H.G. Wells and All Things Russian

By Anthem Press

‘H. G. Wells and All Things Russian' is a fertile terrain for research and discussion and this volume will be the first to devote itself entirely to the theme. Wells was an astute student of Russian literature, culture and history, and Russians, in turn, became eager students of Wells’s views and works (Yuly Kagarlitsky, a Soviet biographer of Wells, called him ‘a one-man think tank’). During the Soviet years, in fact, no ‘big’ foreign author was safer for Soviet critics to praise than H. G. Wells. The reason was obvious. He had met – and approved of – Lenin, was a close friend of the Soviet literary giant Maxim Gorky and, in general, expressed much respect for Russia’s evolving Communist experiment, even after it fell into Stalin’s hands.

Wells’s views on the Soviet Union were often more complex than Soviet critics gave him credit for, but their whitewashing only served to secure his position as a sympathetic man of letters from the capitalist world. On the other hand, those who discerned his nuanced position towards totalitarian regimes, including the dystopian writer Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of an early Soviet study of Wells, found him to be a soulmate and an influence of a different kind, which worked to increase the English author’s popularity among those segments of the Russian reading public for whom his relationships with Lenin and Gorky meant very little.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089932

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H. G. Wells and All Things Russian

H. G. Wells and All Things Russian

Edited by

Galya Diment

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2019 Galya Diment editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-991-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-991-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

In memory of Catherine Stoye (1929–2012), H. G. Wells’s granddaughter and keeper of precious archives, whose friendship and support were tremendous gifts to me when I was working on my Koteliansky book. A fiercely private person, just like her mother, Marjorie Wells, she was nevertheless a strong believer in allowing personal letters and diaries, warts and all, to serve as important historical and cultural documents.

CONTENTS

APPENDIX TRANSLATIONS

1. V. D. Nabokov on Visiting H. G. Wells in England in 1916 (From Iz voiuiushchei Anglii, 41–51) (Trans. Galya Diment)

2. Alexander Amfiteatrov on Wells’s 1920 Visit to Russia (Trans. Veronica Muskheli)

3. Alexander Belyaev on the Wells-Lenin Debate about Utopias (Trans. Galya Diment)

4. Karl Radek and Solomon Lozovsky to Stalin (Trans. Galya Diment)

5. Yury Olesha on His Love for H. G. Wells (In Literaturnyi Kritik 12 (1935), 156– 7) (Trans. Galya Diment)

6. Yuly Kagarlitsky on Being a Soviet Biographer of Wells (Trans. Veronica Muskheli)

Bibliography

Wells, Herbert George – Works Index

General Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1Russian 1920 edition of The Time Machine

2Russian 1921 edition of Russia in the Shadows

3Russian 1928 edition of The War of the Worlds

4H. G. Wells and Maxim Gorky in 1920 in Moscow, with a statuette of Leo Tolstoy that Gorky presented to Wells

5Lenin and Wells in Moscow, 1920, discussing Lenin’s plan for the electrification of all of Russia

6Evgeny Zamyatin in the1920s

7Zamyatin’s 1922 study of Wells

8Alexander Belyaev in the1930s

9Belyaev’s 1925 novel The Head of Professor Dowell

10Odette Keun’s book about her experience in Soviet Russia that led to her meeting Wells

11Stalin and Gorky in the 1930s

12The 1933 poster by Boris Efimov with Stalin at the rudder which declares: The captain of the country of the Soviets leads us from victory to victory

13Wells, his son George Phillip (Gip) in Moscow in 1934, with Betty Glan, the Director of the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Recreation

14Wells with Soviet journalists in Moscow in 1934

15Yuly Kagarlitsky, the Soviet biographer of Wells

6.1H. G. Wells (Sergei Tsenin), Light upon Russia (1947)

6.2H. G. Wells (Sergei Tsenin) in conversation with Lenin, Light upon Russia (1947)

6.3Right to left: H. G. Wells (Harijs Lipinsh), Sam – American photo-reporter (Anatolii Kryzhansky), Anton Zabelin – eminent Russian hydroelectric engineer (Boris Livanov), The Chimes of the Kremlin (1970)

6.4H. G. Wells (Mark Prudkin) and Lenin (Boris Smirnov), the MAT’s production of The Chimes of the Kremlin (1967)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For the Russian materials we are indebted to Wellsians, archivists, and librarians in Moscow and St. Petersburg: Alexander Orlov, Elena Chibisova, Olga Arsentieva, Yulia Sycheva, and Lidya Petrova. I am also grateful to my colleague at the University of Washington, Professor José Alaniz, himself a specialist in Soviet science fiction, who continued his role as Richard Boyechko’s academic advisor by giving him valuable suggestions and making editorial comments on the drafts of his article for this volume.

