The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1)
Page 2
Although the most popular such work produced in France in the Age of Enlightenment, Marie-Anne Roumier’s Voyages de Milord Céton dans les sept planètes [Lord Seaton’s Journeys to the Seven Planets] (1765), concentrated heavily on the moral aspects of its cosmic scheme, the cosmic voyage included in Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne’s Les posthumes [Posthumous Correspondence] (written 1787-88; published 1802)4 was much more preoccupied with the potential biological exoticism of other worlds. Had the latter work been more widely read, it might have provided a more significant example, but it was regarded as an essentially scandalous work and had vanished from sight by the time Flammarion became active; although Flammarion cites it in his exhaustive survey of Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (1864; expanded 1892)—which compared astronomical and literary images of the worlds of the Solar System—he does not appear actually to have read it, and seems to be relying on a rather dismissive second-hand account.
At any rate, what all these previous works had in common, no matter how much or how little influence they took from scientific sources, was that they all were couched as visionary revelations, and were thus devoid of the narrative substantiality—or “hardness”—that had developed as the central characteristic of the novel. That had never seemed to be a significant limitation before the middle of the 19th century, when all books had perforce to be addressed to an intellectual elite, but with the advent of popular fiction—especially popular fiction aimed at younger readers—the packaging of didactic narratives as tales of adventure, in which imaginary journeys were disguised as actual experiences, came to be seen as necessary if readers were to be intimately engaged.
Flammarion and Verne were both admirers of Edgar Allan Poe, and they both took seriously the preface that Edgar Allan Poe had added to the 1840 version of “The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall”—the version that Charles Baudelaire translated into French—in which Poe had appealed for greater “verisimilitude” in accounts of lunar voyages, in order to fit them to the expectations of modern wisdom and modern literature. Flammarion and Verne were both well aware, however, that Poe’s own account of the cosmic schema, contained in Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe (1848), had been cast, of necessity, as a visionary fantasy, and neither of them could see any way to combine the demand for verisimilitude with the adventurous reach required by cosmic tourism. Flammarion’s only novel, Stella (1877), was a straightforward bildungsroman with only a hint of frankly-supernatural speculation, while Verne’s initial attempt to put Poe’s proposal into practice, De la Terre à la Lune (1865; tr. as From the Earth to the Moon) had focused on the building of a gun to fire a projectile at the Moon and had concluded modestly, with its firing.
Although he wrote Autour de la Lune as a sequel to De la Terre à la Lune, Verne’s space-travelers are hamstrung by the author’s inability or conscientious unwillingness to envisage any means of getting them off the Moon again were they to land on it, and are thus restricted to making a looping voyage around it, confining their observation of the alien world to staring through portholes and discussing their observations with the aid of a lunar map. Nor did Flammarion’s fellow popularizers of science make any significant headway with this sort of problem; P.-J. Hetzel published Henri de Parville’s Un habitant de la planète Mars (1865; tr. as An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars)5 alongside Verne’s early works, but Parville—a more prestigious, if less popular, popularizer than Flammarion—could find no more convenient narrative medium for his own cosmic vision than to represent it as a series of discussions conducted at a scientific conference. Although Flammarion borrowed that device in the first part of La Fin du monde (1894; tr. as Omega: The End of the World), it was by no means a satisfactory solution to the problem of transposing scientific speculation into a reader-friendly narrative form.
In setting out their initial prospectus for Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant russe, de Graffigny, Le Faure and Edinger were explicitly setting themselves the task of attempting to fill in the “verisimilitude gap” that Poe, Verne, Flammarion and Parville had all been unable to bridge. They knew, in making such plans, that they would have to improvise the narrative means that Verne had scrupulously declined to construct, in order to allow them to make ports of call within the Solar System and range much further afield than Verne’s characters had been able to do. They were willing not only to copy and elaborate Verne’s space gun, but also to appropriate the highly dubious means of interplanetary travel that he had used in Hector Servadac, even though they knew that they would have to face up to problems of rationalization that Verne had been unable to solve—and they knew, too, that they would need further improvisations of which no one had yet thought.
In retrospect, the attempts that de Graffigny and Le Faure made to design a sequence of space vehicles—each more powerful than the last, so as to be capable of taking their characters to the outer limits of the Solar System and beyond—inevitably seem woefully primitive, and are now very obviously lacking in the verisimilitude that the authors were trying to cultivate, but they did do their best, and it was probably the best that anyone could have been expected to do at the time. It is also very obvious, in retrospect, that they suffered an eventual failure of imagination and nerve similar to the one experienced by Verne in Hector Servadac, but much more exaggerated in consequence of their bolder ambitions—but that too is forgivable, given that they were attempting the unprecedented, and we now know that no one would do any better for at least 40 years.
