MOSCOW, March 16, Pavel Surkov. He was the first among writers to come up with his own incredibly logical universe. And today we can well say that the author of “Amphibian Man” largely predetermined the future. His predictions and thoughts about whether humanity is ready for scientific discoveries are in the material dedicated to the 140th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Belyaev.
Genius captured by ambitious
Neuroscientists are puzzling over how our brain works, where the limits of consciousness are and whether they exist. Belyaev metaphorically put these thoughts into two powerful images — a head without a body and a brain without a body. It all started with the story “The Head of Professor Dowell,” which the writer later reworked into a novel. A terminally ill scientist continues to live as a separate head. This is how the image of a humanist and progressive appears, a desperate fighter against injustice, who becomes completely physically dependent on his student, the cynical and ambitious Kern.
In the story “Hoyti-Toyti” from the cycle about Professor Wagner, Belyaev goes even further. It is no longer the head that is being saved, but only the scientist’s brain, which is supported with nutrients. As a result, it grows in volume and it is no longer possible to push it into the skull, so it is transplanted into the head of an elephant. A whole series of adventures of yesterday's man, imprisoned in the body of a huge animal, unfolds before the readers. And the most difficult thing here is to prove to others that those who do not look human may well have a powerful mind.
The tragedy of superhumans
Other creatures, different from other people, who appeared as a result of an ingenious scientific experiment or were born with some kind of natural anomaly, are the favorite heroes of science fiction. Ichthyander from Amphibian Man is a terminally ill boy who is saved by the genius Dr. Salvator by transplanting shark gills. Now he can live both on land and under water. And, naturally, selfish people perceive it not only as a miracle, but also as a way to get to the countless treasures of the deep sea.
Ariel from Belyaev’s latest novel is a young man who learned to fly as a result of a complex scientific experiment. Like Ichthyander, he has no place in a world where only material things are valued; people have no time for immersing themselves in the intricacies of the unusual human soul. Ariel also becomes an outcast and turns from a romantic hero into a tragic one.
The author shows that superpower always coexists with some kind of superweakness; it is difficult or even impossible to achieve absolute perfection. And society must preserve such unusual people, come to an agreement with them, and not use them as a tool to achieve base goals.
The writer emphasizes: it is scientists who make a superman out of a person. The experiments of Doctors Salvator and Hyde are sometimes very reminiscent of current work with stem cells and even colliders.
Conditional abroad
The action in the works of Alexander Belyaev always takes place in conventional foreign, necessarily capitalist countries . And they fall under the radar of the writer’s social satire. He directly says that an isolated society is doomed — as in «The Island of Lost Ships.» And we should listen to all the apologists of “cancel culture” here: it is impossible to disown the rest of the world, believing oneself to be better than the rest.
Belyaev is a great humanist. Even in his last days, during the Leningrad blockade, suffering from illness and hunger, he invariably maintained faith in the power of the human spirit and mind, science, which, in turn, is impossible without clear and firm moral principles.