Slovo 26 2 by SLOVO Journal

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 2 (AUTUMN 2014), 1-2.

Editorial EUGENIA ELLANSKAYA Executive Editor, Slovo 2013-2014 Slovo is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary academic journal run by postgraduate students at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Spanning across humanities and social sciences, the journal covers all issues concerning Russia, Eurasia, Central and Eastern Europe. While seeking to provide a publishing opportunity both to outstanding young researchers and established academics, Slovo is a unique voice for the regions covered. In our third year as a digital publication, we hope to reach out to a wider audience and to continue sharing our academic discoveries internationally. The current, concluding issue of Volume 26 might not fully reflect the interdisciplinary scope of Slovo, however it has its merits. We are proud to share with our readers a unique English language interview with possibly one of the most outstanding contemporary philosophers in Russia, Professor Fyodor Girenok of Moscow State University. Siberian-born, Girenok addresses the metaphysics and phenomenology of the human condition and has published extensively in Russia. Girenok is notable for his philosophical charisma and innovative approaches to philosophical debates, and we are deeply grateful for the opportunity to carry out and publish his first ever interview translated into English here, in Slovo. Our article, ‘Truth is Stranger than Science Fiction: The Quest for Knowledge in Andrei Tarkovskii’s Solaris and Stalker’, by Thomas Mclenachan is an insightful exploration of Tarkovskii’s renowned tensions with the science fiction genre. Mclenachan examines the very core of this tension by identifying Tarkovskii’s deeply-held beliefs that have informed his creative process and have permeated his works. By analysing the transformation of the novels, Roadside Picnic (1971) by the Strugatskii brothers and Solaris (1961) by Stanisław Lem, into the iconic Tarkovskian works, Stalker (1979) and Solaris (1972), the author uncovers a revealing philosophy that undermined Tarkovskii’s faith in science fiction, and scientific truths. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the entire 2013-2014 Slovo editorial board for their time, energy, and enthusiasm throughout this year. This issue would not have been possible without the precious hours of editing and proofreading you have all put into it. I would like to especially thank the Managing Editor, Joris Zantvoort, Reviews Editors Nikolay Nikolov and Inese Strupule, Public Relations duo Olivia Humphrey and Caroline de Boos, and, crucially, our digital archivist Chloe Messenger, as well as all of our General Editors who have so generously offered their time and professional support to this academic publication. In my final gratitude I am indebted to Slovo’s former Executive Editor, Kristen Hartmann, for her ever optimistic and invaluably useful guidance throughout the process. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and non-commercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 2 (AUTUMN 2014), 2-7.

Interview with contemporary Siberian philosopher Fyodor Girenok FYODOR GIRENOK IN CONVERSATION WITH SLOVO’S EXECUTIVE EDITOR EUGENIA ELLANSKAYA Moscow State University (Faculty of Philosophy) and UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies Fyodor Girenok is a Professor of Philosophical Anthropology at Moscow State University. He is the leader and founder of the cutting-edge Russian philosophical movement known as archaeoavantgarde and is one of the most notable Russian philosophers of today. Girenok’s books and articles have been extensively published in Russia, exploring such topics as language, speech, and inter-human communication. Focusing on philosophical anthropology, Girenok’s works address the metaphysics and phenomenology of the human condition and the issues of the crucial relationship with the Other. As well as an innovative thinker in his own right, Girenok provides ingenious discussions of the classical philosophical concepts and debates evoked by Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, as well as the anthropological ideas of Husserl, Lacan, Foucault, Sartre, and Deleuze. The movement of archaeo-avantgarde is akin to Western postmodernism and considers the past as something to be decoded by avant-garde philosophical thinking. His works (at the moment only available in Russian) are remarkable for the digestible poetic organization of the text itself and for the approachability of the complex discussions evoked. Girenok is a philosopher to be reckoned with, proposing fundamentally new ways of thinking and communicating. As Fyodor’s works remain unpublished in English as of yet, Slovo is introducing to the English-speaking readers a Siberian philosopher that makes a difference.

SLOVO: Who were your childhood “heroes”? Who would you say shaped your philosophy growing up? FYODOR: As a child my hero was Karl Marx. I read the first volume of his Das Kapital when I was 12. At 25 I really got into the Russian philosophers Evald Il’yenkov, Georgii Shchedrovitskii and Merab Mamardashvili. They were all Marxists, but each in their own way: Mamardashvili as an existentialist, Il’yenkov as a Hegelian, and Shchedrovitsky as an educationalist. Then later I discovered Boris Porshnev, Nicholas Marr and Yurii Borodai. SLOVO: In Russia you are known for coining the philosophical term ‘archaeoavantgarde’. You identify yourself accordingly as an ‘archaeo-avantgardist’. What is archaeo-avantgarde? How is this complex-sounding term different from the familiar concept of postmodernism? FYODOR: Postmodernism assumes that a thought can be thought irrespectively of what a man thinks. Archaeo-avantgarde assumes otherwise. It thinks thoughts in relation to what a man thinks. Postmodernism exaggerates the role of language. It © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

INTERVIEW WITH PHILOSOPHER FYODOR GIRENOK

thinks of the world in terms of language. Archaeo-avantgarde acknowledges the limits of language in our consciousness. It sees emotion as an explosion of hallucinations equivalent to the Big Bang in physics. But there’s more. Notice the way the word ‘archaeo-avantgarde’ is constructed: it combines the past (i.e. archaeo) and the future (i.e. avant-garde). But there is no present. So what happened to the present? Who or what has consumed it? For we know that time has past, present and future tenses. We also know that time flows: either from the past into the future (via the present), or from the future into the past. Archaeo-avantgarde does not follow Bergson, Heidegger, and Husserl in its understanding of time. As archaeo-avantgardists we reform the concept of time. What for? In order to discover new means of understanding time, the means which aren’t available if one considers time as something flowing. Time does not flow to, or from, anywhere. Look at children – they pay no attention to time up to a certain age. They are situated in a continuously lasting present tense, in a time which knows no change of states. So a human can well do with the present tense alone, with no past or future. Time as a constantly lasting present tense does not rely on notions of truth or reality. Time understood as flow, on the other hand, is all used up by various schemes of reality. Things become radically different when language gets involved. Language and consciousness are enemies. The first thing language does is elimination of the present. It turns it to zero, into something that isn’t. Instead of the present there emerges a past and an unrelated future. Language brings our consciousness out into the future and forces it to look back on itself in the past. History is then a product of self-reflection, something that needs constant rewriting. There is no objective history. Preoccupation with the future is an act of self-deception. An appeal to the memory of the past is a language game. Archaeo-avantgarde enters into all this as an attempt to connect the past and the present by avoiding language. Being is one of the most fundamental notions of Western philosophy. Archaeoavantgarde acknowledges the fact that ontology [as the theory of Being] and anthropology are at constant war with each other. For we cannot speak of Being as something that had been. Similarly we cannot speak of it as something that will be. It always is. Where a human is concerned, on the other hand, we can speak of him as someone who had been or as someone who will be. But a human never is. Because he exists only as an inclination to become someone else, to not be what he is. The Lantern of

INTERVIEW WITH PHILOSOPHER FYODOR GIRENOK

Diogenes is a symbol of this absence of man in the present [Diogenes - an ancient Greek, known to have fruitlessly wandered in search of an honest man]. SLOVO: Today the biggest enemy of knowledge is paradoxically the excess of information. Information is available to everyone from everywhere. The act of knowing, and getting satisfaction from knowledge in this environment of informational noise, has become increasingly difficult. What is your take on this? How would you recommend dealing with it? FYODOR: I would like to draw attention to Heidegger’s concluding words in his Nietzsche’s Word God is dead. Heidegger says that reason is an irreconcilable enemy of thinking. Why? Possibly because reason is about calculating, and thinking is about daydreaming. The key event of the end of the 20th century is to do with language’s substitution of consciousness. As soon as this happened, virtually nothing humane remained in humans. Consciousness is a traumatic act upon the self, while language is just empty form. The early 21st century philosophy suddenly realized that reason (intellect) should be distinguished from consciousness. Intellect has nothing to do with consciousness. To be thinking is not to be intelligent, and to be intelligent is not to be thinking. The modern world has become too full of knowledge, while lacking in consciousness. People no longer enjoy thinking. In order to gain pleasure from thinking consciousness needs to come back into it. Then one can not only take in the words said, but also those that are under-said and over-said. SLOVO: In the Russian film Udovol’stvie myslit’ inache [‘The joy of thinking otherwise’] by Mark Ditkovskii you speak of philosophy’s reluctance to think, i.e., to perform its main function. The film covers the problem of recycling secondhand philosophical ideas, creating a crisis of philosophy, its morbid decay. You mention how philosophy enjoys sitting in its comfort zone in libraries and cosy armchairs while at the same time demanding great energy expenditure to understand things that really aren’t that new. It stops being interesting and poignant, I agree with you. How would you formulate the main goals and approaches of cutting edge modern philosophy which would meet its purpose? FYODOR: I think modern philosophy changes the meaning of what it is to be “intelligent”. To be intelligent often means to be obedient, obedient to the Other. The intellect within us is desired by the Other. The Other nurtures, brings up and cultivates this intellect in us. The motto of modern philosophy is ‘don’t be obedient’, ‘be irrational’ – this is what makes the impossible possible. Moreover modern philosophy seems to come to a realisation that consciousness is something that makes you blush, something that causes one to “self-harm”, © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

