Метаболизм современности: П Р Е о Б Р А з о В А Н и Е э Н Е Р г и и В Р о м А Н Е А. Б о г Д А Н о В А «К Р А С Н А я з В Е з Д А» и Р А С С К А з Е А. Б Е л я Е В А «Н и ж и з Н ь, Н и С м Е Р т ь»

Although early Soviet literature and culture claimed a radical break from the previous aesthetics, and characterized themselves in many respects by renewed, hierarchical and utilitarian relations of the society with the environment, the enmeshment of the human organism within the earth, the environment, value systems, and the distribution of knowledge appears evidently in the literary and artistic works produced at that time and builds on pre-revolutionary theories from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. This essay analyzes energy transformation across the human-nonhuman divide by examining two works of science fiction — Alexander Bogdanov’s Krasnaya Zvezda (1908) and Alexander Beliaev’s “Ni zhizn’, ni smert’” (1926) — along with the pre-Revolutionary scientific theories by which they were informed, system-thinking and anabiosis. By employing the concept of “metabolism” as energy transformation, I aim to highlight epistemological continuities between pre-Soviet science and early Soviet imagined futures. In spite of the official Soviet narrative and the slogan “Everything anew!” writers and intellectuals before and after 1917 produce story-worlds that are still deeply informed by pre-Revolutionary theories. From their works, humankind emerges as inescapably enmeshed in the environment.