EUTHANASIA
By:
October 14, 2024
A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.
The shining and ponderous goblet
I empty: the earth drops below me,
All things sink away, — I am treading
Cold space — the vast void — the dim
ether.
But distant, in ancient space looming,
My glimmering goblet: the Sun.
I look — far below me are lying
The rivers, the forests, the valleys,
Estranged in the vanishing distance.
A cloud, blowing fog on my eyelids,
Trails gossamer gold in its going.
The flickering landscape is burning
Its last: mid-day stars newly-kindled
Look into my soul, sparkling: “Welcome,”
With radiance silently streaming:
“The end of long wanderings, brother,
Lies here, in your motherland, welcome!”
Slow hour upon hour in procession,
Slow centuries, smiling, pass onward.
In ancient space proudly I lift it,
My glimmering goblet: the Sun.
— Not sure what year this was first published, but before 1927. From Russian Poetry: An Anthology, chosen and translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky (1927).
Andrey Bely, who changed his name from Boris Bugayev, was a distinguished theorist and a leading writer in the Symbolist movement. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, president of the Moscow Mathematical Society, was the author of his influential philosophical essays decrying geometry and probability and trumpeted the virtues of hard analysis.
Despite — or because of — his father’s mathematical tastes, Boris Bugaev was fascinated by probability and particularly by entropy, a notion to which he frequently refers. Particularly in his psychological autobiographical novels Kotik Letaev (1918), which was heavily influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy.
See: “The Russian Revolution and the End of Time: 1900-1940”
by Robert C. Williams (1995)
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.