INTERVIEW WITH PHILOSOPHER FYODOR GIRENOK

something that bothers you. Consciousness stings and bites the Self. Well, it all means that a human is not an intelligent but a thinking being. SLOVO: We are very intrigued by your use of the term “autism” [in discussions on Selfhood]. What is it about this term that makes it important for your philosophy? Could we say that your use of the term autism represents the most desirable state of being, a breakthrough in thinking and knowing of the Self? FYODOR: First of all, I’d like to clarify that autism does not interest me as much in its medical use, but first and foremost as a philosophical term. The concepts of apathy, ataraxia, scepticism and peace were formulated by the philosophy of antiquity; the concept of nirvana was coined by Oriental philosophy. Autism is another such term. It lets us think of what it is to be human independently of the Other, independently of communication and language. In a state of autism a man hovers between two substances: nature and society. This man has nothing that was given to him by either nature or society. Nature has not given him intellect as an instinct, while society has not given him language as a means of uniting with the Other. All he can get, he gets by self-limitation. Autism teaches us that a daydreamer can either get nothing, or not get all. But an autistic thinker can get the main thing: to stop speaking the language of the Other and use his own language, from his own Self. In order to speak from one’s own name, one needs to meet the Self. Autism is what everyone has to go through in order to access the Self. SLOVO: To continue with the fundamental concepts of your philosophy… You often speak of the role of emotion. Many would probably be surprised at this emphasis on the irrational component of our humanity. Why is emotion important? FYODOR: Not reason, but emotion is the hallmark of humanity. To the extent in which we are capable to act upon ourselves, bringing ourselves to a state of following sameness, we are not elements of nature or elements of society. We are contemplators of the human domain in the world. Emotion is the last inalienable territory of humanity. I’d like to note that French postmodernism has given up this territory to cosmic energy and universal structures. SLOVO: Based on your book Absurd i Rech [Absurd and Speech], can we say that emotion, then, comes into the Absurd events, which you see as key to the development of man? FYODOR: A human is always an outcome of the world’s failure to lean away from encountering the Absurd. Every man is branded by the traces of his encounter with the impossible. Reason abdicates before the absurd. © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

INTERVIEW WITH PHILOSOPHER FYODOR GIRENOK

SLOVO: Your writing style in Russian is remarkably visual. The text is notably divided into compact digestible sections. Such texts are quite different from the cryptic and dense philosophical passages that many would be familiar with. What should a 21st century text be like to remain interesting and impactful? FYODOR: A text should be brief. I must be able to read it in between train stops. It should have nothing excessive. It should be a conceptual letter. Text should also captivate and entertain. It has to be a piece of literature. One metaphor can be worth more than an essay of many pages. SLOVO: It seems that one such recurrent metaphor in your own texts is that of God. In an age of secular sermons (e.g., Alain de Bottonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s School of Life) and attempts to find an alternative morality without God, you continue to mention God in your works. To what extent is God just a metaphor for you, and why is God important? FYODOR: I do not believe in morality without God. For me God emerges when you need to make a choice between two opposable actions, while there are no guiding reasons to make this choice. They will appear later in the next step when norms and laws come into play. God here is a primordial limitation, a limitation of the first step of decision-making. SLOVO: This is a lot to take in. Thank you so much for agreeing to share your thoughts with Slovo. We hope that one day we will have access to more of these ideas when your books become available to the English readers. To conclude I would like to ask you to define yourself as a philosopher for our readers. FYODOR: I give words [slovo] to the pre-verbal [doslovnoe], I give my voice to voicelessness. I am a philosopher of the preverbal.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and non-commercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

ÂŠ School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 2 (AUTUMN 2014), 8-29.

Truth is Stranger than Science Fiction: The Quest for Knowledge in Andrei Tarkovskii’s Solaris and Stalker THOMAS MCLENACHAN School of Slavonic and East European Studies This article explores Andrei Tarkovskii’s conception of truth in Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) as part of his wider philosophical project concerning knowledge. The director’s epistemological views form a core dimension of his life and aesthetic as he strives towards what he considers a higher, spiritual ‘idea of knowing’. In his search for this idealised notion of truth, Tarkovskii uses the medium of film to address what he perceives as a profound imbalance in modern civilization between scientific rationalism and spiritual/aesthetic ‘truth’. This is nowhere more prominent than in his two science fiction films, Solaris and Stalker, as he uses the genre as a battleground to discuss key debates in epistemology. Comparisons will be made with the Russian author and thinker Tarkovskii most revered, Fyodor Dostoevskii, and the Soviet-period science fiction authors whose works he adapted, Stanisław Lem and the Strugatskii brothers, in order to elucidate how the director came to cinematically represent his philosophy.

INTRODUCTION In his written manifesto, Sculpting in Time (1987), Andrei Tarkovskii begins to map out his ideas about truth and knowledge, which are central to his philosophy and permeate his films. As he attempts to distinguish truth from falsehood, he marks out two opposing forms of knowledge: scientific and aesthetic.1 The former is based on a positivist rationale that tries to amass objective knowledge of the outside world, while the latter arrives at the truth through a subjective understanding of the inner self. In his written works and films, Tarkovskii is explicit that he prioritises the latter, an aesthetic form of knowledge, over any scientific approaches to the truth. However, the intricacies of this are not so straightforward: 1

Andrei Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 37 (hereafter: ‘Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time’). It is important to note that, while published in 1987, Tarkovskii began writing Sculpting in Time at least fifteen years before, demonstrating that his philosophical views were consistent at least throughout the second half of his career.

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION To start with the most general consideration, it is worth saying that the indisputably functional role of art lies in the idea of knowing, where the effect is expressed as a shock, as catharsis. From the very moment when Eve ate the apple from the tree of knowledge, mankind was doomed to strive endlessly after the truth. First, as we know, Adam and Eve were discovered naked. And they were ashamed. They were ashamed because they understood; and then they set out on their way in the joy of knowing one another. That was the beginning of a journey that has no end.2 Many scholars and critics of Tarkovskii’s works have reached the conclusion

that his films are hinged on a central conflict between two separate worlds: the external and the internal.3 The former is dominated by the material or physical universe and the latter by individual consciousness, spirituality, and memory. The existing literature, however, ignores how these worlds are intrinsically linked to Tarkovskii’s ideas about knowledge and truth. He posits science, his first form of ‘knowing’, as a reductionist way of understanding the “external” world through its objectification and law building.4 While Tarkovskii does not wholly reject a rational approach to knowledge, his idealised truth is conceived “internally” in the subjective and poetic mind of the individual.5 Accordingly, these two branches of knowledge do not grow from the same root but are instead at variance with each other precisely because they are informed by our experience of the two separate worlds: the external and the internal. In his films, Tarkovskii creates an abstract dialogue between these two worlds, asking a series of questions: What is knowledge? How is knowledge acquired? What “forms” of knowledge are most important to the human experience? This article will bring such questions of epistemology to the forefront of analysis in order to understand this central conflict in Tarkovskii’s works. It is, of course, necessary to immediately question the rationality behind any attempt to contrast different types of knowledge. Arguably, there is no viable way to 2

Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 37. The Russian language has two significantly different words for truth: pravda and istina. The term pravda usually denotes an observable truth, often associated with social justice, whereas istina evokes a higher, absolute truth. Tarkovskii’s truth is unmistakably istina, as indicated by the epigraph of this work: ‘beskonechnoe stremlenie k istine’. 3 See Vida T. Johnston and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovskii: A Visual Fugue (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 231 (hereafter: ‘Johnson and Petrie, A Visual Fugue’); Simonetta Salvestroni, 'The Science-Fiction Films of Andrei Tarkovsky', Science Fiction Studies, 14:3 (Nov., 1987), pp. 294-306 (p. 294); and Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovskii (London: British Film Institute, 1987), p. 102. 4 Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 37. 5 Ibid.

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

compare scientific and aesthetic ‘truth’, or indeed arrange them in an epistemic hierarchy. Only science deals with observable, testable truths that can be validated or disproven. Similarly, Tarkovskii’s idea of aesthetic truth could well represent a higher, absolute Truth, yet it is both irrefutable and indefensible. Here lies one of the several fundamental problems in Tarkovskii’s attempt to rebalance materialism and spirituality, which will be addressed in greater detail later in this article. However, as Tarkovskii at times resorts to evaluating the categories of ‘scientific truth’ and ‘aesthetic truth’ alongside each other, this paper will explore them in a similar manner in an attempt to improve our understanding of his philosophy. To test the proposed hypothesis for Tarkovskii’s conceptualisation of truth, this paper is split into two parts, discussing the role of truth in relation to science and art respectively. The first section, ‘Truth in Science’, focuses on Tarkovskii’s representation of science, scientists, and scientific truths. The initial discussion will shed light on Tarkovskii’s attempt to subvert the science fiction genre in Solaris and Stalker by removing the scientific aspects of the novels in favour of a more natural setting. Following this, the analysis will move on to Tarkovskii's handling of the metaphysical question concerning the alien Other and the limits of human understanding. Of primary concern will be the changes Tarkovskii makes in adapting the original novels on which the films are based, Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961)6 and the Strugatskii brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972)7, so that the integral questions regarding knowledge are slanted in favour of his own ideological ‘truths’. Recognition of these changes makes it possible to differentiate between the epistemological posturing of Tarkovskii and the science fiction authors. This is supplemented by an exploration of the subtle differences that divide Lem and the Strugatskii brothers, which provides insight into the representation of knowledge in the Soviet-period science fiction literature during the 1960s and 1970s. The second section, ‘Truth in Art’, presents a more conceptual discussion, as due to a number of complicating factors Tarkovskii’s idea of aesthetic truth is more

Stanisław Lem, Solaris (New York: Mariner Books, 2002) (originally published in 1961; hereafter: ’Lem, Solaris’). 7 Arkadii Strugatskii and Boris Strugatskii, Roadside Picnic (London: V. Gollancz, 1978) (originally published in 1972; hereafter: ‘Strugatskii, Roadside Picnic’).

