Фантастика Александра Беляева: из небытия в бытие
The fiction of Alexandr Belyaev: from non-existence to existence

Summary/Abstract: Science fiction entered Soviet literature in the 1930s and 1940s. The works of this genre combined scientific inventions with the fantastic imaginations of their authors. Criticism of that time outlined the limits of the “horizon of fiction”: the subject matter of fantastic works was supposed to touch upon future prospects for the development of science and technology. Otherwise, fiction would be cut off from human life. Despite the limitations of criticism, Alexander Belyaev continued to write about spacecraft flights to other planets, describing in detail the mechanisms of operation of space rockets. Belyaev relied on the scientific works of famous scientists, including Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The fiction of the Russian writer has its own characteristics: the writer details the technical mechanisms of spaceships, introduces autobiographical moments into his prose, combines the fantastic and the real, draws attention to the moral and educational aspects in the presentation of his characters, and looks into the future in order to describe a new man of space. The article’s author argues that a combination of literary translation with technical translation becomes an important task for translating Belyaev’s prose.

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