![]() Hence, the instantaneous connection, the unbreakable bond. Bradbury was a great young-adult author, and the Soviet Union, at its core, was a country of children of all ages, stunted in their development by the crooked dimensions of the funhouse (sans the fun, more or less) world they’d been born into. ![]() They knew that Bradbury, despite his position as a Martian-like figure of sorts (a denizen of a separate and distant planet called America), was, in effect, one of them: a Soviet child, frightened by the dark, complex, and essentially unknowable world of his own existence and continuously striving, in vain, to assert a measure of control over his circumstances. Within that ideological paradigm, Ray Bradbury was meant to play the role of the loudest literary canary in the mine shaft.īut his millions of Soviet readers could not be fooled. By contrast, the few dystopian novels and short stories by their non-Soviet counterparts that were on offer in the country all tended to relate different versions of the same cautionary tale, with regards to the dire perils awaiting humankind in the unfortunate event that the future, by some fluke of history, ended up belonging to the rapacious, soulless, and increasingly fascist world of unbridled capitalism. Science fiction, in the Soviet Union, was an ideology-intensive literary genre, whose ultimate, overriding agenda lay in claiming the future for a unified, beautifully homogenized, meaningfully sterile, stateless, and classless world-patterned in its development, supposedly, on the Soviet model of society.Īccordingly, most Soviet science-fiction authors portrayed just that kind of radiant, glorious, brave new would-be world. ![]() There was a reason that his books were translated into Russian by masters of the craft, and were allowed to be printed in runs of millions of copies. The love felt for Bradbury by the rumbling machine of official Soviet propaganda, which ran the Soviet publishing industry, was, of course, not so selfless. ![]()
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