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

difficult to define. First, aesthetic truth is, by definition, a more abstract and nonrational way of ‘knowing’. Second, Tarkovskii often uses the terms ‘aesthetic truth’ and ‘spiritual truth’ interchangeably.8 Attempts to distinguish between the aesthetic and the spiritual are further undermined by the fact that Tarkovskii tends to illustrate them both through negation. Most often, he quantifies them through the questioning of the superiority of scientific knowledge rather than by discussing their attributes and intricacies. The conclusion will attempt to resolve these issues, making an assessment of Tarkovskii’s attempt to rebalance the so-called forms of knowledge and the consistency with which he applies his philosophy to the two films in question. Reference will be made throughout to Sculpting in Time which, with the exception of Robert Bird's Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema9, has been largely overlooked as a philosophical text.

Truth in Science Anti-Science Fiction: Tarkovskii and Genre Science fiction has always been an arena of unusual stylistic oppositions and experimentations. Tarkovskii’s metamorphosis of Solaris and Roadside Picnic, however, goes beyond the generic boundaries of sci-fi, adding new conflict to this existing tension. The adaptation process from the original novels involved a constant struggle between the director and the genre. Tarkovskii tried to disengage from the conventions of science fiction as much as possible, stating that he was ‘no more interested, in the fantastic plot of Stalker than [he] had been in the sci-fi story-line of Solaris’.10 It has been suggested that Tarkovskii merely chose the genre as an act of expediency rather than for its artistic value.11 Yet, science fiction, especially the works of Lem and the Strugatskii brothers, had an extensive readership in the Soviet 8

Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 37. It is possible to argue that, rather than being a subordinate part of his aesthetic truth, spiritual or religious knowledge constitutes an autonomous third branch in Tarkovskii’s epistemic hierarchy. It would be desirable to explore this further, adding a third section to this article, however space precludes this. 9 Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (Reaktion Books, 2008). 10 Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 199. 11 O Tarkovskom [‘About Tarkovskii’], ed. by Marina Tarkovskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), p. 166.

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

Union and was more likely to be commissioned by the central film-body Goskino than Tarkovskii's other desired projects.12 Regardless of his motives, Tarkovskii considered the existing works by Lem and the Strugatskii brothers as mere raw material that allowed for a radical reshaping of its content. Stalker, in particular, bears little resemblance to the original novel Roadside Picnic. Tarkovskii consciously manipulates the genre, reversing many of its key characteristics in order to convey his critique on knowledge. One key change that Tarkovskii makes is the minimisation of the technological fetishism commonly associated with science fiction. For Solaris, he shunned what he called an ‘exoticism of technology’ because ‘a detailed “examination” of the technological process of the future transforms the emotional foundations of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to the truth’.13 This steadfast viewpoint is especially interesting considering that the role of technology in Lem’s novels is already relatively subtle in comparison to the contemporaneous ‘hard’ Soviet science fiction by Ivan Yefremov, Mikhail Yemtsev, and others. Surprisingly, the initial literary script that Tarkovskii submitted for Solaris actually ‘introduced additional sf elements in the script: a transparent film which covers a park, children moving by jet-propelled belts, and a 204-floor building where Kris lives’.14 Again, it must be presumed that these were temporary measures to satisfy the commissioning board at Goskino. In a complete turn of events, the minutes from a studio discussion stored in the Mosfilm archives reveal that Tarkovskii later expressed a desire for the entire film to be set on Earth, much to the dismay of Lem who was actively involved in the adaptation process.15 A compromise was reached whereby a considerable part of the action took place on Earth and the scenes in space were shot on a relatively minimalist set in Mosfilm studios, making it an unmistakably terrestrial experience throughout. In the film, Tarkovskii preferred a more modest use of ‘lifeless’ gadgetry in favour of earthly 12

For example, Tarkovskii had several failed attempts to secure funding for an autobiographical film before eventually making his seminal work The Mirror in 1975. 13 Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews, ed. by John Gianvito (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), p. 36 (hereafter: ‘Gianvito, Interviews’). 14 Ibid. 15 See Andrei Tarkovskii, Collected Screenplays (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 130 (hereafter: ‘Tarkovskii, Screenplays’).

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

objects as evidenced by the space station Solaris being adorned with plants, wooden furniture and fittings, and works of earth-themed art.16 Despite technology being a prominent feature of the novel, the only remotely futuristic element of Solaris is a sequence filmed in Tokyo which sees the character Berton looking lifelessly into the camera as he drives around the modernised Japanese metropolis. This four-minute segment, partly filmed in black and white, does not feature any dialogue, nor does it develop the plot in a meaningful way. It is possible to assert, therefore, that the minimal use of such “scientific” elements in Solaris was designed partly to satisfy studio commission panels and, more importantly, to function as a reminder of Tarkovskii's warning against the encroachment of science and materialism on modern civilization. Nonetheless, Tarkovskii concedes that there were ‘too many pseudo-scientific gadgets in the film’ and that ‘[m]odern man is too preoccupied by his material development, by the pragmatic side of reality’.17 As he attempts to humanise the genre by removing technology and adding natural ‘truths’, he creates something more akin to anti-science fiction that is representative of his own distinctive philosophy. The director believed that man is essentially a spiritual being who needs to conquer the natural realm before the technological. He stated that he preferred to be ‘away from the paraphernalia of modern civilization’ in a more natural setting such as his dacha where ‘rain, fire, water, snow, dew, the driving ground wind – are all part of the material setting of which we dwell; I would even say of the truth of our lives’.18 This sentiment is reflected in the opening of Solaris: the camera closely studies the earth, filming at root level the tranquil, pastoral world, painted by flowing water reeds and the Tarkovskian trope of the dacha. These shots immediately establish a close intimacy with nature, contrasting with the sterile setting of the space station. Stalker marked an even more comprehensive removal of all technology and space-based landscapes in favour of a more natural setting. Evidence from the original drafts of the script, of which there were thirteen in total, show that the process of removing the scientific and technological elements from Roadside Picnic 16

Ibid. Gianvito, Interviews, p. 173. 18 Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 212 [my emphasis]. 17

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

was gradual and conscious.19 The same feeling of intimacy with nature is created in the opening sequences of Stalker when the eponymous protagonist returns to the Zone and amorously embraces the soil while worms and insects crawl over his skin. Once again, the lusciousness of the Zone, with its pulsating green grass and overgrown passageways, is contrasted against the preceding monochrome images of the industrialised, man-made world. The overwhelming impression here is that nature carries with it a sensation of truth in Tarkovskii’s world. In his ‘conflict between spirit and matter’, nature is the one constant in the material realm that holds true.20 Tarkovskii, like his central characters, tries to get as close to nature as possible, both in the physical and spiritual sense but, importantly, he does so without attempting to understand it scientifically as ‘the pathos of human existence doesn’t lie in comprehension’.21 The closer his characters get to nature, the further they distance themselves from science, and the more morally aware they become. For Tarkovskii, the advance of technology and materialism meant that man was distracted from deep, spiritual truths which occur in the natural world. In his eyes, science is limiting because it perceives the natural world as a morally neutral object, an impartial entity waiting to be understood by man in a systematic rather than an existential manner. In this respect, Tarkovskii represents science as an objectivising force that has the potential to sidetrack expansive, subjective understanding of the human condition. Tarkovskii laments that ‘[i]n our attempt to protect ourselves from nature and to conquer it, we have given so much preference to our material development that we’ve ended up quite unprepared to cope with this technology we have created’.22 There is a slight irony in Tarkovskii’s criticism of modernisation here as his chosen art form, film, inherently depends on the very technological advances that he brings into question. Unlike his idealised canon of nineteenth-century authors, Tarkovskii’s journey in art requires not only a mastering of the aesthetic but also of the technical. Slavoj Žižek, in his characteristically provocative fashion, goes as far as to claim that

See Tarkovskii, Screenplays. Gianvito, Interviews, p. 94. 21 Ibid., p. 115. 22 Gianvito, Interviews, p. 94. 20