CONTRIBUTORS

Richard Boyechko is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. His dissertation explores the role that subways play in the public imagination of modernity in Russia and China by considering their portrayal in contemporary cultural productions, particularly in science fiction.

Galya Diment is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities who teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and is Affiliate Professor in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She was Joff Hanauer Distinguished Professor in Western Civilization, 2015–18. She is the author of three books, including A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky (2011), and edited or co-edited four more, including Katherine Mansfield and Russia (2017).

Zoran Kuzmanovich teaches Davidson College courses on American and comparative literature, literary theory, film and fragrant plants. His research focuses on the relations among ethics, politics and art. Since 1996 he has edited Nabokov Studies.

Muireann Maguire lectures in Russian literature and culture at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature (2012) and is currently researching a monograph on pregnancy and childbirth narratives in Russian literature. She also translates Russian literary fiction.

Veronica Muskheli is a PhD candidate at the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Washington, Seattle. Muskheli is also a literary translator, credited with translations of folktales and fantasy from Russian, Slovenian and Georgian into English. Her latest publication is a co-translation of the Russian science fiction writer Aleksei Lukianov’s short story Entwives.

Ira Nadel is professor of English at the University of British Columbia, and he publishes on modernism and biography. His titles include Joyce and the Jews, Modernism’s Second Act and lives of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and Leon Uris. His current work involves Anglo/Russian literary exchanges.

Patrick Parrinder is the author of Shadows of the Future (1995), Nation and Novel (2006) and Utopian Literature and Science (2015). He published his first book on H. G. Wells in 1970, and has been involved in Wells scholarship ever since. He is currently general editor of the 12-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English, and is also president of the H. G. Wells Society. He is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Reading.

David Rampton is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. His work includes studies of Nabokov and Faulkner as well as anthologies of fiction and nonfiction. He served as chair of the department from 2002 to 2007.

Maxim Shadurski is adjunct professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Studies at Siedlce University (Poland). He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His publications include two monographs and over 40 essays on utopia, nationalism and landscape. He edits The Wellsian: The Journal of the H. G. Wells Society.

Olga Sobolev lectures in Comparative Literature at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She publishes on British-Russian cultural relations including From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920 (2017); Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Russia (2016); Alexander Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon (2017); and a monograph on Shaw, with Angus Wrenn, G. B. Shaw and Russia (2012).

Angus Wrenn has taught literature at the London School of Economics since 1997. Recent publications include From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920 (2017); Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Parade’s End (2014); Henry James’s Europe (2012); and a monograph on Shaw, together with Olga Sobolev, G. B. Shaw and Russia (2012).

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

In this volume we render Russian names in English both largely in accordance with the widely used ALA-LC system of transliteration and, where appropriate, in the way they are better known to the English-speaking world. You will encounter, for example, both Evgenii Zamiatin and Evgeny Zamyatin, or Aleksandr Beliaev and Alexander Belyaev.

INTRODUCTION: THE WELLS EFFECT

Galya Diment

So it is I interpret the writing on the Eastern wall of Europe.

