Paperno, Introduction, in Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 5–9. See also chapter 3 above. 6 James T. Andrews, Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009), 67. 7 Richard Stites, “Fantasy and Revolution. Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction,” in Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, ed. Loren R.

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to tektology in the imaginary worlds of Red Star.8 We can now simply take the logical next step and argue that in the novel, Bogdanov conducts a thought experiment that tests his views on the future evolution of (Russian) society: such a perspective enables us to trace the ideas played out and to see what kind of outcome they reach, if any. Later in his book on tektology, Bogdanov goes on to acknowledge that the method of thought experimentation (“abstraction”) has been used extensively in classical works by Western economists, among whom Malthus, as we know, holds a place of honor alongside Adam Smith and others; naturally, the ultimate conclusion is that works by Karl Marx, a decisive influence on Bogdanov,9 offer the best model for research of this kind: In the social sciences […] the decisive role belongs to the method of thought abstraction, examples of which were first provided by the classics of bourgeois political economy, and later, in a much more accomplished and persuasive form—by Marx’s research.10 Yet despite this mark of respect, Bogdanov’s stance on Malthus’s population theory is predominantly sceptical, as inspired by Marx and expressed, for example, throughout the manuscript of Bogdanov’s Capri lectures of 1909: In political economy, “Darwinism” had existed long before Darwin: R. Malthus, the Manchester School, and similar Darwinist sociologists, while completely missing the point of the uniform nature of a social system with respect to labor, equate human economic activity with the struggle for existence between individual organisms and animal species […] and attempt not so much to explain, as to justify the laws of the survival of the fittest, such as the destructive competition of capital

Graham and Richard Stites, transl. Charles Rougle (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 6. 8 See Stites, “Fantasy and Revolution,” 1–6; Iagodinskii, “Marsianin,” 35; Prashkevich, Krasnyi sfinks, 73–75; and Andrews, Red Cosmos, 66–67. 9 On Bogdanov and Marx see, for example, K. N. Liubutin and V. D. Tolmachev, Aleksandr Bogdanov: Ot filosofii k tektologii (Ekaterinburg: Bank kul′turnoi informatsii, 2005), 74–77. 10 “В общественных науках […] решающая роль принадлежит мысленной абстракции, образцы которой дала сначала буржуазная классическая экономия, а затем, в гораздо более совершенной и обоснованной форме—исследования Маркса.” Bogdanov, Tektologiia, 87.

Revolution on Earth and Mars

with small-scale production and its economic repression of the proletariat […].11 Viktor Iagodinskii has specifically pointed out that in Red Star, Bogdanov rejects the ideas of Malthus, offering alternative solutions to the problem of population.12 In contrast to Bogdanov, who expressed his views on Malthus, thought experiments, and a wide range of other issues in his substantial theoretical writings, Aleksei Tolstoy was much less of a theoretician: instead, he was a prolific reader and writer of fiction. In terms of his literary lineage, he is undoubtedly an heir of both the Realist and the Symbolist movements in Russian literature: while his novels are always firmly grounded in reality, reminiscent of Leo Tolstoy’s epic narratives, his prose style can be at times as expressive as the verse of Andrei Bely or Alexander Blok, and the latter trend is particularly strong in Aelita.13 It has been established that Aleksei Tolstoy read Red Star, which had been published about fifteen years before the first edition of Aelita, and, indeed, numerous parallels between the two novels confirm that the latter was creatively inspired by Bogdanov’s evocations of Mars.14 Most scholars agree that with Red Star, in 11 “В политической экономии ‘дарвинизм’ существовал ещё до Дарвина: Р. Мальтус, манчестерцы и т. под. социологи-дарвинисты, совершенно упуская из виду трудовое единство социальной системы, приравнивают экономическую деятельность людей к индивидуальной и видовой борьбе животных за их существование […] и пытаются не только объяснить, сколько оправдать законы выживания приспособленных, истребительную конкуренцию капитала с мелким производством и экономическое подавление им пролетариата […].” Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, Three hectographed lectures delivered at the Vysshaia sotsial-demokraticheskaia propagandistsko-agitatorskaia shkola dlia rabochikh in 1909, Capri, Italy (Grigorii Aleksinskii Papers, 1895–1913 [MS Russ 73], Houghton Library archives, Harvard University), folder 2 of 3, lecture III, page 2 of 2. 12 Iagodinskii, “Marsianin,” 41. 13 Indeed, in Tolstoy’s home country, the critical consensus is that he innovatively absorbed the best from the classical tradition in Russian literature: see, in particular, V. Shcherbina, A. N. Tolstoi. Tvorcheskii put′ (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1956); O. Mikhailov, Stranitsy sovetskoi prozy (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1984); V. Kovskii, Realisty i romantiki: iz tvorcheskogo opyta russkoi sovetskoi klassiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990); A. M. Kriukova, A.  N. Tolstoy i russkaia literatura. Tvorcheskaia individual′nost′ v literaturnom protsesse (Moscow: Nauka, 1990); and Van Dunmei and M. V. Mikhailova, Geroini A. N. Tolstogo: tipologiia obrazov i evoliutsiia kharakterov (Moscow: MAKS Press, 2006). 14 For a confirmation that Tolstoy read Red Star, as well as on other sources of Aelita, see Muireann Maguire, “Aleksei N. Tolstoi and the Enigmatic Engineer: A Case of Vicarious Revisionism,” Slavic Review 72, no. 2 (2013): 254; George Slusser, “The Martians among Us: Wells and the Strugatskys,” in Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science, ed. Howard V. Hendrix, George Slusser, and Eric S. Rabkin ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 57–61; Prashkevich, Krasnyi sfinks, 145–148; and Anatolii Britikov, Russkii sovetskii nauchno-fantasticheskii roman (Leningrad: Nauka, 1970), 68. For a close reading of Aelita, see

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particular, Bogdanov became the progenitor of utopian science fiction as a novelistic genre in Soviet literature.15 Richard Stites notes that “Bogdanov’s works pointed the way to an enormous blossoming of revolutionary science fiction in the 1920s,” including “Alexis [sic] Tolstoy’s once famous Aelita […],” which “again featured two planets, Earth and Mars, and two revolutions, though with a political premise about Mars opposite to that of Bogdanov’s.”16 The following selective analysis will examine the structural, stylistic, and thematic features of Red Star and Aelita as literary thought experiments, with a focus on three aspects: the predictable, the unexpected, and variation. As discussed in the Introduction, variation can be traced back to Ernst Mach, while the other two aspects are inspired by Michael Riffaterre’s reader response theory and method and have been briefly applied in chapters 2 and 3 above. As we recall, Riffaterre’s main terms for critically reconstructing the reading process are predictability and unpredictability. He argues that the elements detected by the reader—by almost any reader, in fact—are usually the unexpected ones. Therefore, it is worthwhile for the critic to focus on the tension between the predictable and the unexpected within a literary text, so as to elicit the most likely triggers of reader response. As we shall see, our examination of this tension in this chapter constitutes a somewhat modified perspective on the reading process in comparison with the analysis of “striking elements” and the “mimetic illusion of reality” in Odoevsky’s and Chernyshevsky’s texts in chapters 2 and 3 of this book respectively. Some of the structural elements of the two Mars novels are predictable in the (positive) sense that they create a perfect illusion of reality, so as to match the reader’s expectations of verisimilitude and suspend his/her disbelief. Indeed,

Dunmei and Mikhailova, Geroini A. N. Tolstogo. For a detailed discussion of links between Aelita and Aleksei Tolstoy’s return to Russia in 1923, see Elena Tolstaia, “Degot′ ili med”: Aleksei N. Tolstoi kak neizvestnyi pisatel′, 1917–1923 (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2006); and Maguire, “Aleksei N. Tolstoi.” 15 See Britikov, Russkii sovetskii nauchno-fantasticheskii roman; Darko Suvin, “The Utopian Tradition in Russian Science Fiction,” Modern Language Review 66, no. 1 (1971): 139–159; Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); Stites, “Fantasy and Revolution”; Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Andrews, Red Cosmos, among others. Although a rich tradition of space travel narratives and other science fiction works, including social utopias, had existed in Western and Russian literature before Red Star, including such names as Jules Verne, Kurd Lasswitz, and H. G. Wells, as well as Vladimir Odoevsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Bogdanov’s innovation was to add “a communist utopia on Mars.” See Stites, “Fantasy and Revolution,” 3–4. 16 Stites, “Fantasy and Revolution,” 14.

Revolution on Earth and Mars

this is quite close to Chernyshevsky’s strategy discussed earlier. Thus, both narratives mostly have the form of a day-by-day diary of space travel, which occasionally resembles a scientific report (Red Star is written in the first person and Aelita in the third person): events are recorded systematically as they occur, with occasional digressions on the technology of a spaceship or the history of Mars. In fact, a very similar chronological narrative development across regular intervals is used by Malthus in his thought experiment in chapter X and elsewhere in the Essay: not surprisingly, this is symptomatic of many good stories, and science fiction in particular. Within this regular movement of the plot, both novels display a tripartite structure, made up of a prior stay on Earth, a journey to Mars, and a return back to Earth respectively, all experienced by the relevant protagonists: the revolutionary intellectual Leonid in Red Star, and in Aelita, the engineer-inventor Mstislav Los′ and the Civil War soldier Aleksei Gusev. This tripartite structure enables both authors to highlight the insights gained by their heroes during the journey to Mars, which ultimately give them an entirely new perspective on life on Earth; we shall see to what extent this revelatory experience is shared by the reader. In line with the expectations of most science fiction amateurs, a technologically advanced humanoid civilization is found on Mars in both texts, exemplified in particular by a sophisticated canal system, which corresponds to observations from Earth. Humans can learn a great deal from this civilization as far as science and technology are concerned, but they can also teach Martians new things, especially in the domain of emotions. The outward appearance of Martian inhabitants and nature also combines comforting elements of similarity to Earth with some colorful differences one would expect on Mars: in Red Star, Martians look like humans, except for their abnormally huge eyes17 and slightly neutral body proportions, which, together with unisex clothing, efface the differences between the male and the female body;18 the Mars of Aelita is inhabited by two races of humanoids, with orange and blue skin respectively,19 while the overall proportions are very close to humans from Earth. Crucially, in both texts, Martians are similar enough to Earthlings, physically as well as mentally, for interplanetary love relationships to blossom: Leonid falls in love with Netti, Los′ develops a passionate attachment to Aelita, and Gusev has a light-hearted 17 Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, Krasnaia zvezda: Roman-utopiia [1908], in his Krasnaia zvezda: Roman-utopiia. Inzhener Menni: Fantasticheskii roman (Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 1979), 24. 18 Ibid., 82. 19 Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, Aelita [1923], in his Giperboloid inzhenera Garina. Aelita (Moscow: Astrel′, 2011), 68–72.

