Revolutionary Experiments
The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 23 January 2014
- ISBN 9780199992980
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages288 pages
- Size 236x155x20 mm
- Weight 522 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
This book examines the transformation of specialized biomedical knowledge 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.
MoreLong description:
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.
this book can provide an enjoyable read for the lay intellectual, and a scholarly monograph fit for advanced research and for the classroom.
Table of Contents:
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