—H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows

At the end of Russia in the Shadows, H. G. Wells calls Russia The Eastern wall of Europe and suggests that it is vitally important for the fate of all modern civilization to try to interpret the writing on this particular wall as carefully and accurately as possible.¹ Wells and All Things Russian is such fertile terrain for research and discussion that it is rather surprising this book is the first one to devote itself entirely to this theme. There have been other excellent books that touched on some aspects of this topic most notably The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe (2013),² edited by Patrick Parrinder, one of the contributors to this volume, and John S. Partington, as well as chapter III (H. G. Wells: Interpreting the ‘Writing on the Eastern Wall of Europe’) in From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature in the 1920s, by two more of our contributors, Olga Sobolev and Angus Wrenn.³ Yet, this is indeed the first (and, hopefully, not the last) effort to focus entirely on how Wells and Russia influenced each other. The Russian and Soviet fascination with Wells, facilitated by a very large number of his translations, was, for a long time, one of the most powerful collectively felt for a foreign author. The critical articles in this volume discuss the rich relationships, both personal and literary, between Wells and his contemporary Russian writers, including Maxim Gorky, Evgeny Zamyatin, Alexander Belyaev, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. They likewise analyze how Wells’s evolving views of Russia and the Soviet Union were reflected in both his fiction and nonfiction, and examine the ways in which Wells was portrayed in Russia and the Soviet Union not just in the press and literary works but also on screen and stage. The Appendix features a compilation of some of the most important Russian, émigré and Soviet archival materials and publications about Wells from the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s—the decades during which he traveled to Russia—as well as post-World War II. All of them appear here in English for the first time.

H. G. Wells had become interested in Russia’s history and literature much before his first visit in 1914. In 1906, he even exchanged letters with Leo Tolstoy who expressed interest in reading the English writer’s stories. I never sent you my books, Wells responded to Tolstoy, because I assumed that you were inundated with a flow of volumes, supplied by every single debutant-writer of Europe and the US […] I read about eighty works of yours—everything which one could get in English.⁴ Around the same time he met and befriended Maxim Gorky and was also fairly active in the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, signing petitions for the release of political prisoners of the tsarist regime.⁵ Upon his return from Russia in 1914, Wells declared that Russia is a big developing thing and suggested to the headmaster of Oundle School, which his sons (including Gip, who would accompany him to Russia in 1920 and 1934), attended that they should teach Russian there (the school acted on his recommendation).⁶

The Russian reading and writing public at the time amply returned Wells’s affection, with several Russian science fiction authors even criticized for being influenced by Wells a bit too much. One case in point was Alexander Bogdanov’s 1908 novel Red Star, about space travel and a communist society on Mars, which indeed reads like—to borrow Mark B. Adams’s formulation—a leftist rehash of the works of H. G. Wells and, in particular, of Wells’s War of the Worlds and When the Sleeper Wakes.⁷ Bogdanov by then was—together with Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who would become the first Soviet Commissar of Education as well as Bogdanov’s brother-in-law—one of the founders of the Bolshevik movement.

Among Wells’s many avid readers in pre-Revolutionary Russia there were, of course, also those who decidedly did not share Bogdanov’s or Lunacharsky’s radical views. One of them, V. D. Nabokov, a prominent Russian politician, hosted the writer in 1914 in the family’s mansion in St. Petersburg. V. D. Nabokov revered Wells as the author of such remarkable books, now sparkling with fantasy, now astounding with depth of thought, bright, instantaneous outbursts of passion, alternating sarcasm and lyricism.⁸ In one of his letters that year, Wells called Nabokov (or, in his spelling, Nabokoff) one of the most brilliant Liberal statesmen in Russia.⁹ In 1916, V. D. Nabokov visited England, saw Wells again, and remarked that on the walls of his house one could see pictures he had brought from Russia.¹⁰ A year after his visit, Wells agreed to write an introduction to Denis Garstin’s sympathetic depiction of the country in Friendly Russia, primarily because, as Wells stated there, the frequent sunlight in Mr. Garstin’s testimony […] tallies very closely with my own impression.¹¹

One of V. D. Nabokov’s sons, another Vladimir, 15 at the time, was, like his father, overjoyed to meet Wells in person. H. G. Wells, a great writer, was my favorite artist when I was a boy, the author of Lolita would confess to Herbert Gold in 1966.¹² Four years after his interview with Gold, Vladimir Nabokov, who was not known to be very generous with praise for other writers, would state to another interviewer: "A writer for whom I have the deepest admiration is H. G. Wells, especially his romances: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Country of the Blind, The War of the Worlds, and the moon fantasia The First Men on the Moon."¹³ As J. B. Sisson accurately points out, as a result of the high esteem in which he held the English writer, there is hardly any novel by Nabokov where he does not allude to Wells in one form or another.¹⁴