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

‘Tarkovskii's cinematic texture undermines his own explicit ideological project’.23 This, however, is an exaggeration of reality, as the director intended to merely question the superiority of science and materialism, rather than reject them outright. The changes that he makes in adaptations represent scientific truth as being a limited yet necessary approach to knowledge that must be balanced against natural, spiritual truths. Nonetheless, the director seems to overlook the possibility of science and art as having different, yet ultimately equal paths to understanding truth in nature. The Final Frontier of Knowing A central issue of epistemological debate is the hypothetical limit of human knowledge.24 In science fiction, this is often represented by extraterrestrial life and man’s ability, or inability, to envisage extraterrestrial life-forms. This is one of Lem’s primary concerns with Solaris in which he explores the significance of reaching this symbolic boundary.25 In the novel, the alien-planet Solaris acts as a metaphor for the insurmountable peak of human knowledge. Despite centuries of study, scientists are unable to establish any facts or scientific certainties about this mystery. The work of Solaristics, the branch of science dedicated to studying Solaris, ultimately ‘represents a body of incommunicable knowledge. Transposed into any human language, the values and meanings involved lose all substance; they cannot be brought intact through the barrier’.26 Lem’s scientists are forever burdened by their incapacity to think

outside

the

so-called

human

language

and

overcome

the

anthropomorphism inherent in scientific thought. This is apparent when Kris attempts to describe the alien-planet but feels constrained by human vocabulary: ‘The free-ranging forms [of Solaris] are often reminiscent of many-winged birds, darting away from the moving trunks of the agilus, but preconceptions of Earth offer

Slavoj Žižek, 'The Thing from Inner Space', in Sexuation, ed. by Salecl Renata (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 216-259 (p. 242). 24 For a recent evaluation of this debate see Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Papineau, Philosophical Devices: Proofs, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Sets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 25 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, 'The Book Is the Alien: On Certain and Uncertain Readings of Lem's “Solaris”', Science Fiction Studies, 12:1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 6-21 (p. 7). 26 Lem, Solaris, p. 172.

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

no assistance in unravelling the mysteries of Solaris’.27 Critically for Lem, the inescapability of man’s capacity to comprehend the universe only in human terms is his great failing. For Tarkovskii, however, this is not a limitation but a distraction. Tarkovskii believes, man’s preoccupation with the hypothetical knowledge barrier is itself the problem rather than the barrier. This epistemological shift is reflected in the dialogue:

Bureaucrat 1:

All we know about Solaris reminds me of a mountain of separate facts which we are unable to squeeze into a framework of any conception.

Kelvin:

Well, we’re even worse off today, as regards to the essential. Solaristics is degenerating.

Bureaucrat 2: The essential question is far more serious than just Solaristics. We’re probing the very frontier of human knowledge. By artificially establishing a knowledge frontier, we limit our concept of the infinity of man’s knowledge. And if our movement is not forward, do we not risk moving backward?28 In Tarkovskii’s film, the planet Solaris retains symbolic value, yet he portrays attempts to understand it as mere detraction from more important issues affecting the human condition such as art and spirituality. This view was reasserted in an interview with Thomas Johnson in 1986, in which he exclaims ‘[w]hat good is it to go out into space if it’s only to distance ourselves from the fundamental problems of man: the harmonising of the spiritual and the material world?’29 Tarkovskii believed that a complete understanding of the self is a vital prerequisite to understanding the alien Other. Therefore, in order to shift the epistemological focus, Tarkovskii greatly reduces the significance of the alien-planet Solaris. While large sections of the novel are dedicated to describing Solaris and Solaristics, in the film they are merged into a larger analogy of the scientific method as a whole.

Ibid., p. 123. Soliaris [‘Solaris’], dir. by Andrei Tarkovskii (Mosfil´m, 1972) [English subtitles] (hereafter: Solaris, Tarkovskii). 29 Ibid., p. 174. 28

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

For Tarkovskii, science is often a synthetic process that simply gathers objective truths and uses them to strengthen the “barrier” of scientific knowledge. In Sculpting in Time, he introduces a metaphor of an endless staircase to describe this: In science, man’s knowledge of the world makes it up an endless staircase and is successively replaced by new knowledge, with one discovery often being disproved by the next for the sake of a particular objective truth. An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new and unique image of the world, a hieroglyphic of absolute truth.30 Tarkovskii's representation of science here is highly reminiscent of Dostoevskii’s satirical parody, Notes from the Underground (1864).31 In the novel, the unnamed narrator, generally referred to as the Underground Man, gives an impassioned critique on science and Western rationalism. He warns the reader about the limitations of scientific thought, which he represents with a metaphor of a ‘stone wall’: What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact [...] for 2+2=4 is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.32 Dostoevskii’s Underground Man is fascinated by what is beyond the wall but he is only able to glimpse over the top. The metaphorical wall becomes higher as each new brick, representing a new scientific law or ‘truth’, is placed on top. The higher it climbs, the tighter science’s grip on the truth becomes, making it harder to scale. The attempts of the Underground Man to break through the wall with his forehead are futile. He is a holder of a ‘higher and deeper’ form of knowledge, akin to Tarkovskii’s spiritual form of knowing, yet he is unable to refute the laws of science or mathematics in any kind of rational way.33 Ultimately, the Underground Man declares ‘wall building’ a reductive act and attempts to find the truth within himself rather than in the bricks.34 He concludes that ‘[c]onsciousness is infinitely higher

Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 37. Fyodor Dostoevskii, Notes from the Underground (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1998) (originally published in 1864; hereafter: ‘Dostoevskii, Notes from the Underground’). 32 Dostoevskii, Notes from the Underground’, p. 13. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 31

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

than 2+2=4 [...] after all, 2+2=5 is not without its attractions’.35 Tarkovskii would later make reference to this in his penultimate film Nostalgia (1983)36 in which one of his key heroes Domenico – holder of his higher, spiritual knowledge – writes the sum ‘1+1=1’ on the wall and proclaims that ‘one plus one does not equal two but a bigger one!’.37 Tarkovskii writes in his diary on 13 April 1986 that such equations cannot be true ‘because there can be no such thing as positive knowledge’.38 These words are echoed by the Writer in Stalker who laments that: The world is ruled by cast-iron laws, and it’s insufferably boring. Alas those laws are never violated. They don’t know how to be violated...There is no Bermuda Triangle. There’s only Triangle ABC that equals Triangle A-prim, B-prim, C-prim. Do you feel the boredom contained in this assertion?39 The intention of both Tarkovskii and Dostoevskii here is to represent scientific truths as being inherently limited in comparison to more expansive spiritual or aesthetic truths which are not confined by rationalism. Their alternatives sums of ‘2+2=5’ and ‘1+1=1’ defy mathematical reasoning and are designed to destabilise scientific logic. Importantly, both suggest that there is more truth to be found in the irrationality of poetic logic than in the predictability of science. Aside from his reworking of the “knowledge barrier” in Solaris, a second key change that allows Tarkovskii to demote scientific knowledge whilst bringing spiritual values to the forefront is his modification of Lem's psi-creatures. In the novel and the film, the scientists are haunted by mysterious psi-creatures or phantoms which take on human form and walk freely around the space station. At first, the scientists believe them to be hallucinations before coming to realise that the alien-planet Solaris is producing them from their unconscious memory. They begin to feel affection for the psi-creatures, in full knowledge that they are not real, at least in the human sense of the word. At this point the novel and the film take 35

Ibid., p. 19. Nostalgiia [‘Nostalgia’], dir. by Andrei Tarkovskii (Mosfil´m, 1983) [English subtitles]. 37 Andrei Tarkovskii, Time within Time: the Diaries 1970-86 (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 374. 38 Ibid. 39 Stalker [‘Stalker’], dir. by Andrei Tarkovskii (Mosfil´m, 1979) [English subtitles]. 36

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

significantly different paths. In Lem’s original text, the scientists run tests on the creatures, revealing that the phantoms are not atomic-based structures, but instead are composed of neutrino-based matter. Through the realisation that the psicreatures are not strictly alive, the scientists ease some of their epistemological anguish in dealing with their presence on the space station. In the film, however, Tarkovskii injects more life into the phantoms as they become more than mechanical copies of their past selves. The materialised ghost from Kris’ memory, his dead wife Hari, becomes not only “real”, but almost more real than the living characters, because she retains the ability to love and express true emotion. In reaction to this paradox, Kris exclaims: ‘But what does it matter if you are clearer to me than all the scientific truths which have existed in this world?’.40 Hereafter, the crux of the film is Kris coming to terms with this non-sensical truth at the expense of science and rationalism. This quandary gives Tarkovskii further ammunition for his central conflict between the two separate worlds, the external and the internal. Because the phantoms defy reality, knowledge from the external world is brought into question and is eventually superseded by memory and subjectivity that come from within. By putting more certainty in these internal truths, Tarkovskii is able to reset the balance of inner versus outer knowledge in the original novel. Because of these changes, Lem was highly critical of Tarkovskii’s adaptation. He stated in a 1979 interview that the director created a […] moral drama par excellence, which in no way relates to the problems of cognizance and its extremes. For Tarkovskii the most important facet was Kris’s problem of “guilt and punishment”, just as in a Dostoievskii book.41 This demonstrates Lem's preoccupation with ‘problems of cognizance’ as opposed to Tarkovskii's emphasis on moral issues. This contrast is, however, complicated by the fact that epistemology and ethics are, to some extent, interdependent and overlap. The way that we perceive morality is dependent on what we know, or what we think we know, about the human condition. The opposite is also true as we prioritise 40

Solaris, Tarkovskii. Stanisław Lem, quoted in Jeremy Robinson, The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (Maidstone: Crescent Moon, 2007), p. 392. Lem’s view is corroborated by Tarkovskii himself in an interview, first with Ian Christie in 1981 and again with Laurence Cossé in 1986. See Gianvito, Interviews, p. 66, p. 167. 41

