Krementsov Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction

Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-999298-0
Verlag: OXFORD UNIV PR

Krementsov Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction

Who are we? Where did we come from and where are we going? What is the meaning of life and death? Can we abolish death and live forever? These "big" questions of human nature and human destiny have boggled humanity's best minds for centuries. But they assumed a particular urgency and saliency in 1920s Russia, just as the country was emerging from nearly a decade of continuous warfare, political turmoil, persistent famine, and deadly epidemics, generating an enormous
variety of fantastic social, scientific, and literary experiments that sought to answer these "perpetual" existential questions. This book investigates the interplay between actual (scientific) and fictional (literary) experiments that manipulated sex gonads in animals and humans, searched for "rays
of life" froze and thawed butterflies and bats, kept alive severed dog heads, and produced various tissue extracts (hormones), all fostering a powerful image of "science that conquers death." Revolutionary Experiments explores the intersection between social and scientific revolutions, documenting the rapid growth of science's funding, institutions, personnel, public resonance, and cultural authority in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It examines why and how biomedical sciences
came to occupy such a prominent place in the stories of numerous litterateurs and in the culture and society of post-revolutionary Russia more generally. Nikolai Krementsov argues that the collective, though not necessarily coordinated, efforts of scientists, their Bolshevik patrons, and their
literary fans/critics effectively transformed specialized knowledge generated by experimental biomedical research into an influential cultural resource that facilitated the establishment of large specialized institutions, inspired numerous science-fiction stories, displaced religious beliefs, and gave the millennia-old dream of immortality new forms and new meanings in Bolshevik Russia.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Krementsov, Nikolai

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte der Revolutionen Russische Revolution
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of Contents
Note on names, translations, and transliterations
List of abbreviations
Prologue: Science and Fiction
1. "The Ray of Life": Science in Revolutions
2. "Professor's Head": Isolated Organs
3. "Neither Life, Nor Death": Anabiosis
4. "The Billionaire's Last Will": Hormones and Institutions
5. "The Dog's Heart" and Monkey Glands
6. "Quo Vadimus?": Human Biology and Human Destiny
Epilogue: An Unending Quest
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Krementsov, Nikolai
Associate professor of history, University of Toronto

Nikolai Krementsov is a Professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. He is the author of several books, including Stalinist Science (1997), The Cure (2002), International Science between the World Wars (2005), and A Martian Stranded on Earth (2011), and numerous articles on the history of biomedical sciences in Russia and the Soviet Union.