After the Revolution, which the Nabokov family opposed and then fled, the relationship between the Russian state and science fiction became much more complicated. In the Nabokovs’ times there was hardly any discussion of whether science fiction as a genre was good or bad for the ideological purposes of the state, even when writers like Bogdanov used it as largely communist propaganda. Now, despite the fact that Bolsheviks made science their new religion, the fiction part of the genre was often seen as quite problematic. While the vehement campaign against science fiction as harmful did not start in earnest till the end of the 1920s, even in the more liberal early part of the decade the genre was tolerated primarily only if the publications served the greater purpose of the class struggle and did not veer too much from dialectic materialism and objective reality. In this light, one of the most fascinating aspects of Wells’s relationship with the Soviet Union stems from what I call The Wells Effect, namely, his rather outsized influence on the fate of Soviet science fiction in the 1920s and the 1930s. It was largely produced by his visits to the country in 1920 and 1934, and facilitated by two very powerful figures in the artistic and cultural development of the very young Soviet state: Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky.

It was Gorky who persuaded Wells to come to the Soviet Russia in the second half of 1920 but, as Wells informs us in Russia in the Shadows, he was officially invited to visit by Lev Kamenev, Leon Trotsky’s brother-in-law, who that year led the Russian Trade Delegation to London.¹⁵ Lunacharsky was by then already enthroned as the Commissar of Education (he would be deposed by Stalin in 1929). Like Bogdanov, Lunacharsky was a fan of Wells and he had the power to shield science fiction from rising ideological pressures.¹⁶ Also like Bogdanov (and, to some extent, Gorky), Lunacharsky was deeply engaged with the idea of creating a new Bolshevik religion, which he called Bogostroitel’stvo (God-Building), and which, unlike other religions, would be totally compatible with science.¹⁷ Scientific socialism is the most religious of all religions, he had proclaimed in 1907.¹⁸ In that, as well as in his belief that even physical immortality would eventually be achieved through science, Lunacharsky—despite his own protestations to be found in his 1908 Religion and Socialism—was akin to the so-called Russian Cosmists, whose worldview was likewise based largely on religious philosophy and science, having found its most powerful articulation in Nikolai Fedorov’s Common Cause and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s theories of space colonization. Wells’s visit in 1920 must have truly pleased Lunacharsky (even though he apparently was not in Moscow or Petrograd at the time and did not meet Wells personally). Not many famous Europeans or Americans were yet visiting Soviet Russia, which was still largely in ruins and in the midst of severe hunger that year, so the fact that it was the titan of futuristic science fiction who had chosen to be among the very first was quite significant.

I believe we truly do not know what would have happened to science fiction in the young Soviet Union if Wells had not come to Russia in 1920 and by his importance as Lenin’s interlocutor about the future of the country had not elevated that literary genre to the level of at least some societal acceptance. After all, the official sentiment already in place by that time was that utopias did not have to be fantasized about any more—the Bolsheviks were actively building one—while futuristic dystopias could be dangerously subversive to the new regime. It was not for nothing that Yakov Protazanov, in his silent movie classic Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), which was based on a novel by Alexey Tolstoy, chose to change the ending of the book by making the trip to Mars merely the protagonist’s dream. What makes these two versions of the same story indeed such a conspicuous case in point is that both Protazanov and Tolstoy first emigrated from Soviet Russia and then returned in 1923, thus needing to be on their best behavior in order to be accepted, published and employed by their new masters. Tolstoy’s novel was published in the Soviet Union in 1923, the same year he returned from Europe, but was mostly written while he was still abroad. In it, he dutifully pays tribute to the class struggle by depicting how two Russian travelers go from the post–World War I Petrograd to Mars and, among other things, help the exploited Martian masses stage an uprising against their rulers. In his film Protazanov brings it much closer to objective reality by making the travelers more contemporary Soviets, and, in the end, by revealing that the whole space journey was the engineer-protagonist’s dream, thus, for all intents and purposes, taking his adaptation out of the science fiction realm altogether. Contemporaneous futuristic utopias, like Vivian Itin’s 1922 Strana Gonguri (The Country of Gonguri), were often likewise very careful to couch their futuristic visions as just that, visions—in Itin’s novel a revolutionary condemned to death dreams about the future communist planet Earth where the happy comrades live among greenery, can move mountains, and have eliminated hunger by creating chemical food. Itin’s own future was dystopian, rather than utopian—he would be arrested in 1938 as a Japanese spy, and, like his protagonist, executed.