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affair with Ikhoshka. Nature is treated in the same way: Bogdanov depicts plants with red foliage,20 while Tolstoy’s characters admire blue-colored forests;21 yet overall, Martian landscapes, however exotic, are just a very striking variety of what we already know from Earth. Color symbolism is significant here, as it reflects the diverging perspectives of the two novelists, who nevertheless stand in a creative intertextual dialogue with each other. For Bogdanov, the “red star” is unequivocally Mars, and the red color of vegetation on Mars is directly associated by Leonid with the red socialist flag—Mars embodies the realization of a socialist utopia, a model for Earth to follow.22 In contrast, in Tolstoy’s novel, it is Earth that both Ikhoshka and Aelita call the “Red Star.”23 Bogdanov’s symbolism seems to be reversed here, perhaps even deliberately, with Earth carrying the full potential for a radiant socialist future, possibly as a model for Mars to admire. Similarly, it is likely that Tolstoy chooses the cool blue as one of the main colors for Aelita’s planet simply because it is opposed to the warm red, the color of human blood. At the same time, despite the differences between the texts and the planets, the reassuring illusion of reality and similarity in both novels is conducive to reflection, as we empathetically engage with the characters at dramatic turning points in the narrative. Bogdanov’s reader is tempted to figure out whether the problem of overpopulation on socialist Mars is indeed likely to be solved as soon as Venus is colonized by Menni’s expedition. Quite differently, as we follow the socialist revolution sparked off by Gusev on Aelita’s Mars, we ponder whether a fresh influx of energy from Earth is strong enough to invigorate this capitalist-feudal society whose population is dying out. Against the backdrop of the familiar, the unexpected serves the purpose of catching the reader’s attention and having an impact on his/her mind at critical moments in both novels: indeed, thought-provoking fantastic elements blend smoothly into the realist fabric of the two narratives. Leonid’s startling, hallucinatory mental illness blurs the boundaries between reality and reverie: From that moment onwards, an orgy of phantoms had begun. Of course, there is much that I cannot remember, and it seems that my consciousness often grew confused in a waking state as if in a dream. […] The phantoms never spoke to me, whereas at night, when all was silent, auditory hallucinations continued and

20 Bogdanov, Krasnaia zvezda, 68. 21 Tolstoi, Aelita, 56. 22 Bogdanov, Krasnaia zvezda, 65, 68–69. 23 Tolstoi, Aelita, 74, 82.

Revolution on Earth and Mars

intensified, turning into entire coherent, but absurdly meaningless conversations between individuals who were largely unfamiliar to me […].24 A mixture of poetic-supernatural discourse (“призраки”—“phantoms, ghosts”) and matter-of-fact medical terminology (“слуховые галлюцинации”—“auditory hallucinations”) highlights the confusion between the real and the unreal here. In this way, Leonid’s illness underlines the gap between the highly organized and responsible teamwork-driven socialism on Mars and the backward individualism of Earth’s inhabitants, which prevents them from achieving harmony and peace: even Leonid, one of the best representatives of his planet, struggles to come to terms with the Martian perfection. We can infer in the context of the novel that violent revolutions on Earth are in part conditioned by this barbarian backwardness, as higher cultures would see it. Quite daringly for the 1920s in Soviet Russia, Red Star thus suggests that gradual evolution of society, together with technological progress and an optimal organization of labor, as epitomized by Mars, is much more efficient in fostering social welfare and prosperity than brutal wars and revolutions. At the same time, Leonid’s recovery thanks to tremendous self-discipline and Netti’s love still leaves hope for mankind. In Aelita, the fantastic takes the shape of the Greek myth of Atlantis, which suddenly comes to life in Aelita’s accounts of Mars history, glittering with the gold and bronze of Atlantean warriors whose spaceships land on Mars after their homeland on Earth is swallowed up by the ocean: They were wearing tall helmets adorned with spiky crests, beltshaped armor, and no shields. With the right hand, they were throwing bronze balls […]. Beyond the protective walls of the great city, the Magacytles continued to fly away from the top of a tiered, gold-covered pyramid, penetrating through the ocean of falling water, through smoke and ashes into the starry space.25 24 “С этого момента началась оргия призраков. Многого я конечно не помню, и, кажется, сознание часто спутывалось у меня наяву, как во сне. […] Призраки не разговаривали со мной, а ночью, когда было тихо, слуховые галлюцинации продолжались и усиливались, превращаясь в целые связные, но нелепо-бессодержательные разговоры большею частью между неизвестными мне лицами […].” Bogdanov, Krasnaia zvezda, 116. 25 “Они были в высоких шлемах с колючим гребнем, в панцирных поясах, без щитов. Правой рукою они бросали бронзовые шары […]. За оплотом стен великого города с вершины уступчатой, обложенной золотом пирамиды Магацитлы продолжали улетать сквозь океан падающей воды, из дыма и пепла в звёздное пространство.” Tolstoi, Aelita, 94–95.

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These warriors are called “Магацитлы,” which means “the ruthless ones” (“беспощадные”), as Aelita explains to Los′.26 In the above passage, they are shown to be superhuman in their ruthless strength, poetically represented by their spiky helmets, the similarly sharp shape of the pyramid they use for the take-off of their spaceships, and the fact that they escape from the elements of water and fire (“сквозь океан падающей воды, из дыма и пепла”) and go on to conquer outer space (“звёздное пространство”). Yet it is precisely humanity that is lacking in the civilization that they create on Mars, a planet named after the Roman god of war. Symbolically called “Sons of Heaven” (“Сыны Неба”) by the indigenous orange race on Mars, the Atlanteans eventually father the blue race, to which the beautiful Aelita herself belongs. Indeed, it is worth recalling that the legend of Atlantis was first recounted by Plato in one of his dialogues, where it served as a model of a utopian society. Therefore, the striking suggestion that the Martian population has Earth origins functions as an implicit warning: it seems that without a major social revolution or transformation, even the most advanced (utopian) society is likely to deteriorate and perish, as Atlantis did. Similar to Atlantis in its own time, the Martian society ruled by Tuskub, Aelita’s father, is certainly advanced, given its technological sophistication that remarkably anticipates our very own twenty-first century: note, for example, extensive everyday use of air travel and video conferencing. And yet, Mars is clearly in the process of stagnation and even degeneration, as its population is rapidly decreasing: the Atlantean utopia that carries the wisdom of many centuries seems to have turned into a dystopia. Tuskub takes advantage of the population crisis to herald the end of Martian civilization in the near future: The history of Mars is over. Life is dying out on our planet. You know the statistics of births and deaths. […] It is not in our power to prevent the population from dying out. […] First and foremost—we must destroy the city.27 For Tuskub, this is an excuse to destroy the cities and to condemn many of their inhabitants to slavery and death, so that the ruling elite can survive and stay in power. Significantly, both visitors from Earth, Los′ and Gusev, are immediately dubbed “Sons of Heaven” by the locals: just as Aelita’s race has symbolically

26 Ibid., 94. 27 “История Марса окончена. Жизнь вымирает на нашей планете. Вы знаете статистику рождаемости и смерти. […] Мы бессильны остановить вымирание. […] Первое и основное – мы должны уничтожить город.” Ibid., 101.

Revolution on Earth and Mars

inherited the decline of Atlantis, the new “Sons of Heaven” appear to carry the potential for renewal that Atlantean warriors realized on Mars in the distant past. This hope is articulated by the engineer Gor, the leader of the opposition to Tuskub, in response to the latter’s brutal plans: We don’t want to die. We were born to live. We know what the threat is—the degeneration of Mars. But we also know where our salvation lies. We’ll be rescued by Earth, humans from Earth, a healthy, young race with a hot blood.28 However, the precise nature of this revitalizing potential remains enigmatic. This is where the procedure of variation comes in, as defined by Ernst Mach.29 Indeed, we are going to trace the creative literary application of this method both in Red Star and in Aelita in terms of the simultaneous presence of alternatives. In both novels, the implicit question underlying the storyline could be phrased as follows: who will save the world, or rather, the civilizations of the solar system? In Red Star, Earth is in revolutionary upheaval and needs rescue perhaps no less than Mars, yet since Mars is a projection of Earth’s distant future, it is first of all the destiny of the Red Planet that is about to be decided. At first sight, Bogdanov’s Mars is a highly sophisticated socialist utopia with an egalitarian structure: its inhabitants enjoy superior intelligence and a life of plenty, free from suffering, material necessity, and financial greed; relationships between individuals and regional communities are characterized by harmony and peace, and there is a universal language spoken across the entire planet; science and technology are highly advanced, with a wide-ranging experience in space travel; and an optimal distribution of labor, controlled by a system similar to a vast computer network, ensures that industry, agriculture, education, the arts, and other vital areas function and evolve for the maximum benefit of all.30 Weapons of mass destruction exist, but are not used.31 However, broadly in line with Malthusian theory, it is precisely the success of this welfare socialist state that has led to overpopulation and a lack of space and resources. This results in a constant struggle with nature, as the Martian Enno explains to Leonid: 28 “Мы не хотим умирать. Мы родились, чтобы жить. Мы знаем опасность – вырождение Марса. Но у нас есть спасение. Нас спасёт Земля, люди с Земли, здоровая, свежая раса с горячей кровью.” Ibid., 102. 29 See Ernst Mach, “Über Gedankenexperimente,” in his Erkenntnis und Irrtum—Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung (Leipzig: Barth, 1906), 191, as quoted in the Introduction. 30 Bogdanov, Krasnaia zvezda, 59, 72–98. 31 Ibid., 150–151.

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In the course of the latest period in our history, the exploitation of our planet has many times increased tenfold, our population is growing, and our needs are augmenting incomparably faster. In various areas of human activity in turn, we have been repeatedly confronted with the threat of the depletion of natural forces and resources. Until now, we have been able to avert this threat without recourse to the loathsome restriction of life in ourselves or in our progeny; but right now, this struggle is becoming particularly serious.32 Yet before any of the Malthusian “positive checks” begin to operate, superhumans such as the engineer Menni and his associates plan ahead and use their superior scientific and technological knowledge to find new territories for their fellow Martians. Here, a range of alternative options are considered: is it better to colonize Earth or Venus? If Earth is to be colonized, should its population be annihilated, as Sterni suggests (!), or coopted into working together with the visitors from Mars, as Netti proposes? Indeed, Sterni, with his homicidal project, constitutes an irregularity within the narrative fabric at which the utopia threatens to veer into a dismal dystopia; however, the humanist views of the majority opposed to Sterni prevent Bogdanov’s experiment from going along this route. Further alternatives are then played out. If cooperation with Earth is to be envisaged, who is a better choice for a first contact: Leonid the intellectual or a revolutionary worker? How does Leonid ultimately react to Sterni’s plans of destroying Earth’s population: has Leonid killed Sterni in reality or merely in his mentally perturbed imagination? In contrast to the open-endedness in Aelita, as will be discussed below, choices are made regarding most of these dilemmas, which is perhaps more in the vein of Mach’s thought experiment, which usually implies an outcome: it is decided by the “colonial group” presided by Menni that Mars will colonize Venus, rather than Earth, accepting the inevitable expedition casualties;33 Earth’s population will be spared and cooperation will continue via Leonid, even though he himself doubts he is the best candidate for this;34 despite

32 “За последний период нашей истории мы в десятки раз увеличили эксплоатацию [sic] нашей планеты, наша численность возрастает, и ещё несравненно быстрее растут наши потребности. Опасность истощения природных сил и средств уже не раз вставала перед нами то в одной то в другой области труда. До сих пор нам удавалось преодолеть её, не прибегая к ненавистному сокращению жизни—в себе и в потомстве; но именно теперь борьба приобретает особенно серьёзный характер.” Ibid., 98. 33 Ibid., 165. 34 Ibid., 190.

