One of the earliest of these was The Land of Gonguri (1922) by Vivian Itin (1893-1945). Itin was one of those revolutionary adventurers of the period who wandered and fought the length and breadth of the huge republic in the Civil War. In Siberia, Itin passed death sentences in Bolshevik tribunals, closed churches and took away their bells, preserved ancient monuments, and wrote poems to exalt Siberian aviation. He was one of the few utopian writers who was a perty member. The initial core of his story came to him in 1917, a fantasy dream of other worlds which he folded into a revolutionary plot and published in the obscure town of Kansk on the Enisei River. One of the ironies of Gonguri was that is cost 20,000 rubles in the inflated currency of the moment and that the peasants who bought it used it for cigarette paper. The other was that its autor, the first post-revolutionary reconnoiterer of the socialist heaven, was purged under Stalin.

“Gonguri” is a land – seen in the dream of a Red partisan – of oversized fruit, machines that work better than people, cities inside buildings holding tens of thousands of people and erected at astonishing speed. Work is conducted as a festival and the fruits of this labor are public squares of mirrored glass, continuous gardens, and palaces of dreams where writers create their works. Murder, war, intrigue, hungry children, terror, and the state have disappeared. The pathos of the story is provided when the sixteen-year old hero-dreamer ia awakened at dawn by White soldiers who take him out to be shot. The brightly colored vision of tomorrow is thus limned by the dreadful cruelties of class war in the bloody Siberian campaigns.¹

Stites Richard. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. – New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. – P. 174, 286.

© Richard Stites, текст, 1989