to the whole materialist philosophy of the Soviet regime. But he was not alone. Science fiction was rapidly becoming the principal arena for liberal, religious and dissident critiques of the Soviet world view. In Daniel Granin's Into the Storm (1962), the physicist hero is a humanist, a Pyotr Kapitsa or an Andrei Sakharov, who understands the need to harness science to spiritual human goals. 'What,' he asks, 'distinguishes people from animals? Atomic energy? The telephone? I say - moral conscience, imagination, spiritual ideals. The human soul will not be improved because you and I are studying the earth's magnetic fields.'201
The science fiction novels of the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady and Boris) were subversively conceived as contemporary social satire in the manner of Gogol and, drawing much from Dostoevsky, as an ideological critique of the Soviet materialist Utopia. That, to be sure, is how they were received by millions of readers in the Soviet Union who had grown accustomed from years of censorship to read all literature as allegory. In Predatory Things of the Century (1965) the Strugatskys portrayed a Soviet-like society of the future, where nuclear science and technology have delivered every conceivable power to the omnipresent bureaucratic state. Since there is no longer any need for work or independent thought, the people are transformed into happy morons. Sated with consumer goods, the citizens have become spiritually dead. This same idea was taken up by the dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky in his Unguarded Thoughts (1966), a collection of aphoristic essays which renounce science and materialism for a Russian faith and native soil-type nationalism that could have come directly from the pages of Dostoevsky.
Science fiction films were equally a vehicle for challenging Soviet materialism. In Romm's Nine Days (1962), for example, some scientists engage in long debates about the moral questions posed by atomic energy. They philosophize about the means and ends of science as a whole - to the point where this very verbal film begins to resemble a scene out of Dostoevsky in which characters discuss the existence of a God. In Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Solaris (1972) the exploration of outer space becomes a moral and spiritual quest for self-knowledge, love and faith. The cosmic traveller, a scientist called Chris, journeys to a space station in the distant galaxies where scientists
have been researching the mysterious regenerative powers of a huge burning star. His journey becomes a more personal quest, as Chris rediscovers his capacity to love, when Hari, his ex-lover, whom he had driven to suicide through his emotional coldness, is brought back to life, or a mirage of it, by the powers of the star. Hari's sacrifice (she destroys herself again) releases Chris from his emotional dependence on her and allows him to return to earth (an oasis which appears in the burning star). In a spirit of atonement he kneels before his father to beg forgiveness for his sins. The earth thus emerges as the proper destination of all journeys into space. Man ventures out not to discover new worlds but to find a replica of earth in space. This affirmation of the human spirit is wonderfully conveyed in the scene on the space station where Hari looks at Bruegel's painting Hunters in the Snow which helps her to recall her former life on earth. The camera scans in detail over Bruegel's painting as Bach's F minor Choral Prelude, interspersed with the sounds of the forest and the chimes of the Rostov bells, rejoices in the beauty of our world. Solaris is not a story about space in the literal sense of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, with which it is so frequently compared. Whereas Kubrick's film looks at the cosmos from the earth, Tarkovsky's looks from the cosmos at the earth. It is a film about the human values in which every Christian culture, even Soviet Russia's, sees its redemption.