Revolution on Earth and Mars

a persistent element of uncertainty regarding Sterni’s life, there seems to be a fair chance that Leonid has not killed him in reality, as both Dr. Werner and Netti assert that the protagonist’s memories of the murder are simply the creation of his imagination under the impact of mental illness.35 Ultimately, Bogdanov’s thought experiment sustains an alternative to Malthus’s “great restrictive law” of necessity.36 In Aelita, yet again, it is the population of Mars that is under an immediate threat, and alternative paths of rescue are represented by Los′ and Gusev respectively. Will Mars be reinvigorated by Gusev’s public commitment to revolution or by the private family union of Los′ and Aelita? What is more decisive in the face of a dying population: the proletarian or the intellectual, armed force or the combined impact of science, technology, and culture? There seems to be no unequivocal answer to these questions: Gusev’s revolution begins very impressively, but is then completely crushed by Tuskub; the romance between Los′ and Aelita seems to be doomed from the start, but then both miraculously survive and even establish radio contact while being on different planets. With no clear priority given to socialist revolution, it is only too fortunate that Soviet censors of Aelita missed these points. Indeed, as Van Dunmei and Maria Mikhailova point out, in Soviet scholarship, Gusev was traditionally interpreted as an entirely positive hero of revolution, while Los′ was evaluated as an ambiguous figure, with dangerous elements of (bourgeois) individualism.37 Considering the novel as a thought experiment characterized by variation helps to dissipate such stereotypes by illuminating the open-endedness of the narrative, which encourages the reader to think critically. This stands in contrast with the emphasis on clearcut choices that we have seen in Red Star. Yet whatever path is chosen by Mars, Tolstoy’s novel shows that major changes are inevitable to prevent a capitalist society from facing a relentless population decline and an apocalyptic end. This is quite different from Malthusian chronic population surplus, against which any social transformations are powerless, but which is nevertheless part of a very stable status quo. After the failure of Gusev’s proletarian uprising, words of farewell by the engineer Gor seem to suggest that Mars has missed out on its chance to have a fair social revolution. Gor is certain that this chance should have been taken up at an earlier point in history, with the implication that it is still not too late for the inhabitants of Earth to reform their society:

35 Ibid., 176, 190. 36 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798], ed. Geoffrey Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14. 37 See Dunmei and Mikhailova, Geroini A. N. Tolstogo, 75.

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Farewell. If you return to Earth, tell our story. Perhaps you’ll be happy on Earth. But our fate ends in ice deserts, death, and anguish… Alas, we’ve missed our chance… We should have loved life fiercely and vigorously, yes, vigorously…38 As if in response to Gor’s words about loving life, the novel ends with Los′ yearning for Aelita, whose voice he seems to discern in radio signals transmitted from outer space. The protagonists’ experience of Mars and its decline has led to their heightened awareness of life on Earth as unique and meaningful even in its most difficult moments. We can see that the Malthusian hypothesis that poverty and misery will always exist is undermined in different ways by the two Mars narratives. According to Bogdanov’s novel, social and technological sophistication may well solve the problem of overpopulation and achieve universal happiness, despite the high price that is likely to be paid by the individuals involved in the process. In a complementary thought experiment, Tolstoy warns that unless a fair social (socialist?) order is established, human civilization is likely to face degeneration and die out due to internal armed conflicts and a lack of life energy. A political agenda in both novels is startlingly mingled with dreams of long-distance love and space travel adventures. There is no space for Malthusian despondency here: even if peace and prosperity are not immediately attainable, future prospects are full of hope. We have also uncovered some of the structural and stylistic means thanks to which literary thought experiments work in these ways: a mixture of the predictable and the unexpected, realism and fantasy is used hand in hand with symbolic elements and the method of variation to exert a systematic influence on the reader and to guide him/her towards what may be a better understanding of the future and the options it holds.

38 “Прощайте. Если вернётесь на Землю, расскажите о нас. Быть может, вы на Земле будете счастливы. А нам—ледяные пустыни, смерть, тоска… Ах, мы упустили час… Нужно было свирепо и властно, властно любить жизнь…” Tolstoi, Aelita, 131.

CHAPTER 5

A Peasant Utopia: Alexander Chaianov’s My Brother Aleksei’s Journey (1920)

Moving on from the revolutionary dreams discussed in the preceding chapter, Alexander Chaianov’s short novel My Brother Aleksei’s Journey into the Land of Peasant Utopia (Путешествие моего брата Алексея в страну крестьянской утопии, 1920) plays out a thought experiment that directly transports the reader into Russia’s imaginary future: the novel is set in 1984, a year in which the protagonist living in 1921, Aleksei Kremnev, unexpectedly wakes up as a result of inexplicable time travel. This chapter examines Chaianov’s evocation of the utopian agricultural society thus imagined in 1984: despite advanced technologies, the entire population lives and works in the country, with no real cities; urban centers are for entertainment only. Inhabitants are free to work as farmers and/ or to realize their talents in the arts and the sciences. All seems to confirm that this society is marked by prosperity and peace, personal happiness, and a relative freedom of choice. I will show that in Chaianov’s utopian vision, smart social and economic structures prevent both problems envisaged by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population: overpopulation and food production deficit. Similar to Chernyshevsky (What Is to Be Done?, 1863) and Bogdanov (Red Star, 1908), as examined above, Chaianov’s text creates a polemical alternative to the famously dystopian thought experiment that Malthus conducts in chapter X of his Essay. At the same time, in My Brother Aleksei’s Journey, socialism of the 1920s makes way for a very unusual social order by 1984, in which “tame” capitalism is combined with a very centralized and quasi-dictatorial government: in some ways, a utopian mirror image of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). It has been repeatedly pointed out that this authoritarian

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dimension of Chaianov’s agricultural idyll perplexingly stands in contradiction to the positive impression that the utopian society initially makes upon the protagonist and the reader alike.1 I argue that some light can be shed upon this apparently self-contradictory character of the novel if we consider the plot as a counterfactual thought experiment that unfolds according to Ernst Mach’s principle of variation and upsets the reader’s expectations in the process. It is hoped that a further critical gain from such an analysis will be an additional insight into the epistemic and cultural value of literary thought experiments. Writing over a hundred years later than Malthus, Alexander Chaianov (1888– 1937) was one of the most brilliant intellectuals of his time, with a remarkable range of professional and creative interests. In addition to his successful academic career as a professor of agricultural economics and his work for various government institutions, both before and after 1917, he was also a novelist, a poet, a painter, and an art historian. His encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of disciplines enabled him to apply a systematic and often interdisciplinary approach in his research, and it has been noted that his work in agricultural economics stands in affinity with modern systems theory, one of whose predecessors was Alexander Bogdanov (Tektology: Universal Organization Science, 1922).2 Chaianov also had a profound grasp of mathematical statistics and extensively employed mathematical modeling in his work on agronomy.3 After modeling, thought experiments are a logical next step. The literary experiment of My Brother Aleksei’s Journey is anticipated in many of Chaianov’s writings on the economics and organization of Russian agriculture, and the novel certainly develops some of the author’s views on the subject. For example, Chaianov’s vision of future trends, as expressed in his 1917 brochure What Is the Agrarian Question? (Что такое аграрный вопрос?), encapsulates some of the features found in the agricultural utopia set in 1984:

1 See Mirja Lecke, “Utopie und romantische Kunsttheorie in A. V. Čajanovs ‘Putešestvie moego brata Alekseja v stranu krest′janskoj utopii,’” Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 59 (2000): 387–391; O. A. Pavlova, “‘Puteshestvie moego brata Alekseia v stranu krest′ianskoi utopii’ A. V. Chaianova kak metautopiia: sintez mifologem Prosveshcheniia i Renessansa,” Vestnik VolGU, series 8, issue 4 (2005): 33–34; and others. 2 See Aleksandr Vasil′evich Chaianov, Izbrannoe: Stat′i o Moskve, pis′ma: 1909–1936 (Moscow: TONChU, 2008), 278. 3 Chaianov, Izbrannoe, 287. Indeed, Chaianov’s articles are typically densely packed with mathematical formulae and calculations.

A Peasant Utopia

Once we have given the land to a peasant farm, we need to organize this peasant farm, to instil it with some culture, to give it a knowledge of agronomy, to make sure that smaller farms join together in powerful cooperatives and that each farm has a stable market position as well as sufficient credit.4 The idea of peasant cooperatives mentioned in this extract is central to Chaianov’s agricultural theory, as he emphatically states in another major work, Key Ideas and Working Methods of Public Agronomy (Основные идеи и методы работы Общественной Агрономии, 1918): We can be certain that a progressive modern peasant farm is unthinkable without cooperative associations, just as modern industry is unthinkable without capitalist forms.5 Indeed, Vladimir Lenin carefully read Chaianov’s writings on agronomy and expressed his approval for their key ideas, especially that of peasant cooperatives, on many occasions and especially in his article “About Cooperation” (“О  кооперации,” 1923),6 published a few years after My Brother Aleksei’s Journey had been written.7 Moreover, and as a logical consequence, the principle of peasant cooperatives formed the basis for the government policy of the NEP (“new economic policy,” НЭП), which was constructively realized in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, starting shortly after the composition of Chaianov’s novel. The novel was therefore a natural product of its time—yet from 1927 onwards, 4

5

6 7

“Передав землю крестьянскому хозяйству, надо устроить это крестьянское хозяйство, надо внести в него культуру, дать ему агрономические знания, организовать в мощные кооперативы, упрочить его положение на рынке и снабдить его доступным кредитом.” Aleksandr Vasil′evich Chaianov, Chto takoe agrarnyi vopros? [1917] (Moscow: Universal’naia biblioteka, 1917), 11. “Можно уверенно полагать, что прогрессивное современное крестьянское хозяйство не мыслимо без кооперативных объединений, точно так же как современная промышленность не мыслима вне капиталистических форм.” Aleksandr Vasil′evich Chaianov, Osnovnye idei i metody raboty Obshchestvennoi Agronomii [1918] (Moscow: Moskovskoe tovarishcheskoe knigoizdatel’stvo po voprosam sel’skokhoziaistvennoi ekonomii i politiki, 1918), 101. Vladimir Il′ich Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1967–1981), vol. 45, 369–377. In Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, there is an editor’s note confirming that, while writing his 1923 article, Lenin read Chaianov’s book Key Ideas and Organizational Forms of Peasant Cooperation: Аleksandr Vasil′evich Chaianov, Osnovnye idei i formy organizatsii Krest′ianskoi Kooperatsii [1919] (Moscow: Sovet vserossiiskikh kooperativnykh s”ezdov, 1919). See Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 45, 597–598, note 212.

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when the Communist Party took the decision about compulsory collectivization in Soviet agriculture, government economic policy in the USSR changed abruptly and radically. As a result, the status of Chaianov’s ideas changed drastically as well. In the context of socialist collectivization in Soviet Russia, the assertion that the present and future of progress belong to peasant cooperatives and capitalist forms of industry was clearly heretical—and also extremely daring, carrying a tremendous personal risk for the author. And yet, both ideas appear in My Brother Aleksei’s Journey as cornerstones of the utopia’s socioeconomic structure. Powerful peasant cooperatives dominate the agriculture in the idyllic state of 1984: Already in the early twentieth century, our peasantry collectivized and transformed into large cooperative businesses all those areas of its production where a large farm had an advantage over a small farm, which is why our farming in its current state represents maximum stability and the greatest possible technical perfection. Such is the basis of our national farming.8 This is combined with a “tame” form of capitalism, so as to encourage optimal industrial development: Nevertheless, private enterprise of the capitalist kind still exists in our society: in those areas where collectively managed enterprises are powerless, and in those cases when someone’s organizational genius is victorious over our draconian taxes thanks to technological sophistication. Yet this residual capitalism is quite tame around here. […]9 In this context, it becomes evident at what a high cost the novel saw the light of day: in 1930, Chaianov was arrested and in 1937, at the peak of Stalin’s 8

9

“Уже в нaчaле XX векa крестьянство коллективизировaло и возвело в степень крупного кооперaтивного предприятия все те отрaсли своего производствa, где крупнaя формa хозяйствa имелa преимущество нaд мелким, в своем нaстоящем виде предстaвляя оргaнизм нaиболее устойчивый и технически совершенный. Тaковa опорa нaшего нaродного хозяйствa.” Aleksandr Vasil′evich Chaianov, Puteshestvie moego brata Alekseia v stranu krest′ianskoi utopii [1920] (Moscow: Kniga po trebovaniiu, 2012), 32. “Однaко чaстнaя инициaтивa кaпитaлистического типa у нaс все же существует: в тех облaстях, в которых бессильны коллективно упрaвляемые предприятия, и в тех случaях, где оргaнизaторский гений высотою техники побеждaет нaше дрaконовское обложение. Однaко этот остaточный кaпитaлизм у нaс весьмa ручной. […]” Ibid., 33.