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

different forms of knowledge based on what we think constitutes moral behaviour. When Lem and Tarkovskii pose their questions regarding knowledge they undoubtedly tip the scales balancing ethics and epistemology to suit their interests. In his analysis, Nariman Skakov recognises this balancing act, creating the analogy: ‘The epistemological questions which shape the text of the novel are transmuted into a quest to regain self-knowledge through the prism of ethical judgement’.42 Therefore, for Tarkovskii’s characters, the knowledge barrier is more reflective, putting a focus on internal truths that are forever encumbered with ethical concerns. Whilst Tarkovskii’s second “science fiction” film, Stalker, constitutes the focus of the next section of this paper, it is important to recognise here the differences between the representation of knowledge in the original novels he adapted, Solaris and Roadside Picnic. This topic is considered by George Slusser in his article, 'Structures of Apprehension: Lem, Heinlein, and the Strugatskiis' (1989).43 Slusser, who does not make reference to Tarkovskii’s adaptations, senses a ‘very different epistemological feel’ between Solaris and Roadside Picnic, stemming mainly from their narrative structure and setting.44 He claims that Solaris is, in essence, a ‘space epic’ in which scientists travel to the distant cosmos and are thereby ‘physically annexed by acts of exploration’.45 In other words, the protagonists are literally placed at the frontiers of human knowledge. By contrast, Roadside Picnic functions more as an “it-came-from-outer-space” tale akin to The War of the Worlds (1898)46 in which the scientists are forced less to act than react to the alien visitation.47 The key difference for Slusser is the degree of activity or passivity in the quest for knowledge in the two novels. With Solaris, Lem is more interested in the distress caused to the scientists when they reach the limit of truth in human understanding. In Roadside Picnic, the Strugatskii brothers are less concerned with the end of the journey (the truth) as they are with the journey itself. The variance between the novels helps to

Nariman Skakov, The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time (London: I.B. Taurus, 2012), p. 99 (hereafter: ‘Skakov, Labyrinths’). 43 George E. Slusser, 'Structures of Apprehension: Lem, Heinlein, and the Strugatskys', Science Fiction Studies, 16:1 (Mar., 1989), pp. 1-37 (hereafter: ‘Slusser’). 44 Slusser, p. 2. 45 Ibid. 46 Herbert George Wells, War of the Worlds (Plain Label Books, 1898). 47 Slusser., p. 6.

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

explain some of the differences between the two films in question. Regardless of how far Tarkovskii strayed from the original content, the novels undoubtedly influenced the representation of knowledge in the films. Indeed, Tarkovskii was openly critical of Solaris, labelling it his weakest film as he was unable to fully rework the core philosophy of Lem’s novel and to shake the restrictions of the genre.48 By using Roadside Picnic, and therefore also the Strugatskii brothers’ philosophy of knowledge, as raw material for his later film, Tarkovskii was able to exercise his philosophy on knowledge more freely. In his recent book, Skakov reaches the conclusion that Tarkovskii’s dealings with science fiction were ultimately unsuccessful as he ‘tried to reconcile the irreconcilable: he is desperate to humanise the fantastic genre and to undermine the rigid opposition between the real and the hallucinatory’.49 While he may not have been wholly successful in his attempt to subvert the genre to his means, the two films are, to a greater or lesser degree, representative of his humanistic ideology. Close reading of Solaris and Stalker shows that Tarkovskii was faithful to his core ideas about knowledge, although his ideology is noticeably more pronounced in the second half of his career. There are several contributing factors that explain this. Firstly, the differences of epistemology between the original novels, as already highlighted by Slusser, which inevitably filtered down into Tarkovskii’s films, regardless of how far they strayed from the written content. Secondly, pressures from Goskino and Lem to satisfy the conventions of the ever-popular science fiction genre in the early 1970s prevented Tarkovskii from freely exercising his views on knowledge in Solaris. Finally, and of greatest significance, there was a conscious shift in the second half of Tarkovskii’s career into the spiritual, quasi-religious realms of Dostoevskii that influenced the way he personified spiritual truth within certain characters and gave him the vocabulary to plainly spell out his ideas about truth and knowledge.

48 49

Gianvito, Interviews, p. 173. Skakov, Labyrinths, p. 98.

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

Truth in Art ‘The Two Cultures’: Art and Science As demonstrated in the first section of this paper, Tarkovskii’s ideas about scientific truth are, at times, clearly pronounced, while speculation on his conception of aesthetic truth is naturally the more deceptive element of his epistemology. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovskii works to glorify aesthetic truth, describing it as ‘a symbol of the universe’ which is ‘hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities’.50 He goes on to explain that ‘art, like science, is a means of assimilating the world, an instrument for knowing it in the course of man’s journey towards what is called “absolute truth”’.51 Within this list of highly romanticised images of art, which continues for several pages, it is possible to discern two constants. The first is that aesthetic truth is limitless. Unlike the relative finitude of science, the possibilities of art have no boundaries. This is true for both artistic inspiration and interpretation. Tarkovskii, returning to the staircase metaphor, proposes that ‘if cold, positivistic, scientific cognition of the world is like the ascent of a staircase, its artistic counterpoint suggests an endless system of spheres, each one perfect and contained within itself'.52 The second constant is that true art can only be understood subjectively. Tarkovskii often belittled the objective, universal laws of science, in favour of subjectively experienced art represented in his metaphor by a ‘sphere’ that is ‘perfect and contained within itself’.53 By representing the so-called divide between art and science in a reductive, diametric way, Tarkovskii's work is reminiscent of Dostoevskii’s confrontation with Chernyshevskii and the rationalists in the mid-nineteenth century. In his essay ‘The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality’, Chernyshevskii asserted that art was merely a mechanical reproduction of reality and could therefore be interpreted in a logical way much like the sciences.54 Dostoevskii strongly disagreed with such utilitarian

Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 37. Ibid. 52 Ibid., p. 39. 53 Ibid. 54 Nicholas Chernyshevskii, ‘The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality’, Selected Philosophical Essays, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953). 51

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

views on art and aesthetic beauty, a sentiment that is echoed by Tarkovskii in the following passage: Art does not think logically, or formulate a logic of behaviour; it expresses its own postulate of faith. If in science it is possible to substantiate the truth in one’s case and prove it logically to one’s opponents, in art it is impossible to convince anyone that you are right if the created images have left him cold.55 To say that art is infinite and subjective is, of course, highly clichéd, yet Tarkovskii repeatedly returns to these two factors to defend his notion of aesthetic truth. Because of the apparent finite/infinite and objective/subjective qualities that separate science and art, Tarkovskii perceives a divide between the two specialities that leaves little room for overlap. This unwavering position associates him with the views of Dostoevskii and at the same distances him from many of his contemporaries in film and art. Many of the great Soviet artists, especially in the fields of cinema and science fiction literature, had close affinities with science, including Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Ivan Yefremov and Mikhail Bulgakov among others. Stanisław Lem, a medical student and scientific researcher, and Boris Strugatskii, an astronomer and computer engineer, show great respect for scientific thinking in their novels. They do not perceive the realms of art and science to be poles apart, but consider them to be complimentary. In this respect they hark back to the words of Chekhov who famously stated in a letter to A.S. Suvorin: I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.56 Because of their ‘infidelity’, Lem and the Strugatskii brothers occupy a critically different perspective to Tarkovskii on the role of truth in art and science. Recognition 55

Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 41. Anton Chekhov, letter dated 11 September 1888. See ‘Letters of Anton Chekhov to his Family and Friends’, Pennsylvania State University (2008), <http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/checkov/Chekhov_Letters.pdf> [accessed 15 November 2013]. 56

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of this is important because it has great implications for the way they present the different strands of knowledge in their respective works. Because Tarkovskii perceives a fundamental imbalance between art and science, he is more readily able to dissect the different forms of truth and present them in opposing categories. For Lem and the Strugatskii brothers, the relationship between scientific truths and what Tarkovskii labels ‘aesthetic’ or ‘spiritual’ truths is more complex. Much of this complexity boils down to the interaction of imagination and reality in relation to truth, which adds yet another paradigm with which to inspect the differences between Tarkovskii and the respective authors. Fluid Worlds: Imagination and Reality In an article published in the Science Fiction Studies journal, David Field discusses Lem’s Solaris and Nabokov’s Ada in relation to the authors’ views on the interaction between art and science.57 Field argues that, for Lem and Nabokov, the two specialities are inherently linked because they have dynamic ties to both imagination and reality. He explains that ‘without its imaginative component, science would lose the driving force of creative observation and theory, and without a subtle and precise sense of external reality, art would become abstract, detached and even insane’.58 In other words, science needs the imaginative aspect of art for new hypotheses; art needs the critical aspect of science to ‘awaken the imagination into activity’.59 This suggests that there is a greater degree of cross-fertilisation between the rationality of the scientist and the irrationality of the artist than Tarkovskii and others profess. Field concludes that because Lem and Nabokov both acknowledge these ‘fluid boundaries’ between imagination and reality, and thereby science and art, they place greater emphasis on the ‘theoretical issues concerning the nature of knowledge’ in their novels.60 The consequence of this is that Lem and Nabokov, much like the Strugatskii brothers, create worlds in which there exists an incestuous relationship between scientific and aesthetic truths. 57

David Field, 'Fluid Worlds: Lem's “Solaris” and Nabokov's “Ada”', Science Fiction Studies, 13:3 (Nov., 1986), pp. 329-44 (p. 331) (hereafter: ‘Field, ‘Fluid Worlds’’). 58 Ibid., p. 329. 59 Sheldon Richmond, ‘The Interaction of Art and Science’, Leonardo, 17:2 (1984), pp. 81-86 (p. 81). 60 Ibid.