It would be inappropriate to continue the discussion of the particular narrative moves employed by de Graffigny and Le Faure in advance of the reader’s experience of the text, so I shall postpone my further remarks on those matters to footnotes and an afterword, but I do need to make some further observations here on the particular difficulties that arose in the translation of this exceedingly awkward text.
However the text was composed, the fact that it appears to have gone through more than one draft did not result in any manifest tidying, and if the proofs were read at all, they were not read very scrupulously. The published text is abundantly littered with errors of every possible sort, some of which are presumably typesetting errors, but many of which must have been incorporated into the manuscript. Many of the proper nouns cited in the text are misrendered, probably because the manuscript used for typesetting was dictated to an amanuensis who did not know how to spell them by an author whose memory sometimes let him down. The narrative is also liberally strewn with continuity errors, seemingly resulting from memory lapses on the part of the dictator. Given its extreme length, it is not surprising that the story is rambling, and that its later phases do not have much in common with its earlier ones, but it is not uncommon for relatively short stretches of the text to include numerous inconsistencies and blatant contradictions. More worryingly, given the text’s loudly-proclaimed didactic aspirations, many of the mathematical calculations carried out by the characters are mistaken; although some of these miscalculations are due to careless rounding of the cited figures and others are undoubtedly transcription errors introduced by the amanuensis or the typesetter, some can only have arisen from the arithmetical carelessness of the originator of the calculations.
All of these errors caused problems in translation, because I had to decide in each case—or, at least, each case that I detected, given that a significant proportion will surely have escaped my attention—whether to correct the error without comment, leave it in place without comment, or call attention to its existence. With grosser errors, which arise from understandable mistakes made by 19th century astronomers or the fact that the authors’ understanding of certain basic scientific principles is a trifle confused, I felt compelled to leave the text as it is and to attempt explanation of some of its more intriguing shortcomings as best I could in commentary footnotes. To do that for more trivial errors would, however, have been inappropriate and could easily have resulted in such an enormous proliferation of notes that the text wo
uld have become ridiculously cluttered. I therefore decided simply to make small corrections wherever I could, and to leave some uncorrectable continuity errors in place without comment, thus confining my explanatory remarks to more serious matters, in which the reader might obtain some benefit from my supplementary observations. I can only apologize for perpetuating any errors that I did not notice, or could not resolve. I have also made some minor alterations to the content and arrangement of the text in order to make it read more smoothly in English and adapt it to its new format; the most significant of these adaptations is the continuous numbering of the chapters (which, in the original, started anew in each subsequent volume).
Having said all that, it is worth emphasizing that many of the more glaring faults in the original text arose, not from the carelessness of its authors, but from the sheer impossibility of their task. Much of what they were attempting to do in combining and fusing the legacy of astronomical discovery with the norms and expectations of novelistic narrative is akin to mixing oil and water, and would surely have defeated the ingenuity any contemporary individual or group of collaborators. The internal evidence of the text suggests that the two authors were as temperamentally incompatible as the materials they provided, but a certain emergent frustration was probably inevitable—and there is a sense in which the evident tension between their contributions, and the gradual development of that tension into a more-or-less open enmity, merely adds a further dimension to the fascination of a unique text.
Brian Stableford
PREFACE
To Messrs. G. Le Faure and H. de Graffigny
You ask me if I approve of the thinking that has presided over the elaboration of The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist—which is to say, the publication of a scientific romance entirely based on Astronomy.
Not only do I approve, but I also congratulate you on the path that you have taken. Nowadays, in fact, Astronomy is more than a science that remains inaccessible or indifferent; it emerges from the realm of data as a living thing. It is what touches us most intimately; without it, we would be living blindly in the midst of an unknown universe. No intelligent being, no cultivated mind is nowadays a stranger to the splendid discoveries of Astronomy: discoveries that allow us to live in the bosom of grandiose visions of nature and put us in direct communication with the sublime realities of Creation.
This is not the first time that anyone has tried to describe a voyage through space. Lucian of Samosata opened the way to us nearly 2000 years ago, and Cyrano de Bergerac transported us in his ingenious celestial voyages, written 200 years ago, to the bosom of The States and Empires of the Moon and Sun. More recently still, Edgar Poe has recounted the adventures of a burger of Rotterdam,6 rising in a balloon as far as our satellite and sending back news to the town of his birth by courtesy of an obliging Selenite. Other writers, too numerous to name, have followed the same path—but it was the imagination that played the greatest—almost the only—role in these imaginary excursions. Henceforth, science, being more advanced, can serve as a solid based for such compositions and use ingenious fabulation to frame the facts revealed by the marvelous telescopic discoveries of our times, offering intelligent minds of all ages reading-matter incomparably more enthralling, more instructive, and even more seductive than the over-refined novels of an empty and unhealthy literature that are thrown out daily as fodder for misguided minds and which leave in their wake neither truth, nor enlightenment, nor satisfaction.
