Electricity: Science fiction and modernity in early twentieth-century Russia

Through an examination of electricity in early-twentieth-century Russian literature, this essay demonstrates how science fiction provides a crucial discursive site for analyzing the continuity between constructs of technological utopia and concepts of modernity in the pre-Revolutionary and Bolshevik eras. It delineates the process through which peculiarities of technological development in Russia determined the emergence of a particular semiotic paradigm in pre-Revolutionary speculative fiction about electricity that was absorbed seamlessly into the rhetoric of the Bolshevik electrification plan of 1920. The essay pays special attention to the intertextual dependency of science fiction upon the many cultural discourses of the period, such as canonical and popular literature, mass media, advertisements, dictionaries and encyclopedias, popular philosophy, and aesthetic theory.