Cecilia King is a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas.
Andrei Platonov's fictional works are difficult to categorize squarely within one genre. While his later works adhere more closely to realism, his works from the 1920s range from science fiction to social satire. Even those of his short stories seemingly presenting as science fiction defy the parameters of the genre. In particular, the 1926 story “The Lunar Bomb” possesses many of the prominent markings of science fiction, but confuses and undermines the telltale characteristics of this literary tradition. These subversive tendencies are evident in the story’s narrative style, the manner in which futuristic technology is presented, and the story’s commentary on its society of the future. Readers familiar with science fiction tropes would not be surprised by the story’s depiction of a futuristic society, frequent explanations of technological processes, and preoccupation with space travel. Ultimately, though, this story coopts these typical elements of science fiction to tell a confoundingly different type of story.
Science fiction often transports the reader to a wholly unfamiliar setting. The reader relies on the narrator to make sense of this new world. To serve this purpose, science fiction may contain protracted explanations of the science and technology of the society portrayed, as well as descriptions of its social order. These techniques serve to entertain the reader, while also applying logic to how such futuristic enterprises might operate. Thus, there is a sense of rootedness in this type of narrative that serves to orient the reader in a new world. This world-building allows a work of fiction to comment on dilemmas facing its fictional societies, urging the reader to consider aspects of their own society in a new light.
“The Lunar Bomb” contains these expected elements of science fiction, amusing the reader with depictions of a future society and its harnessing of impressive technology. However, as the reader begins to grasp the thrust of the plot—the development of a spacecraft designed to fly to the moon—the story’s adherence to expected science fiction standards slips away. In the end, the story leaves the reader disoriented within the fictional city of Carbomort. We have gained a sophisticated understanding of some of the city’s technology, but glaring omissions remain, hampering our ability to relate Carbomort’s features and flaws to our own society. The reader’s guide becomes ever more slippery in his connection with the audience, ultimately evading the narrative entirely.
Typically, science-fiction protagonists and narrators act to anchor the reader in a potentially disorienting landscape by translating its potentially confusing features. In order to establish this relationship with the reader, this guide is often a visitor or a misfit within the strange world depicted. Meanwhile, not only is Peter Kreuzkopt, Platonov's protagonist in "Lunar Bomb," known among his compatriots as a tactless oddball, he also fails to effectively translate his city to the story's audience. Without a solid tether to the story’s logic, the reader is encouraged, instead, to fixate on technology.
As a physical city, Carbomort is completely isolated. Its obsession with mechanical efficiency relies on heavy extractive industries, directing the city’s only interactions with nature downward, far below the earth’s surface. Lengthy descriptions of these mechanical processes abound, but the narrative style is jerky. While the story’s action follows a chronological path, the narrator dwells on technological descriptions even while glossing over catastrophic events in Kreuzkopf’s personal life. Devastated and alone after his wife has left him, Kreuzkopf immediately sets out to pursue his scientific vision, the building of the titular lunar bomb. Rather than exploring Kreuzkopf’s emotional state, the story’s narrative, like Kreuzkopf himself, distracts itself with the details of his work. The narrative becomes fractured, reflecting the internal state of a person avoiding his own internal turmoil.
The story comments on the structure of Carbomort’s society in a manner seemingly typical of science fiction, but ultimately refuses to provide parallels to the reader’s social and political world. Kreuzkopf comes from a working-class background, while his wife, Erna, is an aristocrat. Platonov foregrounds this potential class conflict in the story's opening, then abandons the theme. Instead, Kreuzkopf avoids addressing his grief over the end of his marriage by throwing himself into his pursuit of scientific knowledge. His work test-driving new types of automobiles is described in detailed, mechanical terms, as if Kreuzkopf is willing himself to ignore his emotional pain and conceive of himself as a machine. The narrative follows Kreuzkopf’s lead by expanding descriptions of his driving and minimizing details that would otherwise serve as consequential descriptions of Carbomort’s social arrangement. Wedged within accounts of natural scenery during Kreuzkopf’s driving excursions, for example, is a passing mention of smoke from a city crematorium. Like the elision of Erna's aristocratic origins, this passing reference to widespread cremation — a distant, though distinct, ambition in 1920s-era Russia — remains unexplored.
Throughout the story, Kreuzkopf actively avoids facing his horror, guilt, and sadness over the tragedies he has caused. He uses scientific inquiry to evade his emotional reality, but the mere act of avoidance traps him further and causes additional destruction. The continual fracturing of Kreuzkopf’s personality as he experiences each tragedy and subsequently avoids facing it makes for an evasive narrative style that attempts to divert the reader with descriptions of science and technology. The reader may try to catch up with Kreuzkopf’s mental state, but the protagonist is always working on his next escape plan.
The narrative flow shifts, however, when Kreuzkopf begins reading poetry. Not only does the content of the text shift from explanation of technology to lines of verse, but Kreuzkopf’s very attitude is transformed. No longer determined to escape his physical surroundings and his spiritual state through the pursuit of knowledge, Kreuzkopf recognizes that other people also experience existential loneliness and grief and that human empathy and love cannot overcome life's inherent unhappiness. At this point, he plans his final escape from his own life.
If the reader is ever able to relate to Kreuzkopf, it is difficult to pinpoint what one can learn from his experiences. By the end of the story, he has eluded the reader entirely, merely leaving verbatim reports from outer space that abruptly cease as the protagonist ejects himself from the story. The descriptions of this strange invented world and its futuristic technology, which had previously glued together Kreuzkopf’s patchwork narrative, have fallen away and left a numbered list of notes whose logic gradually disintegrates. The reader may feel that the only remaining questions are about Kreuzkopf himself, not about the strange world of Carbomort, but he has vanished from the narrative.
