Professor Yefremov's KGB Files
Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and author, had an influence on Professor Yefremov’s outlook. Breaking from the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition which focused largely on unconscious motivations, Fromm held that humans are products of the cultures in which they are bred. Yefremov was not as kind to the late Middle Ages as Fromm. To him, they represented religious fanaticism, the dark ages, burning of those who were different, horrible fate of women…Throughout his novels and stories one sees great influence of ancient Greece. Yefremov was a lover of life; he constantly emphasized beauty, especially the beauty of human body, beauty of healthy Eros. He hated religious fanatics, all those who destroyed beauty and human psyche.
He possessed encyclopedic, comprehensive knowledge, and his books, whether historical or sci-fi novels were full of precise scientific details. Yefremov’s knowledge (revealed in his stories and novels) encompassed biology, physics, astronomy, sociology, philosophy and medicine. Everett C. Olson of the UCLA Department of Biology, a former chair of the department, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and recipient of numerous medals and awards, was an internationally recognized pioneer in studies of the origin and evolution of vertebrate animals. He passed away in 1993. Professor Olson, who knew the Russian scientist and corresponded with Ivan Yefremov, described his colleague as a person who seemingly did not feel boundaries of time and space. The Russian writer was equally at home among the stars, in the open ocean, in the cataclysms of the distant geological epochs, or in the nonexistent world of anti-matter. On occasions Yefremov seemed to the American scientist to be an enigmatic representative of his society. What society?
A DIFFERENT COMMUNISM
Ivan Yefremov dared to have his own vision of Communism: of a humane society, of a future world based on the ideas of equality of all in reason and in spiritual life regardless of the distinctions between races, tribes, customs and religions. Professor Yefremov took fundamental principles of Soviet ideology (Communism and dialectics) and applied to them his own meaning, greatly removed from their orthodox Marxist ideas. His complex philosophy combined materialism with a dialectical (but non-Marxist) base and ideas derived from Eastern philosophies . He was not neither truly a Soviet (in the ideological sense) nor an anti-Soviet writer. But millions of Soviet readers devoured his books and visions of a different, complex and beautiful future.
Professor Yefremov’s vision of Communism did not include the existence of the all-knowing and “wise” Communist Party, and the sinister, hilarious, boring, stifling, ridiculous attributes of every-day Soviet life. His books, even the utopian Andromeda –the Space Age Tale (1956) challenged the official ideology by exposing the inadequacy and constraints of existing Marxist dialectical materialism and showing the necessity for a new spiritual philosophy. This did not bode well with the Soviet leaders and the “shield and sword” of the regime, the KGB, although the Russian writer was a patriot of his country, and did not view Western capitalism as an alternative. He was concerned with the future of the planet, and had his own ideas what it ought to be.
At the same, he was con vinced to the day of his death in 1972 , that war between the Soviet Union and China was unavoidable, and he believed the United States should be afraid of China, too. This is according to The Other Side of the Medal (1990), Professor Everett C. Olson’s book published in UCLA.
Average Soviet people loved his novels, to the extent that many of them (including the nation’s cosmonauts) chose their professions and education because of the influence of Yefremov’s novels. The novel was translated into dozens of languages of the world. That stupendous future he described in Andromeda-the Space Age Tale and Cor Serpentis (Heart of the Snake) ( 1958 ) was drastically different from the dreary contemporaneous reality, and worth fighting for. But even such prominent Soviet personalities as the father of Soviet space program, Sergey Korolyov, according to his assistant V. Tsibin, loved Andromeda and Yefemov’s ideas.
What an unusual adventure genre and science fiction writer he was for the Soviet readers: he believed in the spiritual power of a man, psychological and physical self-improvement; he created a vision of a magnificent, brilliant, breathtaking future of humankind, of space exploration, of cooperation between ours and the extraterrestrial civilizations through the use of the Great Circle, a marvelous association that consolidates isolated planets (like Earth) in the interconnected totality by remarkable methods of communication. And yet the future was not as bright in a later novel…
To be continued
Paul Stonehill
Author of the Soviet UFO Files (1998), and co-author of Mysterious Sky: Soviet UFO Phenomenon (published: 2006 in English, 2007 in German, and 2009 in Portuguese)