There are, to be sure, differing accounts of the impact of Wells’s 1920 conversation with Lenin, with Trotsky famously claiming that Lenin said upon Wells’s departure: What a bourgeois he is! He is a Philistine!¹⁹ And, yet, regardless of what Lenin really thought of Wells, the famous English writer expressing acceptance and a degree of sympathy towards the new and struggling Soviet state obviously worked well for propaganda purposes. In addition, Lenin probably hoped that Gorky (with whom his own relationship had become quite rocky by then) was close enough to Wells to positively affect the English writer’s attitude toward the Bolshevik experiment. And it seems to have worked: In Russia in the Shadows, which followed his visit, Wells, while reminding the readers that he was not a Marxist (I have always regarded him as a Bore of the extreme sort²⁰), asserted that he was more than willing to give the Bolsheviks a chance to succeed because Russia most likely had no better choice. He also praised the intellect and what he perceived as the honesty of the party leaders, including Lenin.

Significantly enough, the immediate years after Wells’s trip to the Soviet Union turned out to be very beneficial not just to his stature in the country but to the fate of Soviet science fiction as well. As Richard Stites points out in Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Between 100 and 200 native works of science fiction appeared […] novels, stories, poems, plays, and movies. In the peak year, 1927, almost fifty came out, an unprecedented figure in Russian publishing history, though modest by Western standards.²¹ In terms of Wells’s own books, Russia in the Shadows was translated in 1922, to be followed, a year later, by the reprint of Wells’s 1911 book Floor Games. Then, throughout the 1920s more reprints appeared, among others, In the Abyss, The New Accelerator, and The New Machiavelli. When Lunacharsky, no longer the Commissar of Education, visited Wells in London in 1930, he had every reason to assure the writer that all your books are translated into our language and you have an extraordinary number of readers in our country, even though the most enlightened readers among us, the communists, of course find much in your statements to object to.²²

Evgeny Zamyatin’s study of Wells also came out following Wells’s visit, published by Epokha in 1922. It was precisely because of the views that the enlightened Bolsheviks, according to Lunacharsky, found objectionable that Zamyatin must have felt even deeper affinity with Wells. Therefore, in his critical analysis of the writer, the author of dystopian We, completed the year Wells came to Russia, mostly aimed to reach those segments of the Russian reading public for whom Wells’s personal relationships with Lenin and Gorky either meant very little or were outright disappointing. Wells, Zamyatin wrote there, is above all an artist, and that is why everything in his work, including socialism, is his own, Wellsian. […] Wells’s red banner is not colored by blood. It is colored by the joyful sunrise of a new day in the history of mankind […] Human blood, human life for Wells are sacred treasures because he is first of all a humanist.²³ As Patrick Parrinder points out, Zamyatin’s admiration of the author of The Time Machine appears, in fact, to place him much closer to Wells than he was to satirists such as Huxley and Orwell.²⁴

Wells’s powerful impact, both as a writer and champion of science fiction, was also definitely felt by Alexander Belyaev who would become the most prolific Soviet science fiction author in the 1920s. By education a lawyer, he was nowhere near Moscow or Petrograd at the time of Wells’s 1920 visit. Instead he was in Yalta, on the Black Sea, confined to a bed and wearing a stiff body corset as a result of spinal tuberculosis, which caused the full paralysis of his legs. He developed this disease in 1915, when he was 30 years old, and it was during the six long years of total confinement that he read much of H. G. Wells (as well as Nikolai Tsiolkovsky). He started publishing in 1924, when his story, The Head of Professor Dowell, which he would a year later turn into a short novel, appeared in the journal Gudok. After that, and until 1930, Belyaev published at least one new book a year, being helped, in addition to The Wells Effect, by the cultural tendency, throughout the 1920s, to treat science fiction as largely literature for children, and, as such, enjoying certain imaginative freedoms.

Other significant works of Soviet science fiction, which appeared in the 1920s, included Alexey Tolstoy’s Golubye goroda (Blue Cities, 1925) and Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (The Garin Death-Ray, 1926); Sergey Grigor’ev’s Gibel’ Anglii (The Death of England, 1925), praised by Gorky; Iakov Okunev’s Griadushchii mir (The Coming World, 1926), a utopia of earthly existence in the twenty-second century; and Vadim Nikol’sky’s Cherez tysiachu let (In One Thousand Years, 1928), which uses a Wellsian time machine in order to see the communist utopia rather than Wells’s apocalyptic dystopia.