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION What Field’s article does not attempt is a comparison with other Soviet artists

of opposing beliefs. Tarkovskii would be an ideal candidate for this as he considers artistic imagination and scientific hypothesis to be essentially separate entities. Tarkovskii asserts that ‘even though a scientific discovery may seem to be the result of inspiration, the inspiration of the scientist has nothing in common with that of the poet’.61 For the director, artistic imagination is triggered by a deep, subjective knowledge that is informed by reality in a purely illogical way. In certain respects, this is influenced by his central conflict between two separate worlds, highlighted in the introduction: the external and the internal. To put it simply, for Tarkovskii, scientific truths are limited to a formulaic understanding of the ‘real’ external world and aesthetic truths are processed internally from individual imagination. The concept of imagination versus reality marks a key philosophical idea that separates Tarkovskii from both Lem and the Strugatskii brothers. Again, this can be observed in the changes made in the adaptation process. Tarkovskii chose to omit key passages from both Solaris and Stalker that discuss the scientific process in favour of linking film with the wider arts. In the novel Solaris, Kris reads multiple volumes on the history of ‘Soliaristics’, a branch of science dedicated to understanding the planet-ocean Solaris which has developed over centuries and been divided into a multitude of different academic fields. These different fields are so specialised that a ‘Soliarist-cybernetician had difficulty in making himself understood to a Soliaristsymmetriadologist’.62 With this, Lem is undoubtedly alluding to the divisiveness of science and academia. Similarly, Roadside Picnic features a meta-literary element, as illustrated by the scientist Pilman reading a book called History of the Visitation, which documents the scientific study of the Zone.63 In both cases, the nature of scientific thought is presented in such a way that new theories stem from the scientist’s imagination. The way that they conceptualise the alien-planet and create hypotheses is dependent on the individual scientist’s personality and subjectivity. Tarkovskii, by contrast de-humanises all aspects of science, allowing only selected characters the capacity for real imagination. 61

Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 40. Lem, Solaris, p. 26. 63 Strugatskii, Roadside Picnic, p. 34. 62

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION It is of course conceivable that these ‘meta-literary’ aspects of the books

would be too difficult to fully replicate in film. Nonetheless, this omission is consistent with Tarkovskii’s philosophy. In his adaptation, Tarkovskii replaces these scientific documents with works of art. This is most evident in the reworking of the library sequence in Solaris which sees the camera explore the room to reveal a collection of artistic artefacts brought from Earth: Pieter Bruegel’s vista The Hunters in the Snow (1565), Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-1615), and a bust of Socrates. The fact that Tarkovskii stages this artistic revival in the library is important because it is the only room in the space station that does not have windows looking out onto the planet Solaris. He therefore tried, as far as it was possible, to make this a terrestrial experience for the characters, removing any futuristic technology and adding art classics and objects of high modernity. Herein lies the final way that Tarkovskii differentiates between art and science: time. One of the most distinguishable elements of Tarkovskii’s films is that they do not follow unidirectional, historical time. Instead, Tarkovskii presents time as a malleable object, calling his artistic method ‘sculpting in time’. His films do not have a defined tense, but above all, they look toward the past as his characters live in dreams, memories, and fantasies, creating their own personal, subjective time. Tarkovskii shows great respect for the past, as demonstrated by his use of classical art and engagement with antiquated practices such as holy foolishness (iurodstvo).64 In Tarkovskii’s eyes, science is orientated towards an end-point in the future. The scientific process is one that works to gradually amass objective facts until it has brought the entire human condition under complete understanding. It presumes that the physical laws of the Universe are already given and are simply waiting to be discovered, recalling the finite/infinite divide between the scientific and aesthetic truth. Tarkovskii ultimately sees science as having an end-point, creating for itself a

For example, the main character in Tarkovskii’s Stalker is a half-mad, half-blessed fool-in-Christ type of character, who alone bears a special sensibility for hidden truths beyond the material appearance of things. See: Vida T. Johnson, ‘Laughter beyond the mirror: Humor and satire in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky’, Inside Soviet Film Satire, ed. by Andrew Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 98-104 (p. 102).

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‘knowledge barrier’ that is self-limiting. Art, by contrast is timeless and subjective which makes it incomparable yet infinitely superior to scientific knowledge. Tarkovskii’s belief in the redemptive power of art is not especially original or indeed surprising. What distinguishes Tarkovskii from his contemporaries, however, is his conviction that there is a fundamental imbalance between art and science. He, at times, is prone to representing aesthetic truth and scientific truth as two separate entities, each competing for a stake on knowledge and thereby dividing humanity. His final remarks in Sculpting in Time succinctly convey this assertion: Seeing ourselves [the human race] as the protagonists of science, and in order to make our scientific objectivity more convincing, we have split the one indivisible human process down the middle, thereby revealing a solitary, but clearly visible spring, which we declare to be the prime cause of everything, and use it not only to explain the mistakes of the past but also draws up our blueprint for the future.65 His contemporaries are not able to make such steadfast judgements about the relationship between art and science, Lem and the Strugatskii brothers being prime examples. As Field discusses in his article, the science fiction authors created ‘fluid worlds’ in which science and art co-exist and germinate from the equally fluid concepts of imagination and reality. The authors show great respect for the findings of modern science in their novels and this undoubtedly has an effect on the epistemological feel of the text. Tarkovskii, by contrast, denies the imaginative aspect of scientific thought, often restricting science to objective statements about the external world.

Conclusion This article has demonstrated that the struggle for truth is at the core of Tarkovskii’s art and philosophy. Having analysed both films in detail, it is possible to detect a basic principle by which Tarkovskii represents knowledge. First, he exposes a rift

Tarkovskii, Sculpting in Time, p. 240.

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between what he perceives as opposing forms of knowledge: scientific and aesthetic/spiritual. These two forms are supported by a number of secondary oppositions that help distinguish them: objective/subjective, external/internal, finite/infinite and real/imaginative. These qualities are then personified by individual characters who enact them in an uncompromising fashion. This is most transparent in Stalker where the three protagonists are assigned a specific profession that conveys a certain truth and creates the anonymity of the characters under archetypal titles of ‘Scientist’, ‘Writer’, and ‘Stalker’. Equipped with their specific form of knowledge, they engage in an epistemological debate that is grounded in a quest narrative. The conditions are such that the different forms of knowledge do not compete on equal terms but work to support Tarkovskii’s preconceived ideas about the nature of truth. The result is an epistemic hierarchy in which some truths are in a way more true than others. In Tarkovskii’s world, the dehumanised, objective knowledge of science is always superseded by his preferred aesthetic truths. Analysis has shown that Tarkovskii slants his core questions of epistemology in such a way as to invalidate scientific truths before they enter the debate. In fact, Tarkovskii’s questioning of science in the dialogue of Stalker is so blatant that it has received criticism for being overly explicit in exposing the film’s basic ideology.66 Indeed, in both films, his aspirations for a higher truth are somewhat clouded by the fact that there is an overriding focus on perils of scientific knowledge. Therefore, because he develops his argument through negation, he is at risk of representing his preferred truths as distant abstractions. For Tarkovskii, humanity will find its salvation not in the medical and technological advances of science but in artistic expression. The second part of this paper, ‘Truth in Art’, demonstrated that a romanticised notion of an infinite aesthetic truth sits comfortably at the top of Tarkovskii’s hierarchy of knowledge. Identifying this aesthetic truth as the focal point of Tarkovskii’s ideas about knowledge is not a difficult task. He is explicit in interviews and his films that he sees art and spirituality as the gateway to absolute truth. However, unlike his view of scientific 66

Johnson and Petrie, A Visual Fugue, p. 146.

MCLENACHAN – TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN SCIENCE FICTION

truth, which is unashamedly transparent, his aesthetic truth is, necessarily, the most abstract element of his epistemology. Tarkovskii’s own cinematic aesthetic is based on the idea that art cannot be understood in any kind of rational way. His famous lecture at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, in 1984 strayed from its original topic of the ‘apocalypse’ to reaffirm his belief that ‘[t]he moment a viewer understands, deciphers, all is over, finished: the illusion of the infinite becomes banality, a commonplace truism’.67 For Tarkovskii, therefore, aesthetic truth can only be found within the individual and any attempt to corner it is counter-productive. Ultimately, Tarkovskii cannot rationally defeat his enemies. There is no viable way to compare scientific and aesthetic “truths”. Only scientific truth can be validated in any kind of logical way. Tarkovskii’s intuition that absolute truth is to be found in art may well be accurate, yet it cannot be tested. This conundrum recalls the most basic question of epistemology: What is knowledge? Many would consider faith, spirituality, and art to be outside or above knowledge. Because Tarkovskii chooses to assess them as comparable items he oversimplifies the debate and actually sets it up in a way that is impossible for him to succeed. In the end, the real question that Tarkovskii presents the viewer with is: What is not knowledge? He answers his own question definitively: the scientific. While he prided himself on making films which ask open-ended philosophical and theological questions, with Solaris and Stalker he presents the viewer with a one-sided debate. However, while Tarkovskii’s attempt to distinguish truth from falsehood is flawed, insight into this can help broaden our understanding of his life and works. His epistemology, with its inherent paradoxes and contradictions, inevitably filters down into his aesthetic and his films. Tarkovskii would have argued, of course, that it is precisely in their illogicality that his films find beauty and truth, but this argument itself could ultimately be perceived as self-defeating. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and non-commercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

Tarkovskii quoted in ibid., p. 38.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 2 (AUTUMN 2014), 30-31.

