Slavic Dreams

Monday, 4 November 2019

1. Pkhentz and Science Fiction

a. Story told by alien, shipwrecked on the earth 30 years ago, who has been living
disguised as human for all those years.
b. Compare it to what we know about conventional stories of aliens and humans
-NB. Close plot connections to the 1976, Nicholas Roeg The Man who fell to
Earth.
c. Narrative told from the pov of alien – defamiliarization/alienation effect as we see
humanity with fresh eyes, so we see those things that we normally take for
granted (food, sex, our bodies, disability, love, social norms, etc.) from the
outside, and presumably, this added vision helps us, changes us, our way of
thinking some way. Exactly what is the effect of alienation in this context? We
question the the thig we take for granted, expand our minds, sympathy, etc.

2. Language
a. Difficulty of expressing the most important in foreign language. . . ubiquity of
misunderstanding (Verochka)
b. Language and the failed search for kindred spirit (real hunchback)
c. Symbolism of forgetting one’s native tongue. . .
d. Inexpressible beauty of the sounds of his native language. . .
e. Language as metaphor. . .

3. Sinyavsky/Tertz and Soviet Culture

a. Portrait of the dissident individual in totalitarian society, forced to hide his true
self, what he knows about the society in which he lives, etc. in order to survive a
society which doesn’t accept others!
b. Portrait of the free/individual writer in a collective society in which he and his
way of life are profoundly alien. Sinyavsky uses SF to tell a story about the plight
of the non-conforming individual in Soviet society, but this could just as easily be
read as a story about the non-conformist anywhere!

4. Conclusions
a. Defense of non-conformity in all its forms. . .
b. Pushing SF beyond conventional genre status to “Literature”