A Peasant Utopia

repressions, he was shot, as a result of completely fabricated accusations. One of the accusations concerned the writer’s alleged anti-Soviet activity as a member of the Peasant Labor Party (Трудовая крестьянская партия)—an organization that had only ever existed within the fictional framework of My Brother Aleksei’s Journey…10 In fact, in some ways, Chaianov’s utopia is constructed as an alternative to socialism: an alternative that diverges slightly from the NEP-socialism of 1921– 1927 and differs significantly from post-1927 socialism in Soviet Russia; at the same time, Chaianov’s vision can be considered as a projected solution to some of the problems predicted by Malthus. There is clear textual evidence in the novel that Chaianov was well aware of Malthus’s warnings about the dangers of overpopulation in a prosperous egalitarian society. Indeed, there is also documentary proof that Chaianov read Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population carefully and that he was opposed to Malthusian scepticism regarding the future of mankind, more or less in the same way as our other chosen authors were. Alexandr Nikulin has revealed in his excellent article of 2017 that in 1914 Chaianov published a detailed analysis of Malthus’s Essay, which contained an optimistic anti-Malthusian argument concerning the future of human society, with reference to the interrelation between population growth and means of subsistence.11 As Nikifor Minin explains to Aleksei Kremnev during their tour of utopian Moscow, high population growth in urban centers had traditionally presented a great threat to progress and to democratic government, which is why the law ordering the destruction of cities was passed in 1934.12 For all the radicalism of this law, it seems to have been one of the factors in solving both the problem of overpopulation and the problem of food production: even though we are told that Moscow’s population is still growing quite fast by 1984,13 this does not pose any problems thanks to the agrarian organization of the country, which caters for material affluence. According to Nikifor, the secret of this success lies in using urban centers only for the purposes of cultural recreation and social

10 See Gennadii Prashkevich, Krasnyi sfinks: Istoriia russkoi fantastiki ot V. F. Odoevskogo do Borisa Shterna (Novosibirsk: Svin′in i synov′ia, 2007), 139–141. 11 Chaianov’s article in question was entitled “Regarding the Question of National Welfare in Europe” (“K voprosu o narodnom blagosostoianii v Evrope,” Sovremennik 8 [1914]: 78–82). For more detail, see Aleksandr Mikhailovich Nikulin, “Mezhdunarodnaia regionalistika A. V. Chaianova (k 80-letiiu gibeli uchenogo),” Ekonomicheskaia politika 12, no. 5 (2017): 153–155. 12 Chaianov, Puteshestvie 14–15. 13 Ibid., 16.

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contacts, rather than as places of living; most people live and work in the country and only come to the cities occasionally, staying in hotels during their visits (indeed, this is very similar to the lifestyle typical for Chernyshevsky’s utopian society in Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, as discussed above): Each of our cities is merely a place for social gatherings, the central square of a district. This is not a place of living, but rather a location that we need for festivities, meetings, and certain business transactions.14 A further dialectical link to Malthus is established via the socialist utopian writers mentioned at the start of Chaianov’s novel: Fourier, Chernyshevsky, and Herzen, all of whom created visions of society standing in a direct antithesis to Malthus’s theory of population. Back in his apartment at the end of a long day, Aleksei Kremnev fondly thinks of these three writers who are all dear to his heart.15 While musing over a volume of Herzen, he then asks (apparently aloud) if liberal thinkers can come up with a viable utopian alternative to socialism: He smiled with regret. Oh you Milonovs and Novgorodtsevs, Kuskovs and Makarovs, which utopia are you going to write on your banners?! What do you have by way of a replacement for the socialist order, except for the imbecility of a capitalist reaction?! I agree that the world we live in is far from a socialist paradise, but what will you give as an alternative to it?16 By way of an answer, he is catapulted into the future by an unknown force. Thus, in a creative dialogue with preceding anti-Malthusian utopian writing, Chaianov provides an up-to-date future forecast for Russia. The agricultural idyll of My Brother Aleksei’s Journey is particularly reminiscent of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s utopian vision in Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream (What Is to Be Done?, chapter 4.16), but for Chaianov who is writing over half a century later, the people of the future do not change very much in comparison to 1920, except that 14 “Кaждый из нaших городов—это просто место сборищa, центрaльнaя площaдь уездa. Это не место жизни, a место прaзднеств, собрaний и некоторых дел.” Ibid., 16. 15 Ibid., 3. 16 “Он улыбнулся с сожaлением. О вы, Милоновы и Новгородцевы, Кусковы и Мaкaровы, кaкую же утопию вы нaчертaете нa вaших знaменaх?! Что, кроме мрaкобесия кaпитaлистической реaкции, имеете вы в зaмену социaлистического строя?! Я соглaсен, мы живем дaлеко не в социaлистическом рaю, но что вы дaдите взaмен его?” Ibid., 5.

A Peasant Utopia

they live well; there is also less emphasis on technology than in Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream and more on efficient organization of labor. Overall, the same result as in Chernyshevsky’s utopia is achieved with more modest means, still providing an optimistic alternative to Malthus. At the same time, Chaianov’s evocation of the future is much more detailed than Chernyshevsky’s, and in contrast to Vera Pavlovna, Aleksei Kremnev gets an opportunity to interact directly with utopian inhabitants, which leads to quite unexpected results within Chaianov’s thought experiment, as we shall see. From the outset, My Brother Aleksei’s Journey into the Land of Peasant Utopia is presented as a self-referential utopian novel: the word “utopia” appears in the title and Kremnev’s status as a protagonist of a utopian novel is clearly (and humorously) flagged as early as in chapter 3: “Have I really become the hero of a utopian novel?” Kremnev exclaimed. “I must admit: what a ridiculous situation to find myself in!”17 In fact, repeated reminders about the utopian status of the narrative punctuate the entire text: the Minin sisters Paraskeva and Katerina, who alternately turn Aleksei’s head, are both called “utopian women”;18 Aleksei and Nikifor drive along the “utopian Pokrovka” in Moscow;19 and the phrase “land of utopia” is used at several points, including the closing sentence of the novel.20 This conspicuous self-referentiality prevents the reader from suspending his/her disbelief and prompts a constant reflection on the credibility of the utopian narrative, as well as a critical questioning of its relevance to reality: the reader is encouraged to decide for himself/herself whether the future will indeed develop in this way and even if so, whether this is desirable. In contrast to persuasive utopias, such as Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, for example, Chaianov’s text works as a series of questions to the reader, rather than as a constructive solution. The resulting reader response therefore moves away from somatically conditioned emotions, whether positive or negative, and towards a cool intellectual approach to the unfolding events, an attempt to think critically.

17 “Неужели я сделaлся героем утопического ромaнa?—воскликнул Кремнев.— Признaюсь, довольно глупое положение!” Ibid., 7. 18 Ibid., 5, 9, 20. 19 Ibid., 11. 20 Ibid., 61.

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And yet, to begin with, Aleksei’s stay appears to be so idyllic and the socioeconomic structure of the peasant utopia so smart that many readers are likely to evaluate the depicted society quite favorably, as is the protagonist. To create such a sense of euphoria, the author uses a mixture of the fantastic and the unexpected along with the familiar and the aesthetically pleasing. Thus, the dramatic moment of time travel is embedded into a fantastic framework of special effects that reminds us of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s use of the uncanny in The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816).21 Herzen’s volume suddenly snaps shut, there is a vague smell of sulphur, both the clock and the calendar accelerate incredibly, the walls tremble as household objects are randomly relocated, and Aleksei feels dizzy, propelled some sixty years into the future: A suffocating smell of sulphur flooded the room. The hands of the large wall clock began to move faster and faster and soon disappeared out of sight in their frenzied rotating motion. The pages of the loose-leaf calendar were being noisily torn off on their own and were flying up to the ceiling, filling the room with a whirlwind of paper. The walls got somehow distorted and started to tremble. […] Exhausted by his effort, Aleksei collapsed onto some sofa, which had never been there before, and lost consciousness.22

21 It has been firmly established that Chaianov admired Hoffmann and was inspired by his writing (see Chaianov, Izbrannoe, 302). 22 “В комнaте удушливо зaпaхло серой. Стрелки больших стенных чaсов зaвертелись всё быстрее и быстрее и в неистовом врaщении скрылись из глaз. Листки отрывного кaлендaря с шумом отрывaлись сaми собой и взвивaлись кверху, вихрями бумaги нaполняя комнaту. Стены кaк-то искaзились и дрожaли. […] Истощённый усилиями, Алексей опустился нa кaкой-то дивaн, никогдa не бывший здесь рaньше, и сознaние его покинуло.” Chaianov, Puteshestvie, 5. Cf. the following passage describing uncanny sounds and strange behavior of the clock just before the entrance of Hoffmann’s Mouse King: “Sie verschloß den Schrank und wollte ins Schlafzimmer, da—horcht auf Kinder!—da fing es an leise—leise zu wispern und zu flüstern und zu rascheln ringsherum, hinter dem Ofen, hinter den Stühlen, hinter den Schränken.—Die Wanduhr schnurrte dazwischen lauter und lauter, aber sie konnte nicht schlagen.” [“She locked the cabinet and wanted to retire into the bedroom, when—listen carefully, children!—there was suddenly soft muttering and whispering and rustling all around her, behind the oven, behind the chairs, behind the cupboards.— In the meantime, the wall clock was humming louder and louder, but it could not strike as usual.”] E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nußknacker und Mausekönig, chapter 4, Projekt Gutenberg, https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/etahoff/nussknac/chap004.html, accessed July 15, 2022.

