«Interplanetarnye» khudozhestvennye i iskusstvennye yazyki v literature i iskusstve 1900–1920-kh gg. (Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, Aleksandr Bogdanov, Aleksei Tolstoi, brat'ya Gordiny)

Abstract

In the history of culture, projects of artificial languages were mainly associated with the search for some universal and, if possible, ideal means of communication, as evidenced, in particular, by the projects of Rene Descartes, John Wilkins, Johann Martin Schleier, Ludwik Zamenhof, Edgar de Waal, Jacob Linzbach, and others. In the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, not only scientists but also science fiction writers, the first of whom was H.G. Wells, offered illustrations and sketches of fictional artificial languages. The esssay mainly examines cases of artificial languages employed for interplanetary communication that take place in Russian science fiction novels (“The Red Star” by Alexander Bogdanov and “Aelita” by Alexey Tolstoy). In addition, it covers experiments in the field of inventing an interplanetary language by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in a number of popular science and fiction works, as well as by Wolf Gordin in his works on the pan-methodological language of AO. In line with the philosophical ideas of Roland Barthes about the discourse of power, as well as considering two types of sociolects and, accordingly, two types of languages (encratic and acratic), artificial languages are classified as acratic, since they are usually created in order to confront the mechanisms of power as such. The projects of the artificial and artistic (fictional) languages of the early twentieth century not only an attempted to find a language of communication between the inhabitants of different planets; they also urged to invent a universal means of language communication that would bring together the people of the East and the West who were separated by revolutions and wars.