Trudno byt Bogom /’Hard to be a God’ (2013) Drama/Science Fiction film, black and white, 177 min. Directed by ALEKSEI GERMAN. Written by ALEKSEI GERMAN, SVETLANA KARMALITA. Cast: Leonid Yarmol’nik, Evgenii Gerchakov, Aleksandr Chutko. Russia and Czech Republic: Sever Studio/Lenfilm. Language: Russian. In the closing moments of Hard to be a God (2013), in the aftermath of a brutal massacre, Don Rumata mournfully plays his clarinet. A passing man and a young child trudge down a snow-covered path. ’Do you like this music?’ the girl asks, ’It hurts my stomach.’ The girl’s response to the music could well serve as an initial reaction to this film, as it is a deeply beautiful work about the ugliest atrocities mankind is capable of. Initial reactions of confusion, queasiness of the stomach, and mutterings that the film is “impenetrable” merely demonstrate the public reluctance to deal with such an uncompromising work of art. The film depicts a planet that is still languishing in a medieval phase of development, unlike Earth where space travel and futuristic technologies fully flourish. Disorder reigns as local warlords vie for power. Intellectuals and artists are rounded up and brutalised, beaten and dunked head-first into latrines. A scientist from Earth, disguised as local nobleman Don Rumata, observes all this, reporting to his superiors on the events and protecting the hounded wise men with a view to secure a future renaissance. Rumata is searching for one such key thinker, a doctor called Budakh. However his attempts to locate the man and to intervene in local politics result in a backlash from a local warlord, who instigates an eruption of pillage and mass murder (the original title of the film, ‘The Chronicle of the Arkanar Massacre’, unambiguously established this potential spoiler as a theme).The core dilemma this film grapples with is God’s possible intervention in human affairs. For every positive intervention there is a potentially disastrous consequence. In discussion with Rumata later in the film, Budakh suggests that the best gift God can give his creations is self-determination, to leave them alone to make their own fate. Ultimately, Rumata must bear the consequences for this intervention and for his paternalistic meddling resulting in a landslide of unexpected chaos. Of course, any reworking of a Strugatskii brothers novel is bound to raise comparisons with other major adaptations: Andrei Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1979) and Aleksandr Sokurov’s Dni Zatmeniia (‘Days of the Eclipse’, 1988) in particular. Indeed, parts of Hard to be a God develop as a slow motion replay of the sack of the city of Vladimir from Tarkovskii’s Andrei Rublev (1966). However, these comparisons should only be used to situate Hard to be a God within its context. In Russia and the former Soviet Union, there is a long tradition of taking science fiction seriously, including its cinematographic incarnations. Therescience fiction has long been a forum for debating metaphysical, sociological and ethical questions, rather than an occasion for action-packed spectacles. It is also worth speculating that Hard to be a God takes the films of Tarkovskii and Sokurov even further in its commitment to a new cinematic way of seeing. Unlike the earlier, more prosaic adaptation by Peter Fleischmann (which seems to

REVIEWS: FILMS

unfold in a duller procession of grey fright wigs), delineating the events of the novel clearly was not a priority of German’s film. Instead, the plot becomes submerged in a thick, viscous mass of incident and rich, tactile detail. Bleak, snow-covered landscapes, courtyards with hanged bodies swaying lightly in the breeze as people mill about indifferently along narrow corridors filled with cackling denizens. Ropes, chains and grotesque human flesh frequently fill the centre of the frame, obscuring our view of the action. At other times, characters peer directly into the camera and speak seemingly to the audience, in a move that at first seems like a breaking of the fourth wall. In fact, this move is better conceptualised as the fullest realisation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notion of ‘free indirect vision’, where the objective (the point of view of the camera) and the subjective (the worldview of the characters) entwine. German builds his film out of complex, weaving shots that whirl around a pro-filmic reality that is already teeming with movement. This restless, fluid camerawork was created by Vladimir Il’in and Yurii Klimenko. The latter also helped to bring a poetic sensibility to the emblematic films Legenda o Suramskoi kreposti (‘The Legend of the Suram Fortress’, 1984) and Chelovek ukhodit za ptitsami (‘Man Follows Birds’, 1975), but has truly outdone himself here. With all this constant movement and baroque detail, there’s a sense of the horror vacui of outsider artists. That’s not to say that the film is undisciplined, or the shots uncomposed. The careful sense of stacking of details and the remarkable ease of free exchange between the foreground and the background astound and confound in equal measure. The image itself has a luminous quality and a sharpness that captures every nuance of the smoke that seems to waft into view of almost every shot. The addition of colour would be excessive; the monochrome isolates the details of every horror that unfolds, making it a vivid but never a lurid experience. Aleksei German died on 21 February 2013, leaving his son and wife to supervise the final leg of the film’s post-production. Hard to be a God takes the form of an epitaph then, but it is also the crowning achievement of German’s all too brief an oeuvre as a director: six feature films counting his debut, Sed’moi Sputnik (‘The Seventh Companion’, 1967), co-directed with Grigorii Aronov. Despite aforementioned critical grumblings, the overall response to German’s film seems more receptive than to his previous film, Khrustalyov, mashinu! (‘Khrustalyov, My Car!’, 1998). Perhaps this is because the director’s passing has encouraged people to evaluate the loss of a major talent.

JOHN A. RILEY Woosong University PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 2 (SPRING 2014), 32-33. Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe. By TOMASZ ZARYCKI. (BASEES Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies). Pp. 293. Oxon: Routledge. 2014. £90.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9780415625890. Tomasz Zarycki’s Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe is a compellingly argued contribution to the growing field of literature on discourses of Orientalism in Central and Eastern Europe. Despite the geographic breadth suggested in the title, Zarycki makes clear from the outset that the focus of the analysis will be Eastern Poland. The book is therefore essentially an exploration of the mechanisms behind the stigmatisation of Eastness; both in terms of inter-European relations, but also within internal Polish discourses. Zarycki explains such processes with reference to what he terms ‘ideologies of Eastness’ (p.1). He contends that there is a multitude of such ideologies in operation across economic, cultural, and political hierarchies, creating center-periphery dependencies at the international and domestic level. Chapter 1 offers a broad introduction to Ideologies of Eastness, locating the narrative within the context of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Zarycki is careful to discern the uniqueness of the Central and Eastern European context from Said’s Middle Eastern Orient, noting the borderland and, later, the non-threatening aspect of the region’s identity. He fully elaborates upon his theoretical influences in Chapter 2, positioning Central and Eastern Europe as peripheral to, and semi-dependent upon, the Western Core. He notes the relevance of Stein Rokkan’s analysis of power cleavages, Pierre Bourdieu’s work on theories of capital and the field of power, as well as Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory, to his understanding and analysis of the mechanisms underpinning this relationship. Within this chapter Zarycki also outlines his zone-based approach to the study of Central and Eastern Europe, the most relevant of which is zone one, encompassing Western influenced, but previously Soviet controlled, regions of Central Europe, e.g. Poland and Hungary. Upon this platform, Zarycki uses Chapters 3 and 4 to develop two key ideologies of Eastness: firstly, the ‘dependence doxa’ (p.32) and, secondly, the ‘intelligentsia doxa’ (p.64). Zarycki defines the former as the ‘naturalization of [Central and Eastern European] structural dependence on the West’ (p.32), questioning the traditionally accepted knowledge that the supposed backwardness of the region is a Communist legacy, rather than a consequence of over dependence on the West, for example, through EU inflicted structural violence. For Zarycki, the intelligentsia doxa refers to the distinct role of cultural elites in zone one, in terms of the way in which this group can utilise cultural capital to legitimate political and economic hierarchies. Particularly referring to the liberal, pro-Europe elite, he notes the role of intelligentsia in communicating and reinforcing the dependent relationship between zone one and the Western core. Chapter five marks the conclusion of the theory-centric chapters of the analysis, questioning the application of post-colonial theory to