A Peasant Utopia

Once Aleksei has landed in 1984, the familiar surroundings of Moscow seem to be back, but they have changed, and for the better, as both his apartment and the city outside exude harmony, peace, and vitality.23 Inside the apartment, Aleksei immediately comes into contact with everything that is aesthetically pleasing: elegant furniture, beautiful paintings, and an attractive young woman who brings him delicious food: The door opened, and his young hostess came into the room, carrying above her head a tray with steaming breakfast dishes. Aleksei was charmed by this utopian woman, by her nearly classical head, ideally placed upon a strong robust neck, by her broad shoulders and her full breast, which lifted the collar of her blouse every time she breathed in.24 Furthermore, Aleksei’s ensuing tour of the utopia is a series of pleasures: guided excursions, hearty meals of welcome, trips to exhibitions and concerts, and, to top it all, his blossoming love for Katerina, which she reciprocates. Flashes of the unexpected, perhaps no less pleasant, contribute a sense of excitement to this idyll: for example, Aleksei discovers to his great surprise that the figures of Lenin, Kerensky, and Milyukov appear together in a sculptural group where they all hold hands in a brotherly fashion.25 It seems that even past history is rearranged to create a sense of harmony and peace. The euphoria remains largely uninterrupted over the first ten chapters of the novel. It is only at the beginning of chapter 11 that the mood suddenly changes: Aleksei and Katerina are met with cool disapproval by her family, and there is also talk of war. Very much in accordance with Mach’s principle of variation, changing circumstances are introduced into the utopian thought experiment, with unforeseeable consequences. What if the inhabitants of utopia come into conflict with each other, or at least with a newcomer such as Aleksei, the author seems to ask. What if the isolation of the peasant idyll is broken and a country such as Germany declares war? What will happen if German secret agents are caught at this point and need to be sent to prison along with Aleksei, whose 23 Chaianov, Puteshestvie, 6–7. 24 “Дверь рaстворилaсь, и молодaя хозяйкa вошлa в комнaту, неся нaд головой поднос с дымящимися чaшкaми утреннего зaвтрaкa. Алексей был очaровaн этой утопической женщиной, ее почти клaссической головой, идеaльно посaженной нa крепкой сильной шее, широкими плечaми и полной грудью, поднимaвшей с кaждым дыхaнием ворот рубaшки.” Ibid., 9–10. 25 Ibid., 13–14.

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false identity as the US engineer Charlie Man is exposed? Indeed, all of this happens over the course of the final four chapters, and in a sequence of dramatically chaotic episodes, Aleksei’s blissful existence vanishes. Moreover, in a long conversation with Aleksei Minin, the head of the Minin household, he realizes, to his great dismay, that the land of utopia is ruled by a small authoritarian elite who keep the rest of the population under total surveillance to make sure that no one strays off the prescribed course of happiness. Even worse, the old Minin— clearly belonging to this elite—turns out to be dangerously similar to a fanatic: Special associations, with numerous members and tremendous power, are carefully observing millions of people, and you can be certain that not a single talent, not a single human possibility can now get lost in oblivion… The old man’s eyes burned with the fire of youth, a fanatic was standing in front of Kremnev.26 Admittedly, this is just a likely suggestion, among at least three different alternatives offered by the text: the old Minin and his friends may be prophets, fanatics, or, as he himself claims, artists.27 And so overall, even though the utopian idyll loses some of its attractiveness, as war with Germany is fought and Aleksei is sent to prison, the text nevertheless remains ambivalent. Indeed, despite the ominous developments, nothing tragic really happens, and the utopia’s return to the status quo is almost comical in its lightness: the war is over in several hours, as utopian Russia wins thanks to sophisticated weather control technology; the prison turns out to be a rather pleasant hotel building where Aleksei and his fellow prisoners are offered free meals and entertainment; finally, Aleksei is quickly released from prison after a very courteous hearing, as the authorities decide that he is innocent. In terms of reader response, this series of episodes is almost a humorous version of reductio ad absurdum, a caricature of dramatic events, rather than their serious evocation. And if reductio ad absurdum traditionally demonstrates the inner contradictions of an untenable theory, Chaianov’s light-hearted caricature leaves it up to the reader to devise explanations for the events in question and to solve all the riddles: no answers and no solutions are offered.

26 “Особые обществa, многолюдные и мощные, включaют в круг своего нaблюдения миллионы людей, и будьте уверены, что теперь не может зaтеряться ни один тaлaнт, ни однa человеческaя возможность не улетит в цaрство зaбвения… Глaзa стaрикa горели огнем молодости, перед Кремневым стоял фaнaтик.” Ibid., 50–51. 27 Ibid., 52.

A Peasant Utopia

We can conclude that Chaianov’s thought experiment starts off with the premise that a viable utopian alternative to Soviet Russia can be created. During the idyllic chapters, both Aleksei and, most probably, the reader are prepared to be convinced by the feasibility and the attractive nature of such an alternative, as embodied by the peasant state: indeed, the carefully created sense of harmony and euphoria here is reminiscent of the positive somatic effect of Chernyshevsky’s utopia, as discussed in сhapter 3 above. During the dramatic episodes, however, Chaianov’s utopia shows its darker side and its credibility is seriously undermined, although not entirely destroyed (depending on the reader’s individual preferences): the text shows that humans remain fallible, no matter what kind of state they live in. The literary thought experiment ultimately stays open-ended, the only certainty being that an individual—such as the protagonist—has to face life all alone. This is suggested by the closing sentence: Bent and depressed by the recent events, he was slowly going down the veranda stairs, just about to enter all alone, without connections or means of subsistence, into the life of a utopian country that was nearly unknown to him.28 Yet the beauty of the open ending is that this state of loneliness may change at any point: after all, peace has been restored, and Aleksei may get back to his love for Katerina and/or to his love of art. Chaianov has therefore created an innovatively versatile and self-questioning version of a literary thought experiment, the function of which is not so much to change the reader’s degree of belief in a particular theory or idea, but to provoke independent thinking.

28 “Сгорбленный и подaвленный происшедшим, он медленно спускaлся с лестницы верaнды, идя один, без связей и без средств к существовaнию, в жизнь почти неведомой ему утопической стрaны.” Ibid., 61.

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CHAPTER 6

Overpopulation in Nina Berberova’s Short Story “In Memory of Schliemann” (1958), in the Context of Malthusian Theory

It is remarkable that Nina Berberova’s short story “In Memory of Schliemann” (“Памяти Шлимана,” 1958) features exactly the same setting as My Brother Aleksei’s Journey: the future in the year 1984.1 And yet, in a neat contrast to Chaianov’s utopian and rural Russia, Berberova’s overriding modus operandi is dystopian, and we are presented with an urban society made up entirely of cities and factories, with seemingly no country life. It is a strange mixture of monarchy and capitalism, but details of the social order are vague. Indeed, the country where the story unfolds seems to be an imaginary cross between Russia and the United States, as some of the names sound English and others Russian: for example, the monarchs are called Kuzma II and Sidor the Great.2 This industrial

1

2

Of course, as hinted already in chapter 5 above, both Russian texts coincide in this respect with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chaianov anticipating and Berberova echoing the English novel. In her autobiography The Italics Are Mine, written over many years and first published in English in 1969, and in Russian in 1972, Berberova directly refers to Orwell as a key writer: see Nina Nikolaevna Berberova, Kursiv moi: Avtobiografiia (Moscow: Soglasie, 1996), 595. These first names, typical for Russian peasants, present a humorous riddle for the reader, as he or she tries to guess how Russian farmers have come to rule the heavily industrialized country depicted in the text. It seems that Berberova is deliberately avoiding clear-cut answers here.

O v e r p o p u l at i o n i n Ni n a B e r b e rov a’s Sh o r t Sto r y “ In Me m o r y o f S c h l i e m a n n” ( 1 9 5 8 )

civilization suffers from an overemphasis on efficiency, as machines rule human life in the worst possible sense. The result is a dystopian nightmare of overpopulation, in which people suffer from a very literal space shortage, as well as suffocate from heat and a lack of fresh air and contact with nature: incidentally, this vision assumes an uncanny relevance in the context of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath, especially if we consider the lack of space and fresh air associated with lockdown measures. In Berberova’s story, the progress of technology and industry appears to bring no advantages, but causes disastrous pollution. Although overpopulation is thus linked to environmental problems, Berberova lets go of Malthus’s concerns about lack of food, in a manner symptomatic of the second half of the twentieth century. However dystopian the scenario, there is no shortage of food: life goes on in an ordinary way, and protagonists even periodically enjoy delicious meals. Unlike the other works discussed above, this postmodernist dystopian thought experiment does not unfold in the usual counterfactual manner (“Let us suppose that X is true…”), but instead provides us with a snapshot of an overpopulated urban society. This society does not evolve in any way, but instead provides a backdrop against which the two main characters develop and interact. Born in Saint Petersburg practically at the same time as the twentieth century, Nina Berberova (1901–1993) was a legendary eyewitness and chronicler of its momentous and tragic history. From her teenage years onwards, Berberova was a regular and welcome attendee of Symbolist poetic circles in her home city, especially Nikolai Gumilev’s group. This creative environment shaped not only her own poetry, but also her later life: after marrying the well-known poet Vladislav Khodassevich, she left Russia together with him in 1922 and went on to spend most of her life in emigration, first in Germany, then Italy, Prague, and Paris, and from 1950 onwards in the United States, where she eventually became professor of Russian literature at Yale and Princeton. Despite all the trials and tribulations, she continued to write and to publish in Russian and became world famous for her memoirs The Italics Are Mine (Курсив мой), as well as her documentary and fictional novels, short stories, and poetry, all translated into many languages. Notwithstanding her success as a writer, her biography was absent from Soviet literary reference works until 1989, when she visited Russia again after an absence of sixtyseven years. Although Berberova’s vision of Russia’s future had been filled with many concerns even after the changes brought by perestroika, her historical 1989 visit inspired her with hope and a tentative optimism, as she admitted herself at the time: “My success in Moscow is a miracle. […] In emigration, we never spoke of the future, it was dark for us. However, we were

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mistaken.”3 There is only a short step from saying that it was a mistake to think of the future as dark to believing that “the future is radiant and wonderful,”4 as Chernyshevsky did; and Berberova is clearly in dialogue with the author of What Is to Be Done? here, whether intentionally or not. The biographical context, including such details, is crucial for understanding Berberova’s literary lineage and ultimately her work. When asked in 1989 to name the writers that have influenced her most, she first lists the great international names of European Modernism: Joyce, Proust, Kafka, André Gide.5 Almost casually, she then mentions the Symbolist poet Vladislav Khodassevich, her first husband.6 However, on closer inspection, Khodassevich proves to be merely the tip of the iceberg: most scholars agree that Berberova has been profoundly inspired by the Silver Age of Russian literature, in particular the poets Nikolai Gumilev, Alexander Blok, Konstantin Balmont, and also Anna Akhmatova.7 In other words, Berberova absorbed the best of poetic Symbolism and its legacy in Russia, a key component of the European artistic movement that paved the way for Modernism without sharing its stark disillusionment. Another relevant feature of Symbolism is that it is marked by a tireless quest for spiritual ideals and refined beauty, something that was given to Berberova as a torch to carry on.8 When delving deeper, Berberova’s roots can also be discovered in the Golden Age of Russian literature: from childhood, her favorite writers were Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol, Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, Tyutchev, Goncharov, and Chekhov.9 This means that she had a privileged access to a veritable treasure trove of humanist values in Russian culture. It is not accidental that while finding a second homeland in France and naturally sympathizing with French Existentialism, Berberova could never quite espouse the passive sense of alienation of human beings from each other that was often characteristic of the latter

3

“Мой успех в Москве – это чудо. […] В эмиграции мы никогда не говорили о будущем, оно было для нас темно. Но мы ошиблись.” From a 1989 interview with Feliks Medvedev, Berberova, Kursiv moi, 623–624. 4 See Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii, Chto delat′? Iz rasskazov o novykh liudiakh [1863] (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 290 (Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, chapter 4.16): “будущее светло и прекрасно”. 5 Berberova, Kursiv moi, 615. 6 Ibid. 7 See Ida Junker, Le Monde de Nina Berberova (Paris: Harmattan, 2012), 11, 20, 27, 34–36, 41. 8 For a selective comparative overview of Russian and European Symbolism, see Natasha Grigorian, European Symbolism: In Search of Myth (1860–1910) (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2009). 9 Junker, Le Monde de Nina Berberova, 17–20.