As Belyaev’s biographer Boris Liapunov pointed out, many Soviet science utopias of the 1920s tended to be not just optimistic but also devoid of bloody conflicts as if the future in them just appeared by itself, without any struggle or history.²⁵ The writers probably considered it necessary to avoid too much violence in order to continue fitting into the relatively more flexible domain of children’s literature. By the 1930s, however, even traditional children’s fairy tales became victims of the new approach where realistic presentations were to prevail at all costs over imagination and fantasy. Vera Inber, Belyaev’s literary contemporary, remembered that all of a sudden animals, birds and insects—in short all living creatures—were taken out of children’s literature. [T]hrough all these books walked boys and girls who knew perfectly well that animals and birds do not speak because they do not have the proper organs of speech and the well-attuned apparatus for thinking.²⁶

In the early 1930s, Belyaev, while still occasionally placing his shorter works in journals, grew so pessimistic that he went back to practicing law. He bitterly complained that science fiction was the poor Cinderella (Zolushka) of Soviet literature, and he was not exaggerating. As a scholar of Russian science fiction Darko Suvin informs us, From an average of about twenty-five titles per year in the mid-1920s (forty-seven in the peak year of 1927), the publications plummeted to four books in 1931, and one each in 1933 and 1934.²⁷ Belyaev may have felt that only Wells could help in this situation by coming back to reassert the importance of science fiction, and, in a politically savvy way, he invited him to do just that.

In the article titled The Lights of Socialism, or Mr. Wells in the Shadows, published in 1933 and included in the third Appendix in this volume, Belyaev ostensibly was angrily chiding Wells for having been skeptical about the ambitious plan Lenin had for the electrification of all Russia. But while singing praises to the freshly completed DneproGES, the dam over the river Dnieper, which became the largest Soviet power plant at the time, Belyaev also powerfully exhorted Wells to come and see this miracle for himself: Do you hear that, the famous writer, the unsurpassed fantast, prophet and seer of the future, the specialist in social utopias? The fantasy city has been built! Come and visit and look at it with your own ‘clairvoyant’ eyes. Compare it to your own cities in the shadows […] This is the city of the Kremlin Dreamer.²⁸ It is not clear whether Wells was ever made aware of this article, but he did, indeed, come the following year and even met with Belyaev.

As was the case in 1920, the main initiator of Wells’s 1934 summer visit to the Soviet Union was Gorky. In Moscow, Stalin and Wells seemed to hit it off even better than Lenin and Wells had done 14 years earlier. He did not visit the DneproGES, but in Leningrad he did see Belyaev. According to a Soviet journalist who was present at the Astoria Hotel where Wells was staying, the English writer assured his Soviet counterpart that he had really enjoyed reading The Head of Professor Dowell as well as The Amphibian Man, published in 1928, and was even envious of the success of these two novels. He also apparently stated that in the science fiction in the West, much to his regret, there was lots of fiction but very little science.²⁹

The Wells Effect seemed to have worked once again. Just days after he left, in 1934, in Literaturnaia gazeta, one of the most loyal Soviet writers, Konstantin Fedin, would largely follow the new Party line in regards to science fiction by suggesting that it may be no longer needed: The great deeds of the present attract the writer so much that he does not want to dream and fantasize about the future. But then, as if mindful of not offending the honored guest who was so complimentary to the Soviets and whose visit was publicized on the front pages of Literaturnaia gazeta’s previous three issues,³⁰ he added: One should not forget that great deeds in present will be followed by even greater deeds in the future. And the closer we come to the realization of our dreams, the less reason we have not to dream.³¹ After Wells left, the Soviets began publishing more science fiction. And while it was not quite the tempo of the 1920s and the genre was still on a strict ideological diet, nevertheless, as Suvin sums it up without attributing any of it to Wells, in 1935, properly sterilized, science fiction was partly rehabilitated as a marginal, juvenile, and popularizing genre.³² As to Belyaev, while he published only two works in the period of 1930–34, between 1935 and 1940 he managed to publish eight.

