Faculty Introduction for ”Victor Saparin’s ‘The Trial of Tantalus’: A Utopian Depiction of the Khrushchev Thaw Period?”

In my Perspectives on the Humanities course, Science Fiction in Three Media, few students got excited about the Soviet SF stories we read. I could hardly blame them: the ideological restrictions imposed on Soviet writers in the 1960s meant that science fiction had to operate within a narrow range of acceptable expression. Depictions of extraterrestrial life had to confirm that any advanced civilization must have achieved a one-party, socialist world-state; scientists either solved technical problems or declared that some future scientist would undoubtedly solve them, because Marxist-Leninist anthropology took as axiomatic the human conquest of the material universe. Yet I urged students to read Soviet SF not despite but for these apparent limitations, to see how some writers flirted with alternatives to them, or even subtly mocked them. (See, for example, anything by the Strugatsky Brothers.) Deng Kexin became so keen on this mode of reading that she built her late-semester research project around it, developing a carefully historicist reading of Yuri Saparin’s “Trial of Tantalus”—a superficially utopian story about an emergent disease. Kexin’s research led her into the scholarship on such topics as western depictions of politics in SF, cycles of freeze and thaw in one-party states, and the role of elections in the Soviet Union. The final essays in POH often impressed me with their ambition, heft, and execution, but none more than Kexin’s.

Read “Victor Saparin’s ‘The Trial of Tantalus’: A Utopian Depiction of the Khrushchev Thaw Period?”.

Ezra Claverie, Lecturer in the Writing Program