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movement. Indeed, one of the final chapters of her autobiography is wittily entitled “Not Waiting for Godot.”10 Being an avid reader with an encyclopedic erudition and a predilection for philosophical and sociological writings in addition to fiction, it is certain that Berberova was aware of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population and that she read many literary texts in the Russian line of Malthus reception, including most of the works discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. Although further research is needed to pinpoint Berberova’s specific sources, there are already a few clear leads. In a 1961 article, entitled “Keys to the Present,” she refers to Vladimir Odoevsky,11 while in The Italics Are Mine, she mentions both Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and Aleksei Tolstoy’s Aelita, in both cases with a curious grudging respect.12 She acknowledges the two novelists’ achievement, but intends to write quite differently. This is precisely what she does in the short story “In Memory of Schliemann.” Moreover, the very explicitness of the overpopulation problem in this text points to the author’s direct concern with the Malthusian context: it can be argued that excessive population growth in the not very distant future constitutes the main subject of the story. The fact that Berberova’s Malthusian scenario is a dystopian nightmare is vividly presented from the start: in terms of the Riffaterrian method of striking elements, we can first of all note her frequent use of symbols and metaphors, natural in view of her Symbolist roots, even though her unorthodox and often dissonant choice of images for such symbolic purposes is symptomatic of her as a modernist writer. Particularly memorable is the scene in which the dry pool of a fountain at the outskirts of the city is densely packed with people, while being totally devoid of water: There was an indistinct murmur of voices over the dry pool of the fountain. It was completely packed with people: sitting, standing, and lying down. In the light of the streetlamps, it was possible to discern faces—young and old, bizarre clothes; […] it was as if during this stuffy summer night all these people had left their houses and had somewhat by accident, unexpectedly for themselves, remained in the square, in this giant seashell, or, rather—on this giant raft made of concrete and trying to drift

10 As a response to the title of Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. 11 Nina Nikolaevna Berberova, “Kliuchi k nastoiashchemu” [Ключи к настоящему], in her Neizvestnaia Berberova: Roman, stikhi, stat′i (St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 1998), 228. 12 Berberova, Kursiv moi, 369; 207–208.

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away into the nocturnal space. […] At first sight, it seemed that there were many hundreds of people here, as well as several kittens, several dogs, at least a dozen children, two of whom were being breastfed, and a large cage with a parrot.13 A dry fountain is a striking oxymoronic symbol in its own right, epitomizing the absence of nature in the urban civilization depicted, as well as quite literally pointing to the absence of water, so essential to human life. However, Berberova goes further and metaphorically presents the fountain as “this giant seashell” and “this giant raft made of concrete and trying to drift away into the nocturnal space.” Both a seashell and a raft are normally organically connected to water. Yet, this seashell is packed with people, thus offering them (illusory) protection, but not water. And the raft is threateningly made of concrete, in the same way as most of the dystopian cityscape, and is trying to float on night air, rather than on water—thus, the frustrating waterlessness of the setting is cemented, literally and figuratively. The author’s aim is to make sure the reader identifies with the protagonists’ discomfort, to the point of feeling as hot and thirsty as they do— and this is exactly what the text succeeds in doing. There are two main characters in the story: the nameless narrator and the young woman to whom he is romantically attached, Daly (Дэли). Daly has gorgeous golden hair and is shown to be charming, but somewhat disorganised. As for the narrator, he is not described at all and even his name is unknown; we can only assume that he is also relatively young, as he is still a junior accountant and considers getting married to Daly. Both characters work in the same large and important institution. However, Daly has just been fired from her job for being repeatedly late to work—due to the impossibly large crowds and endless waiting times during the morning rush hour, as she explains. In contrast, the narrator himself is highly efficient and successful; moreover, he is in the process of working out an ambitious master plan to divide the population into two shifts—the day shift and the night shift—and use both night and day for work 13 “Над сухим бассейном стоял смутный гул голосов. Он был совершенно полон сидящими, стоящими, лежащими в нем людьми. При свете фонарей можно было различить лица – молодые и старые, странные одежды; […] словно в эту душную летнюю ночь все эти люди вышли из своих домов и как-то случайно, неожиданно для самих себя, остались на площади, в этой огромной раковине, или, лучше сказать – на этом огромном цементном плоту, пытающемся уплыть в ночные пространства. […] На глаз здесь было много сотен человек, несколько котят, несколько собак, не менее дюжины детей, из которых двоих кормили грудью, и большая клетка с попугаем.” Nina Nikolaevna Berberova, “Pamiati Shlimana,” in her Rasskazy v izgnanii (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo im. Sabashnikovykh, 1958), 315–316.

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and life, which should solve the problems of excessive crowds and space and time shortage for a couple of centuries at least.14 An additional element of the master plan is to construct buildings with an equal number of floors above and below the ground, so as to save space. In the context of Russian literary responses to Malthus’s Essay, this proposed series of solutions to the population problem is as original as it is constructive, despite a latent undertone of dystopian absurdity. Indeed, the reader is somewhere on the borderline between admiring amazement and shocked disappointment when the ingenious plan is described in practical terms: the intention is to split the city inhabitants into “plus signs” and “minus signs,” who would live above and below the ground respectively. In fact, it can be argued that sarcastic humor at the expense of the narrator underlies the following passage: For some ten or fifteen years this would be perhaps not quite comfortable, while everyone would be getting used to it, yet things would be more than worth the wait! When meeting each other, people would add a plus or a minus sign to their name: “Petrov-plus.” “Sidorov-minus.” Which means that if you are Ivanov-minus yourself, then you cannot have any business for Petrov, you will never meet him again, while it is, on the contrary, quite convenient for you to deal with Sidorov. And again—you have won time.15 Fittingly, Berberova’s Malthusian population scenario is presented in a format that is very close to that of a hypothetical thought experiment. The action is projected into the future and unfolds along regular time intervals, while being based on a specific intellectual hypothesis: Malthus’s famous statement that population will grow exponentially under favorable conditions.16 However, in contrast to most (literary) thought experiments, the aim of Berberova’s text 14 Ibid., 327, 331. 15 “Каких-нибудь десять-пятнадцать лет было бы, может быть, не совсем удобно, пока не привыкнут, но зато потом! Люди бы к имени своему, знакомясь, прибавляли знак плюс или знак минус: —Петров-плюс. —Сидоров-минус. Это значит, что если вы сами Иванов-минус, то дело с Петровым иметь не можете, вы больше никогда не встретитесь с ним, а удобно дело иметь вам с Сидоровым. И опять— вы выиграли время.” Ibid., 311. 16 See the Introduction and chapter 1 above.

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is not to prove or disprove Malthusian theory, but rather to show an alarming extrapolation of current demographic and environmental trends into the future, which is both more practical and less convoluted in comparison to Malthus. Moreover, the action evolves not really across time (although time passes in the process), but rather across space. Hence the structure of the story, which is marked by incremental repetition as the protagonist travels from one destination to another: his hope of finding a relaxing spot of nature is repeatedly built up and then dashed as all he finds for hundreds of miles is a vast urban expanse of industrial pollution. This expansive structure can be related to Ernst Mach’s principle of variation, or the playing out of multiple alternative scenarios, as discussed earlier in this book. However, Berberova’s originality lies in the fact that she mainly varies the circumstances across space, and much less across time. In addition, the structural set-up of the narrative is non-linear, as the chronological progression of the journey is periodically interrupted by digressions into the past and into the future, in the form of the narrator’s thoughts on his own and his country’s destiny. There are four key stages in the protagonist’s experience as he gets three longawaited days off work: 1) his bus journey to the Great Fountains; 2) his bus journey to the lake; 3) his train journey to the gulf; and 4) his final meeting with Daly, when he tells her about his master plan. Each stage features several subthreads. The journey to the Fountains is punctuated by several flashbacks occurring in the narrator’s thoughts: in particular, his evening with Daly some time ago; his ideas for the master plan; fleeting references to the current social order; and his dreams of getting married to someone (“and why not to Daly?,” “и почему бы не на Дэли?”).17 The scene at the dysfunctional Great Fountains is the first disappointment: a literal image of overpopulation, as quoted above, depicted in terms of an acute space shortage; there is no water, no air, and no nature. As the narrator remains hopeful and travels to the lake, there are further digressions to his ideas for the master plan. He is aware of his intellectual debt to the “great utopian writers” of the twentieth century,18 even though he points out that their great forecasts have not been realized, since the progress in the current year 1984 is much less advanced than expected (a biting intertextual remark that would apply to Chernyshevsky and Chaianov in particular). Berberova’s character intends to do much better, as his project is to take out a patent on his idea, which has nothing to do with writing a utopian novel: “this is a serious matter

17 Berberova, “Pamiati Shlimana,” 314. 18 Ibid., 318.

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that does not at all resemble a utopia.”19 Putting a halt to these thoughts, the lake is an even greater disappointment than the Fountains: the dystopian urban civilization is reduced ad absurdum here, as the lakeside landscape is dominated by the deafening noise of an immense factory and the endless rows of parked cars, which completely cover the rest of the space.20 The absurd vision escalates as the narrator spots a second factory on the opposite bank of the lake, beyond which there is an immense power plant reminiscent of an Eiffel Tower that has not been completely dismantled: There, on the opposite bank, an identical copy of the nearest factory could be discerned, also made of brick and glass, enormous, and somehow alive: even from here, one could feel that it was full of people, deafening noise, and a mechanical intensity of sound and vibration, while behind it, slightly to the side, towered a gigantic power plant, completely transparent, its complex ornament reminiscent of a half-dismantled Eiffel Tower.21 The shocking image of the half-dismantled Eiffel Tower amounts to a dystopian reversal of a symbol epitomizing the beauty of modernity. Quite literally, we are witnessing a deconstruction of the Eiffel Tower—perhaps, a demolition of sophisticated human culture by a mindless technology. Yet the protagonist still does not give up and undertakes a train journey to the gulf, during which there are further digressions about the future of human society, potentially improved by the master plan, and the historical past, which is “wonderful.”22 The ridiculously overcrowded beach at the gulf is a third and final escalation in the series of disappointments: the sand is so densely packed with people that it is impossible to say what its color is.23 Yet, here the narrator finally manages to take a swim in real water. What further maintains his good spirits is an expanse of blue haze over the horizon: he imagines that, beyond the haze, there is finally unspoiled nature, with clear ocean waters, green forests, birds,

19 Ibid., 318. 20 Ibid., 319. 21 “Там, на том берегу, виднелся двойник ближнего завода, тоже кирпично-стеклянный, огромный, чем-то живой: даже отсюда чувствовалось, что он полон людей, грохота, механической силы гуденья и дрожанья, а за ним, слегка сбоку, возвышалась гигантская электрическая станция, вся прозрачная, сложным узором своим похожая на разобранную не до конца Эйфелеву башню.” Ibid., 320. 22 Ibid., 324. 23 Ibid., 328.

