Il viaggio utopico nella fantascienza sovietica: <em>La Nebulosa di Andromeda</em> di I.A. Efremov

Abstract

The Utopian Journey in Soviet Science Fiction. The Andromeda nebula by I. a: Efremov

Tumannost’ Andromedy by I.A. Efremov, a novel set in the 30-th century, can be interpreted in its utopic entreaties according to the theme of journey, in order to emphasize its strong link with the composite and problematic cultural climate during the Thaw. The journey can be considered as a technical device to depict the changed landscapes of a future communist society that will create a planet Earth totally resembling human rationality, in Efremov’s project. From the structural point of view, the journey is necessary to face the new and to enlarge one’s conceptual system: thanks to the plausible scientifi c hypothesis, the writer casts his project in the 30-th century, extrapolating the present premises and developing them in a better future. The reader is entrusted with the task of gradually discovering the criticisms of contemporaneity, while the definition of it remains rather ambiguous, since many of its aspects are omitted or denied. The evaluation of science as the concrete instrument with which to reach happiness gives the possibility to read the journey as the metaphor of the impulse towards knowledge and the unknown, as well as to the transcendent. In this perspective, the pages of the novel re-echo the Cosmist’s ideals, as the research of a friendly contact with other worlds, and the human victory against space and time represented by the colonization of the Universe.