The fact is that the study of the universe, in itself, exercises a profound and captivating charm upon all those who embark upon it. The fact is that one experiences intense joy in launching oneself, on the wings of the imagination, towards the worlds that gravitate, in concert with ours, in the immensity of the skies, towards the comets, mysterious messengers of infinity, and towards the stars, sparkling radiances at our zenith.
How many questions there are to resolve in this journey through the wide-open immensities of space! What are the causes of the changes produced on the surface of the Moon? What is the red spot, larger than the Earth, apparent on Jupiter? And who hollowed out those channels linking up all the seas of Mars? What is the physical constitution of those pale nebulas lost in the depths of the Heavens, and the transparent tails of comets? What worlds and what humankinds are illuminated by the ruby, emerald and sapphire suns that constitute the systems of double stars?
How many more points there are to elucidate!
People who want to take account, therefore, without undue fatigue, of the general constitution of the Universe, understanding that our Earth and its inhabitants are moving in space, will follow you in your audacious fecund attempt, you who have undertaken the mission of transporting them through the magnificent panoramas of the Heavens. It is good to live in the contemplation of the beauties of nature; it is pleasant to fly through the etheric heights, in the realm of the imagination, sometimes to forget the vulgar things of life to travel for a little while among the indescribable marvels of that Infinity whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
CAMILLE FLAMMARION
Juvisy Observatory,
November 1888
PUBLISHER’S ADVERTISEMENT
Far be it from us to presume to add to the lines that the reader has just read and interrupt him on the threshold of this work, now that the celebrated astronomer and writer, signatory of the preface, has opened the door with his high competence and incontestable authority. He has brought to light, better than we could, the points in which the present work differs from previous attempts; he has said, better than we could—and his affirmation is a guarantee—that in The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist the reader who cares about scientific truths will be able, while perusing pages that are sometimes dramatic, often witty and always interesting, to bring himself up to date with astronomical discoveries, the most recent of which have amazed the scientific world in this very year.7
The point on which we wish to insist, however, is this:
Until today, the more or less scientific romances that have dealt with astronomy have scarcely spoken of anything but the Moon; none of them has taken its hero through the whole series of celestial worlds, without omitting any, from our humble satellite, the first stop on the voyage to the resplendent stars and further beyond, by way of the Sun and the telescopic planets, small or giant, of our Solar System. Messieurs Le Faure and de Graffigny have undertaken this difficult task and we are entitled to affirm, in accordance with Monsieur Camille Flammarion, that they have done well, for they have succeeded in framing within their story, in a most original form, all the scientific data that it are nowadays indispensable to Astronomical knowledge.
Two artists well-known to and admired by the public, L. Vallet and Henriot, with all the intelligence and talent of their pencils, have collaborated in making this book a marvel, which leaves the publications of the same sort that have so far appeared—we mean those intended for people of taste—far behind.
Is there any need to add that in form and content, this work is addressed to everyone, to young lovers of exciting and instructive adventure stories as well as grown-ups entranced by a love of science.
Our last word must be to thank publicly the highly-esteemed scientific individual who has accepted the dedication of The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist.
G. EDINGER
THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES
OF A RUSSIAN SCIENTIST
“Our minds feel an intense communication
with these inaccessible worlds.”
Camille Flammarion, Les Terres du ciel
Chapter I
In which there is some mention of marriage and much talk of the Moon
It was snowing outside. The white flakes were falling softly and soundlessly, powdering the trees and the roofs of houses and covering the roadway with a thick carpet, on which the sleighs slid silently along.
Only the bells of the rare carriages passing through this remote quarte
r of St. Petersburg imparted a joyful tinkling to the heavy atmosphere, sometimes punctuated by the dry crack of a whip. Inside, a profound silence reigned, troubled only by the rumbling of an enormous enameled stove occupying the very center of the room and the monotonous tick-tock of a clock enclosed in a carved wooden frame and hung on the wall facing the door. In the embrasure of the window, slumped in a vast armchair, a young woman was lost in a reverie, her relaxed hands resting on a piece of embroidery that she had allowed to fall on her knees.
With her pale and symmetrically oval face, lit up by her large and prominent blue eyes, her straight and slender nose with pink and palpitating nostrils, her small mouth, hemmed by lips that were perhaps a little emphatic but adorably ruby-tinted, her well-shaped chin, hollowed by a little dimple, her flaxen-blonde hair curling naturally over her forehead and falling to her shoulders in two long, thick plaits, each tied at its extremity by a blue silk ribbon, the young woman represented the Russian feminine type in all its purity. Her slim shoulders, her scarcely-accentuated bosom, her slender and lissom figure, and her slightly thin arms indicated that she was 16 or 17 years old—but on seeing the gravity of her forehead and the grooves that were hollowed out at the corners of her lips, one might have thought her 20.