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and flowers.24 Indeed, he is so overwhelmed when dreaming of a holiday in that idyllic place together with Daly that he suddenly realizes that love is all that matters in life and regrets being too harsh on Daly earlier.25 After a night spent on the beach, the protagonist faces the final shock of the dawn: there is another heavily polluted city on the other side of the gulf, instead of the imagined natural idyll.26 As a result of the incremental structure I have outlined, the narrative is endlessly spreading out in different directions without really progressing, with the inevitable effect that the reader feels trapped in Berberova’s urban dystopia, suffocating in the same way as the characters. This is exactly what the author intends when conducting her thought experiment: to make sure that we hear the alarm bells when considering the future of our urban civilization. The closing pages constitute a brief epilogue to the story. After returning home, the protagonist goes to see Daly and tells her about his master plan, which is now the only chance to end the hopelessness he has witnessed during his three-day journey. He also explains to her that Schliemann was the archaeologist who excavated the city of Troy, which he found buried under eight other cities. The Schliemann Square, from which the narrator’s journey starts at the beginning of the story, thus becomes symbolic both of urban overpopulation and of the master plan designed to end it. Hence also the title of Berberova’s text. The closing line of the epilogue is as unexpected as it is important: Daly lightly shakes her head, the comb that holds her hair together falls out, and her gorgeous golden hair falls to her shoulders. In this way, the narrator’s dream comes true by accident: he has been asking Daly to take out her comb earlier on, while she has been reluctant to do so. The untying of the hair is clearly symbolic of letting go of emotional barriers, and so the final wisdom of the text seems to be that life is worth living even if only a fraction of our dreams become reality. My concluding remarks will be about the predictable, the unexpected, and ultimately, the Malthusian context. As we recall, in line with Michael Riffaterre’s reader response theory, the reader reacts most strongly to the unexpected elements in a literary text, which may include vivid description, metaphorical language, or symbols. In Berberova’s story, such striking elements are poetic symbols of salvation, in particular, Daly’s golden hair and the food she cooks. Both are linked to intimacy, and mutual love unexpectedly offers salvation to the two protagonists even amidst the most monotonous and hapless existence. Berberova thus paradoxically contradicts Malthus and his forecasts of food 24 Ibid., 326. 25 Ibid., 326–328. 26 Ibid., 330.

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shortage, using these poetic symbols to suggest that, however bleak the future outlook, life will find a way. As for the predictable, it is not only exemplified by the monotony of machines in the short story, but is also reduced ad absurdum to show the dehumanization of the dystopian society: throughout the text, individuals are reduced to machines, numbers, or the plus and minus signs. As a result of combining this kind of reductio ad absurdum with striking symbolic elements, Berberova’s dystopia does not lose credibility, but achieves the contrary thanks to a realistic dimension, which includes hope and the human desire to live. At the same time, the Russian author’s originality goes against reader expectations by updating Malthus in accordance with twentieth-century intellectual trends: instead of a Malthusian struggle for existence in the wake of food shortage, we witness a peaceful, or at worst indifferent, coexistence of individuals amidst an environmental crisis. Ultimately, Berberova’s literary hypothetical thought experiment functions as an effective warning for the reader, urging us to preserve the planet’s natural resources so that mankind can have a future. In the post-2020 world, this warning is more relevant than ever.

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We can conclude that, in our chosen texts, the Malthusian format of the literary thought experiment, as discussed in the Introduction, proves to be first and foremost an effective rhetorical tool, in other words, a way to influence and/or convince the reader within a specific intellectual context, usually concerning a particular type of prognosis for the future of human society. Paradoxically, in most of the texts, Malthus’s rhetorical weapon is turned against his own theory of population, as Malthusian thought experiments are used to show that the future is less gloomy than Malthus envisioned, or at least different. Only Odoevsky, in “The Last Suicide,” and Berberova demonstrate a materialization of the original Malthusian overpopulation scenario in the future. Yet, Odoevsky’s story functions as an absurd hyperbole, which makes the reader sceptical about events that are “too bad to be true,” an impression that is reinforced by criticism of Malthusian theory in the frame tale, while Berberova shows that the main problems of the overpopulated future are not poverty and food shortage, but rather environmental pollution and lack of space. Similarly, the playing out of our literary thought experiments typically leads to a more or less pronounced demonstration of the idea that under extreme circumstances, humans are capable of mutual help and are not necessarily doomed to a relentless Malthusian struggle for existence. We have seen this especially in Chernyshevsky, Bogdanov, and Chaianov, while Berberova offers an interesting third alternative: an indifferent, but peaceful coexistence of individuals under pressure. While it is not an objective of this study to assess the accuracy or inaccuracy of Malthus’s theory, we are justified in saying at this point that the Malthusian format of the literary thought experiment is ideologically very versatile: the same format can be adapted to opposing theories and ideologies. The chosen authors mould this format in different ways to make sure that their portrayal of the future comes across as an exciting story that captivates and then influences the reader. Typically, the future is evoked via narrative forms borrowed from science fiction: those of time travel or space travel accounts. Sometimes, these are complemented by additional narrative techniques, such as Chernyshevsky’s evocation of a dream or Berberova’s first-person narrative from the future. All of this contributes to the sheer narrative appeal of the selected texts. As discussed in the Introduction to this study, the thought experiments in

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question are all based on a “what if ” premise: “let us suppose that X happened,” where X is an imaginary—and often implausible—event or series of events that has never taken place. Overall, these “what if ” assumptions fall into two major groups: 1)  What if we could travel to the ideal future, on Earth or another planet? 2)  What if the future of human civilization is dystopian? In the first group, two further subcategories can be identified: the ideal future can either live up to our expectations of perfection (A), or treacherously disappoint them (B). In case (A), the literary thought experiment plays out a genuinely constructive vision of universal happiness, which is possible thanks to technological progress and human effort: in particular, this happens in the texts by Chernyshevsky and Bogdanov, on Earth in the future and on Mars respectively. The epistemic function of these thought experiments is to inspire and instruct the readers so that they embark towards such future achievements. Of course, the success of this didactic agenda depends partly on the reader’s degree of optimism or scepticism about mankind’s future, but even if the success is partial, it may well be that a reader’s optimism is reinforced, whereas scepticism is attenuated as a result of the reading process. In case (B), the thought experiment format usually provides a systematic method for highlighting the dangers of implementing social utopias: many revolutions have actually attempted to apply a utopia to reality in the course of history, especially in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917. The resulting view of any utopian social theories is highly sceptical: as the thought experiment unfolds, a utopian society turns out to be highly volatile and typically insidiously transforms itself into its opposite, an anti-utopia. The desire of the ruling elite to achieve universal happiness and material welfare, whether by force or by soft persuasion, eventually results in universal misery or at least leads to a worrying absence of individual freedom. This process is dramatically evoked by Odoevsky, especially in “A City without a Name,” as well as by Tolstoy and, in a very subtle way, Chaianov. In other words, these thought experiments show how good intentions pave the road to hell. Sometimes all vestiges of good intentions disappear, as the elite becomes corrupt and seeks only power and wealth for itself, bought at the expense of violence and slavery to which the rest of the society is subjected, as on Mars in Aelita. The epistemic function, or effect, is no longer didactic here: these texts warn the readers about the dangers of social perfectionism and encourage them to think critically. Vibrantly topical in the context of Russian history in particular and

Conclusion

no less relevant in a global setting, the role of social revolutions is thereby seriously questioned. This is especially remarkable in Aelita, which was supposed to be a model work of Soviet literature and duly passed censorship in Soviet Russia. Mach’s procedure of variation, often embedded into literary thought experiments of this type, enables the reader to test the durability of the ideal future (Chaianov) and/or to consider multiple alternatives to failed utopias (Tolstoy), which further enhances the thought-provoking open-endedness of these texts. The second, less numerous, group of texts starts from the premise “What if the future is dystopian.” This is the case in Odoevsky’s “The Last Suicide” and in Berberova’s story, where life in the future is unbearable or at least highly uncomfortable because the Malthusian nightmare scenario of overpopulation materializes. Each of the two authors shows step by step the far-reaching tragic or dramatically unpleasant consequences of such a scenario in everyday life. Firstly, these thought experiments warn us that sometimes the worst may happen simply as a result of historical momentum, independently of our wishes or intentions. In encouraging their readers to prepare for the worst, these texts also make us think about possible means of preventing the disastrous developments (this is where the present has an advantage over the future!) and also about ways of coping with calamities and even making the most of them—we can recall Odoevsky’s life-loving young couple or Berberova’s evocation of Daly’s cooking for the narrator. Secondly, via the dystopian progression of their thought experiments, both authors paradoxically question and undermine the validity of using normative theories, such as Malthus’s theory of population, as a basis for future forecasts, even though they do it in somewhat different ways. Odoevsky introduces a heavy layer of irony into his story, by explicitly labelling the narrator of “The Last Suicide” as unreliable (mentally disturbed, in fact!) and by calling Malthus’s theory a “complete nonsense” in the frame tale. Combined with the method of reductio ad absurdum used throughout Odoevsky’s text, all of this compels many readers to agree that Malthus’s original claim about the miserable overpopulated and undernourished future of humanity is too absurd to be true. Berberova, in contrast, portrays an overpopulated future realistically, without irony, but at the same time shows how it is possible to cope with the problems such a future entails and even to lead a happy and fulfilled life in this future in spite of everything. So the dystopian texts prove to be quite life-asserting: they help their readers to get rid of illusions about the future by confronting them with worst-case scenarios and at the same time, they encourage us to think of preventative and constructive solutions so that such scenarios may be averted. Forewarned is forearmed, indeed.

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From the above summary, it is easy to assess the utopian intensity of our seven works, so as to come up with a preliminary typology that will facilitate the analysis of literary thought experiments in future research. We can see that two of our texts are constructive utopias (Chernyshevsky and Bogdanov); three are treacherous utopias which turn into anti-utopias, or dystopias (“A City without a Name,” Tolstoy, and Chaianov); and two are clear-cut dystopias (“The Last Suicide” and Berberova). So, within our (admittedly limited) corpus, clearly positive visions of the future occur in the same proportion as clearly negative ones. As defined in the Introduction, we have also differentiated between counterfactual thought experiments (based on completely implausible or fantastic assumptions), hypothetical thought experiments (based on a hypothesis which may turn out to be true), and fictional models (fictional scenarios which may later materialize in reality). The distribution of plausibility along this scale is symmetrical across the four texts with a clear utopian or dystopian focus: the two utopias count one counterfactual thought experiment (Bogdanov) and one hypothetical thought experiment (Chernyshevsky),1 exactly as do the two dystopias (“The Last Suicide” and Berberova respectively). The more a writer believes in his/her vision of the future, utopian or dystopian, the more likely he/she is to use a hypothetical thought experiment, rather than a counterfactual one. Yet it seems that in the human mind, hope and fear are equally strong when it comes to imagining the future: hence the balance between positive and negative visions. For the same reasons, there is a strong dialectical connection between utopia and dystopia, which has been picked up by the largest proportion of writers: three of the texts are treacherous utopias. Two of these are counterfactual thought experiments (Tolstoy and Chaianov) and one is closest to a fictional model, a format which has the strongest affinity with empirical reality (“A City without a Name”). The potential treachery of utopia is demonstrated using extremes along our axis of plausibility: either the most unreal conditions for the development of the narrative are chosen, or the most plausible ones, which results in a heightened dramatic effect of these evocations. This preliminary typology of literary thought experiments enables us to assess both the degree of optimism and/or scepticism and the degree of verisimilitude and/or fantasy within a relevant work of fiction. Such a theoretical framework is especially useful for comparing texts that deal with the same or similar issues from different perspectives and can serve as a conceptual tool kit for further research on literary thought experiments. 1

To be precise, Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream is somewhere on the borderline between a counterfactual and a hypothetical thought experiment, as discussed in chapter 3.

