The October Revolution becomes both a historical turning point and a test of literary faith in the account of Boris Ansky and Efraim Ivanov. Ansky invests revolution with the hope of abolishing death; Ivanov’s sudden success as a science-fiction writer gives readers an imaginative picture of socialist possibility, before the later suppression of his novels exposes the widening distance between that promise and political reality.

Revolutionary Hope and the Abolition of Death

Ansky and Ivanov meet at a Moscow literary cafe, where the two writers become friends through their shared interest in ideas and literature. Ansky rejects the official and popular classification of Ivanov as a fantasy writer, accepting instead Ivanov’s preferred description of his work as science writing. Their friendship gives Ansky an interlocutor for his expansive political hopes: he believes revolution will spread throughout the world and bring progress and happiness.

When Ivanov insists that death cannot be abolished, Ansky treats that impossibility as the very problem revolution must confront. He imagines humanity immersing itself in the unknown until it finds something beyond death. The repeated insistence on abolition makes his political hope more than a program for social change: it becomes a demand to overcome the most fundamental limit of human life.

Ivanov’s Work Before and After the Revolution

Ivanov’s literary career has already been shaped by failure and adaptation. After attempts to imitate celebrated nineteenth-century writers, he turns to the less-remembered Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov; for a time, this combination brings success. By 1910, however, the old models have been exhausted, his writing has stalled, and his finances and self-regard suffer. He supports himself through intermittent work, including jobs for scientific and agricultural journals, while continuing party duties ranging from writing pamphlets to procuring paper and serving as a liaison. The Revolution does not ease these burdens: his labor increases, but he continues without complaint.

Ivanov’s breakthrough arrives in an unlikely form. Asked to write about life in Russia in 1940, he produces his first science-fiction story, “The Train Through the Urals,” in three hours. Its young narrator travels at an average speed of 125 miles per hour through factories, cultivated fields, and new model villages, encountering foreign delegations who study the advances for use in their own countries. At the journey’s destination, the boy visits his grandfather, a former Red Army soldier who has earned a university degree later in life and now leads a secretive research laboratory. The grandfather wants to describe recent discoveries, but the boy asks instead for stories of the Revolution, the war against the Whites, and foreign intervention. The story’s reception astonishes both Ivanov and its editor; letters from across the country praise its faith in the future, and readers identify with the grandfather.

Utopian Fiction and Political Reversal

The success of Ivanov’s first science-fiction story establishes a potent connection between revolutionary memory and imagined futurity. Its fast train, factories, villages, and international visitors make a transformed society visible through the eyes of a child. Yet the framing conversation between grandson and grandfather turns that future back toward the Revolution and war that produced it: technological advancement does not displace political history but carries it forward as a story to be remembered.

That imaginative confidence eventually collides with political disappointment. By 1930, Ansky’s notebooks register Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union—dated there as 1930, though the account notes that it actually occurred in 1929—and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s suicide. Ansky’s spirits decline, and the notebooks record his conclusion that the October Revolution has failed. The contrast is sharp: the Revolution once seemed to promise a worldwide advance toward happiness and even the abolition of death, but the later record measures that hope against events that diminish it.

Ivanov’s Expulsion and the Revolution’s Legacy

Ivanov’s later novels, Midday and Dawn, extend his speculative world through extraterrestrials, interplanetary journeys, fractured time, competing civilizations, and characters on the move. In 1935, the novels are withdrawn from bookstores, and an official notice expels him from the party. According to Ansky, Ivanov spends three days unable to rise from bed, rereading his three novels and searching them for a reason for his expulsion. His books, once instruments for imagining a future and welcomed by readers who found hope in them, become the objects through which he tries to understand his political rejection.

In 1936, at the beginning of the first great purge, Ivanov is arrested and spends four months in prison before signing the documents placed before him. After his release, former literary friends avoid him. He writes to Maxim Gorky seeking intervention, but the gravely ill Gorky does not answer before he dies. At Gorky’s burial, two members of his circle challenge Ivanov’s presence. The sequence closes the arc of revolutionary literary promise with exclusion: a writer whose work had inspired readers’ faith in the future is left isolated by the political and literary world that once received him. The Revolution remains, in Ansky’s recollection, at once the source of an almost absolute hope and the historical measure by which that hope is judged.