A New Poetics of Science: On the Establishment of “Scientific‐Fictional Literature” in the Soviet Union

Since the 1920s the relationship between literature and science, more specifically between the modes of popularizing scientific ideas to a broader public, was a broadly discussed topic among writers, critics and scholars. In these debates the relation between educational goals, entertaining devices and visionary thought experiments was a contested issue. Moreover, their interrelationship led to the first efforts to define the Soviet version of science fiction, namely as “scientific‐fantastic literature” (nauchno‐fantasticheskaia literatura). As an alternative to this controversial term Maxim Gorkyi proposed and popularized the expression “scientific‐fictional literature” (nachno‐khudozhestvennaia literatura) as early as the 1930s. His formulation was meant to constitute a new kind of genre within the frames of Socialist Realism, as well as generate a new, uniquely Soviet understanding of scientific thinking itself, opposed to the bourgeois notion of supposedly objective scientific knowledge. But it was not until long after Gorky's death in the post‐war period that the term was finally established as a compulsory form of writing in the context of the “science wars” (Ethan Pollock) of late Stalinism. The article reconstructs these controversial discourses surrounding a new poetics of science and offers an exemplary reading of the work of one of the most prominent and influential writers in the field to highlight the ideological scope, but also the aesthetic limits of “scientific‐fictional literature.”.