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Central and Eastern Europe, again noting the problematic nature of attributing the difficulties facing the region to historical, rather than contemporary, dependencies. Within Chapters 6 and 7, Zarycki moves to concentrate specifically on the Polish case, exploring the ideologies of Eastness that have been constructed to engage with the Eastern sections of the country. He begins by considering the Kresy or ‘old borderlands’ discourse (p.115), noting that the Polish liberal intelligentsia have demarcated this narrative as exclusive and Orientalist. As he notes however, in castigating proponents of the Kresy discourse, this elite stratum in turn become the Orientaliser. For Zarycki, the liberal intelligentsia ascribe to a new borderlands discourse, in which Eastern Poland is presented as a diverse, forward-looking hub of cultural flourishing. He contends, however, that such discourses mask the power relations between the Polish centre and periphery; a reflection of the dependence doxa, which in turn conceals the dependency of zone one regions upon the Western core. The analysis reaches a crescendo in Chapter 8, in which Zarycki, following a historical discussion of Eastern Poland, persuasively applies his theoretical contentions to the development of the regions of Białystok, Lublin and, briefly, Rzeszów. Chapter 9 offers some supplementary reflections upon Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian responses to Polish discourses on the East, whilst Chapter 10 offers concise, but considered, concluding notes. The thoughtful and systematic organisation of the book, as well as the liberal use of examples, makes for a convincing read. There are, however, a few instances where further explanation would have been merited. A hurried reinterpretation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of polyphony and dialogue certainly requires further consideration. Similarly, Zarycki’s characteristic rejection of the debunking of ‘stereotypes’ and ‘myths’ (p.259) in favour of research that strives to understand the social construction of such ideas is called into question, when it appears he himself partakes in such activity in relation to the development of Polish territories under Russian imperial rule. These are minor quibbles however, and it is telling of the quality of Zarycki’s analysis that the reader is left desiring further explanation, rather than frustrated at the lack thereof. Ideologies of Eastness should be of interest to those concerned with processes of othering and Orientalising within any regional context, but especially to those working in the field of Central and Eastern European studies. Ruth McKenna Department of Central and East European Studies University of Glasgow This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and noncommercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 2 (SPRING 2014), 34-35.

Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria. By MARY C. NEUBURGER. Pp. 307. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2013. ISBN: 9780801450846. Nationalism, class struggle, and geopolitics are some of the framing devices historians traditionally employ when writing general histories of modern nations. In her most recent book Mary Neuburger, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, takes a rather different approach. She conducts an extensive examination of the last few centuries of Bulgarian history as viewed through the lens of a commercial commodity, and a very particular one at that – the tobacco leaf. In justifying her choice, Neuburger reminds us of the towering role tobacco has played in the history of modern Bulgaria. In 1918 tobacco made up almost 80% of Bulgaria’s export earnings, earning the moniker of ‘Bulgarian gold’. By the late 1960s the country became the world’s biggest exporter of cigarettes as the main supplier of the insatiable Soviet market. During the heyday of Communism as much as one-eighth of the Bulgarian population were involved in tobacco industry in some capacity. The author’s claim that tobacco is inextricably tied to the fate of the Bulgarian nation is therefore strongly founded in its persisting economic importance. Tobacco has been the maker and breaker of Bulgarian economy, but Balkan Smoke is not a work of economic history. Neuburger closely accounts for the political, but also cultural and social, importance of tobacco in Bulgaria and how its role had changed through time. The sources on which she bases her work, predominantly literary works and memoirs, reflect this bias. The narrative spans from the origins of the ‘Bulgarian gold’ in Ottoman Oriental leaf production to the collapse of the Bulgarian tobacco industry in the years after the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc. The bulk of the book, however, straddles the interwar period and the decades of the Communist rule in the country. The turning points are the two World Wars which saw hundreds of thousands of young men return home from the frontlines addicted to nicotine and ready to become faithful customers of the product that they were freely provided with as soldiers. Neuburger is particularly good at highlighting the fascinating contradictions surrounding tobacco in Bulgarian history. One of them is the uneasy alliance of a portion of Bulgarian Socialists with the Protestant Church over the importance of temperance, both with regards to alcohol and smoking. Another one is the tangled economic relationship between the Jewish dominated-Bulgarian tobacco industry and the Nazis who, despite their ideological qualms, continued to import Bulgarian tobacco on a mass scale to Germany throughout the 1930s. Finally, Neuburger points out the inconsistent attitudes of the Bulgarian Communist leadership to smoking, who attempted to present it as a social deviance, while not compromising the economic benefits Bulgaria gained from the production and sale of tobacco, launching a number of sporadic and rather ineffective anti-smoking campaigns. Perhaps inevitably for a work that traces the history of a single product, Neuburger occasionally seems to be overemphasising the centrality of tobacco in some of the key developments of modern Bulgarian history without considering alternative explanations. One example of this is her account of Bulgaria’s descent into World War II on the side of Nazi Germany, where Neuburger makes the sweeping

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claim that ‘tobacco trade brought potentially Allied countries like Bulgaria into the Axis fold’ (p. 136) and is quick to sideline the strength of right-wing sentiments in the country. Throughout Balkan Smoke one wishes Neuburger would take more effort to step back and couch tobacco in the wider perspective of the complex historical dynamics of the region. Despite these occasional setbacks, Balkan Smoke is an important piece of scholarship. In contrast to the significant literature on the history of tobacco in the USA or the Middle East, the role of tobacco in Eastern Europe has thus far been only sporadically tackled by English-language historians. This lack of interest is surprising especially considering the fact that it was in Eastern Europe that cigarette consumption in the 1980s and 1990s reached levels unprecedented anywhere else in the world. Excluding memoirs and non-scholarly books such as the one written by tobacco industry functionary Ivan Pitekov in 2010, Balkan Smoke is a pioneering work in the history of tobacco in Bulgaria, offering a much needed contribution to the historiography of the region. MATEUSZ ZATOŃSKI London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 2 (SPRING 2014), 36-37.

Alternative Modernities in Europe. Edited by ANDREI BODIU, RODICA ILIE, ADRIAN LACATUS and GEORGETA MOARCAS. Pp. 366. Cluj Napoca: Casa Cartii de Stiinta. 2013. Paperback. ISBN: 9786061704538. Alternative Modernities in Europe consists of a collection of articles presented at the 2013 homonymic conference held at Transylvania University of Brasov, Romania. The volume is organized topically into seven sections devoted to different phenomena accompanying modernity and modernism. Despite being cross-cultural in its aim and heterogeneous in methodology, the anthology draws its consistency from shedding light upon less explored or latent areas in the study of modernity. The first chapter offers a valuable notional framework by retracing the modernist expressions on different cultural backgrounds such as interwar Romania and totalitarian or contemporary society. Such mutations are convincingly captured in studies dedicated to modernity perceived as a temporary paradigm – to employ a formula put forward by Adrian Lacatus to describe the flow of ideas in closed literary systems, on one hand and to features of global and neo-global societies as conceptualised by Jean-Pierre Dubost and Güncel Ӧnkal, on the other hand. Autonomy, human rights, and dignity are just a few of the theoretical concerns cross-cutting these discussions. The section is designed as an eclectic assembly of approaches that shape a nuanced picture of invariants, but also of local and temporal variations circumscribed by European modernity. The next set of articles broadens the scope of inquiry into alternative modernities by shifting the interest to technology and the emerging challenges of its instrumentalisation. All these papers maintain a general focus on the cultural or literary background underlying these issues. The social impact of German nuclear science and technology community is analysed by invoking the prestigious metaphor of the Kafkaesque trial, production systems are examined by means of Hofstede's terminological device in cultural dimensions theory, and the paradigm shift in agricultural traditions is addressed with a particular emphasis on community values. No discussion of modernity would be complete without a turn to popular culture. Papers centring on the televisual playground, mountain cultures and cathartic carnival rites engage into a deep exploration of extreme modernism and the dynamic of resisting and/or embracing alternative legitimacy mechanisms. Under the title of ‘Fringe Literatures: Challenges to Localization’, Zsuzsanna Mónika Tapodi and Vilma Irén Mihály provide an overview of modernity in Hungarian literature, while Daniel Puia-Dumitrescu tries to determine whether the English poets of the ‘50s are an illustration of evolution towards post-modernity or are just another instance of alternative modernity. Oana Soare and Cătălin Badea-Gheracostea give engaging accounts of two different facets of modernity in Romanian literature: the “noocratic” revolution taking place in inter-bellum and the contemporary rise of the steampunk genre, respectively, which are equally animated by a spirit of radical change.

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By reference to the seminal work of Antoine Compagnon, Les Antimodernes, the character of these discourses is subject to deep relativisation, as the ambiguity of the modern and anti-modern simultaneously channels and calls into question any attempt at unravelling a neat and definite typology. This line of argument is best embodied in Georgeta Moarcas’ paper on ‘poetic strategies toward a Romanian alternative modernity’. The hypothesis advanced by Moarcas draws its inspiration from the philosophical topos of the autonomous subject understood, seen from Robert Pippin’s perspective. She argues that the aesthetic modernism of Lucian Blaga, Tudor Arghezi and Ion Pillat is offset by a ‘peculiar tendency toward a rural communitarian ethos that would shape an autochthonous imaginary’. The paper further indicates that the best way to overcome the binary model employed in representing ‘the forces at work during the Romanian modernization process’ is to denounce the image of the poet as the epitome of autonomy, a view reminiscent of Romanticism. The Kantian desideratum of reaching a balance between autonomy and heteronomy is reinforced by Charles Taylor’s claim that authenticity is reconcilable with, or even contingent on, the ability to articulate ‘something beyond the self’. Although the achievements of individual studies are not to be neglected, the real strength of the volume derives from being able to both exemplify and consciously explore the ways in which the vocabulary of modernity can reproduce itself so as to absorb without antinomy a great variety of cultural and creative exercises.

Maria Ghiurtu Transilvania University of Brasov