When Wells said he envied Belyaev his success, he may have not fully appreciated the difference between his own circumstances as a professional science fiction writer in the West and Belyaev’s balancing act as his counterpart in Soviet Russia. Despite a moderate increase in science fiction publications soon after Wells’s visit, the genre would fall back into neglect as the third decade of the century was coming to a close and its champions like Gorky, Tsiolkovsky and Lunacharsky—still somewhat influential even without his ministerial portfolio—were dying off.³³

After the war, the launch of Soviet Sputnik in 1957, four years after Stalin’s death and a year after Khrushchev’s denunciation of the former leader’s cult of personality, worked wonders for reviving Nikolai Tsiolkovsky’s reputation as a prophetic space scientist. It also led to a true renaissance for science fiction in the Soviet Union, as well as renewed fame for science fiction writers no longer living, including H. G. Wells and Belyaev, who both passed away in the 1940s. The first significant postwar and post-Stalin science fiction work was Ivan Yefremov’s Andromeda Nebula (Tumannost’ Andromedy), which came out the same year Sputnik was launched. A largely utopian vision about one world of united and cooperating communist planetary civilizations, the novel showed an unmistakable indebtness not just to the earlier Russians, Bogdanov, Belyaev and Tsiolkosky, but also—and still—to H. G. Wells.³⁴

Nine contributions to the critical part of this volume come from the UK, the United States, Canada and Poland. Their authors include a rich array of prominent H. G. Wells scholars, as well as those studying the influence of Russian culture in Great Britain in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and more general specialists in Russian and English Modernism. Their chapters in this volume address Wells’s impact on Russia, both while he was alive and posthumously, and Russia’s impact on Wells. The volume opens with the contribution from Maxim Shadurski, who delves into the affinities between Wells and Zamyatin by examining one of the striking meeting points between these two self-styled social thinkers: Wells’s and Zamyatin’s conceptions of utopia. Muireann Maguire, in the chapter that follows, details how Wells influenced two largely silenced Soviet authors from the 1930s, Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of the now-famous Master and Margarita, and the lesser known Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Zoran Kuzmanovich then examines the echoes in Nabokov’s story Terra Incognita (1931) of Wells’s The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes (1895), a tale to which Nabokov would have been exposed early while taking advantage of his father’s vast library in St. Petersburg.

The posthumous popularity of Wells in the Soviet Union is first addressed in the article by Richard Boyechko who looks at Wells’s influence on not just Belyaev but also upon authors who started writing after the English writer’s death: such as Ivan Yefremov, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (the latter known as the Strugatsky brothers). Patrick Parrinder likewise deals with Wells’s posthumous years, which produced the work of Yuly Kagarlitsky, the most serious Soviet biographer of Wells, parts of whose translated memoirs are featured in Appendix 6. Wells was present in Soviet cultural life not just through his translated works and his impact on the country’s writers but also through theater, film and TV adaptations of his works and physical portrayals of him on the stage and on the screen. Olga Sobolev and Angus Wrenn, in their critical essay, discuss these visual depictions of Wells and his books.

In the section devoted to Russia’s impact on Wells, David Rampton analyzes Wells’s conflicted views on the Soviet experiment as it stood at the end of the 1930s, as magnified in his Babes in the Darkling Wood, the so-called Novel of Ideas, published in 1940. Ira Nadel focuses on Wells’s complex interactions and relationship with Maxim Gorky, and Gorky’s significant influence on Wells’s feelings about Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as Wells’s personal life. My chapter, which closes this section, deals with Wells’s turbulent semi-marital relationship with Odette Keun, who has to some extent become the black sheep of Wells scholarship. Keun had her own experience in young Soviet Russia, as recorded in her 1923 book, My Adventures in Bolshevik Russia, which could have significantly influenced Wells.

The Appendix features important testimonies and writings by Russian and Soviet authors and scholars that appear here in translation for the first time. It starts with V. D. Nabokov (Appendix 1), who hosted Wells in St. Petersburg in 1914, describing visiting Wells in England two years later. Alexander Amfiteatrov, a popular Russian novelist and publicist who would emigrate in 1921, recounts in his reminiscences, published in 1922 in the émigré press, his attempts to tell Wells what was really going on under Lenin’s new regime (Appendix 2). The echoes of his angry list of grievances found