Conclusion

From the close commentaries of the preceding chapters, it also follows clearly that literary thought experiments are very much oriented towards generating reader response: often, the author has a specific desirable response in mind. Hence the predominance of chronological narrative, which focuses on a central protagonist and develops linearly across time and/or space, similar to a diary or a scientific report (most of these features are used by Malthus, too, as discussed above). Three of our texts are written in this way using a first-person narrative, thus foregrounding the fictional hero’s perspective: “A City without a Name” (here, we have a narrator who is a character observing the events of the story), “The Red Star” (narrated by Leonid, the main character), and “In Memory of Schliemann” (told by the nameless protagonist). In three more texts, there is an omniscient narrator who either has the status of a frame tale character (the mentally deranged young man in “The Last Suicide”) or transfers the task of narration to a central character at key points in the text (the “radiant queen” in Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream and Aelita respectively). Chaianov is the only author to have a straightforward omniscient narrator, but this narrator so completely absorbs the point of view of the protagonist, Aleksei Kremnev, throughout the novel, that the story might well have been told in the first person. Similarly, Chernyshevsky focuses on the perspective of Vera Pavlovna and Tolstoy has a preference for that of the engineer Los′. This kind of single-mindedness, characteristic of our texts, enables the writers to play out each thought experiment consistently, prioritizing the initial premise, its logical development, and the author’s ideological agenda. This streamlined progression is frequently reinforced by a tripartite structure of the overall story built around a journey: we move from an initial situation to the destination of the journey and then back to the place of departure, but enriched with new insights (Chernyshevsky, Bogdanov, Tolstoy, Chaianov—although his journey is one-way only—and Berberova). This kind of progressive structure also lends itself easily to introducing Mach’s method of variation, whereby different circumstances, settings, digressions, and obstacles are introduced by the author to play out multiple alternative scenarios and thereby to provide a range of additional arguments to promote his/her agenda. Together with the above narrative techniques, the authors use specific rhetorical and stylistic strategies that further help literary thought experiments to elicit reader response. We have seen that a mixture of the familiar and the unexpected is typically employed to attract the reader’s attention to those points in the narrative which go counter to our expectations, in line with Riffaterre’s conception of the tension between predictability and unpredictability, which is at the heart of reader response, an idea that has been wonderfully developed by de Beaugrande, Halász, van Peer, Snelgrove, and many other prominent theorists. In our chosen

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texts, a combination of realistic and fantastic elements has a similar effect. A realistic setting usually lulls us into a sense of security, creating an illusion of plausibility that we are ready to believe. Against this background, fantastic elements can then be introduced and are more likely to blend smoothly into the realistic fabric of the narrative, encouraging a suspension of disbelief. The fictional scenario can then unfold exactly as the author intends it to, regardless of empirical reality if necessary. If the author wants us to get emotionally involved with the action of the literary thought experiment, for example, to empathize with someone, or to get indignant about something, then a vivid and/or visual evocation of dramatic episodes may be added to reinforce the somatic effect of literature: we then identify with key characters both on the emotional and on the bodily level. As we recall, Iser noted: “‘identification’ is not an end in itself, but a stratagem by means of which the author stimulates attitudes in the reader.”2 Similarly, as discussed above, it has been noted by Halász and Snelgrove, among others, that empathy plays a key role in reader response. If, on the contrary, the author’s aim is to create a distance between the reader and the action, then the technique of reductio ad absurdum may be applied, thanks to which events appear increasingly ridiculous and absurd and therefore potentially implausible or unlikely. As a result of the above strategies, to quote Iser yet again, “the thoughts of the author take place subjectively in the reader, who thinks what he is not. […] These are the ways in which reading literature gives us the chance to formulate the unformulated.”3 It is precisely in this formulation of the unformulated with regard to hopes and fears for the future that lies the epistemic and cultural value of literary thought experiments. Here, we need to keep in mind that, however logical the argumentation encapsulated within a literary work, each author is inevitably expressing his/her biased point of view (often dictated by a specific philosophical agenda). Therefore, thought experiments within narrative fiction in many cases exemplify literature’s potential cultural role as argumentative narrative or publicity, in the general sense of discourse that effectively promotes a particular opinion or system of beliefs. Indeed, we have seen how easily a text can manipulate its readers on different levels. In the case of the chosen authors, we are typically dealing with open-minded and liberal systems of beliefs, which may shed light on our future aspirations and prospects. However, any argumentative narratives or

2 3

Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” [1974], in ReaderResponse Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 65. Ibid., 66–68.

Conclusion

publicity texts are tools that can be used for better or for worse and need to be handled with care. From the analysis in this book, we can conclude that in the first instance, thought experiments in literature are a particularly pronounced application of the power of art to persuade and to transform mindsets. At the same time, when thus analyzed as a constellation within the framework of the present pilot study, the selected works of Russian prose fiction emerge as part of an international epistemological tradition that links literature, philosophy, and science. This new perspective on the chosen texts ultimately changes the way we read them: they no longer appear as isolated utopian or dystopian dreams rooted exclusively in their respective historical period, but begin to operate in dialogue with each other, as well as with Malthus and the wider interdisciplinary field of thought experimentation. This dialogic dimension enables us to see much more than merely ineffectual idealism or outdated disillusionment in these largely fantastic visions. Instead, we discover the function of the latter as experimental sites that generate intellectual debate, critical thinking, and creative modeling of possible socio-historical scenarios, in a manner which remains topical to this day and resonates especially acutely with the global problems of the post-2020 world.

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Index

Aelita, 69–70, 73–82, 97 Akhmatova, Anna, 96 America, 59 anti–utopia. See dystopia Aristotle, 9, 12 Astarte, 62 Atlantic Ocean, 7 Atlantis, 77–79 Balmont, Konstantin, 96 Baudelaire, Charles, 14 Beaugrande, Robert de, 12, 14 Bely, Andrei, 73 Bentham, Jeremy, 34–35, 44–50, 52–53 Berberova, Nina, 2, 94–100, 102–3 Blok, Alexander, 73, 96 Bogdanov, Alexander, 2, 62, 69–74, 76, 79–84 Britain, 28, 57 Canada, 45 Chaianov, Alexander, 1–2, 83–89, 92–94, 100 Chekhov, Anton, 96 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 2, 55, 58–65, 67, 69, 71, 74–75, 83, 88–89, 93, 96–97, 100 Christ, 41 Condorcet, Marquis de, 25–27 Damasio, Antonio, 15 Darwin, Charles, 55–59, 72 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 96 Dunmei, Van, 81 dystopia, 2, 5–6,19, 30, 33, 39, 43, 49, 51, 53, 55, 78, 80, 94–95, 97–99, 101–3, 106–8

Einstein, Albert, 2 England, 24, 28, 57–59 Europe, 28, 57 evidence, 7–8, 16, 23, 28, 35–36, 43–44, 53, 67, 87 Existentialism, 96–97 Faust (a character in Odoevsky’s work), 33, 36, 38, 43–45, 52 Fedorov, Nikolai, 71 fictional models, 8, 35, 53, 108 France, 19, 25, 96 Franklin, Benjamin, 22, 24 French Revolution, 25, 59 Galileo, 2 Germany, 91–92, 95 Gide, André, 96 Gilbert, Geoffrey, 27 Godwin, William, 6, 25–28, 31, 61 Gogol, Nikolai, 96 Goncharov, Ivan, 96 Gumilev, Nikolai, 95–96 Halász, László, 11–13 Herzen, Alexander, 1, 58, 88, 90 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 90 Hume, David, 21–23 Iagodinskii, Viktor, 73 Iser, Wolfgang, 9–11, 14, 16 Italy, 95 Jakobson, Roman, 12 Joyce, James, 96 Kafka, Franz, 11, 96 Kerensky, Alexander, 91

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Kessler, Karl, 58 Khodassevich, Vladislav, 95–96 Kropotkin, Petr, 55, 58 Lenin, Vladimir, 85, 91 Lermontov, Mikhail, 96 Lewis, David, 16 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 57 London, 57 Mach, Ernst, 3–5, 16, 62, 70, 74, 79–80, 84, 91, 100 Malthus, Thomas, 6–7, 18–19, 21–32, 34–35, 37–38, 43–45, 54–61, 63–65, 67–69, 72–73, 75, 81, 83–84, 87–89, 95, 97, 99–100, 102–3 Manchester, 57, 72 Mars (planet), 69–70, 73–82 Marx, Karl, 72 Maupassant, Guy de, 11 Mikhailova, Maria, 81 Mill, John Stuart, 59 Milyukov, Pavel, 91 modality in literature, 8–9 Moscow, 1, 87, 89, 91, 95 Mukařovský, Jan, 12 Nardocchio, Elaine, 10 “new people” (in Chernyshevsky’s work), 63, 67, 71 Nicolosi, Riccardo, 18, 34–35, 37 Nikulin, Alexandr, 87 Odoevsky, Vladimir, 2, 18, 33–38, 43–44, 46–47, 49, 52–53, 55, 59, 62, 67–68, 74, 97 Orwell, George, 83 Paperno, Irina, 71 Paris, 95 Paulson, William, 13 Peer, Willie van, 12–13 Plato, 9, 78

Potter, Rosanne, 10–11 Poulet, Georges, 10 Prague, 95 probability, 7–8 Proust, Marcel, 96 Pushkin, Alexander, 96 reader response, 4, 9–15, 37, 43, 53, 63, 67, 74, 89, 102, 109–110 Realism (realism), 55, 62, 82 Red Star, 69–77, 79, 81, 83 reductio ad absurdum, 9, 30, 37, 39, 43, 48–49, 53, 61, 92, 103, 107, 110 Reiss, Julian, 36 Riffaterre, Michael, 9, 14–15, 30, 37, 63, 67, 74, 102 Robinson, Douglas, 14–15 Romanticism (Romantic movement), 34–35, 42, 46, 55 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 21 Russia, 1, 7, 18, 25, 55, 57, 59, 62, 69, 77, 83, 85–88, 92–96 Saint Petersburg, 33, 61, 67, 95 Sakulin, Pavel, 34 Schelling, Friedrich, 34–35 Schliemann, Heinrich, 94, 102 Siberia, 59 Smith, Adam, 22, 24, 72 Snelgrove, Teresa, 11–12 somatic effect of literature, 9, 15–16, 37, 41, 43, 50, 53, 67, 93, 110 Stites, Richard, 74 Sucur, Slobodan, 46, 51 Symbolism (Symbolist movement), 96 tektology, 70–72 thought experiments, 2, 3–4, 5–6, 8, 105–8,110–11 counterfactual 2, 3, 6, 8, 16–18, 21, 28, 33–36, 70, 84, 108 hypothetical 8, 67, 99, 103, 108 Todes, Daniel, 58

Index

Tolstoy, Aleksei, 2, 62, 69, 73–74, 76, 81–82, 97, 106–9 Tolstoy, Leo, 15, 73, 96 Troy, 102 Tyutchev, Fedor, 96 United States, 94–95 USSR, 86 utilitarianism, 34, 44, 52 utopia, 5–6, 106–8

variation, principle of, 4–5, 62–63, 74, 79, 81–82, 84, 91, 100, 107, 109 Venus (planet), 69, 76, 80 Wallace, Robert, 22–23, 25, 58 Wallentin, Mikkel, 16 Zola, Émile, 19

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