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For decades there have been several inaccuracies and misconceptions about the evolution of Ukrainian science fiction. One of them pertains to the first depiction of space flight. In the annals of Ukrainian literature, Volodymyr Vladko1 is cited as the first author to portray an interplanetary journey, in his novel Arhonavty Vsesvitu (Argonauts of the Universe), first published in 1935. This seemed an irrefutable historical fact, at least for those who subscribed to the notion that Ukrainian science fiction emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s and evolved only within the general framework of Soviet Ukrainian literature. However, this is rather a myopic perception of the development of Ukrainian culture and literature. On examining the Ukrainian publications that appeared in Western Ukraine and abroad, one discovers that several important works were published before the advent of Soviet Ukrainian science fiction.2 It becomes quite evident that Vladko's novel was not the first Ukrainian science fiction dealing with an interplanetary voyage. In fact the first depiction of space flight in Ukrainian literature occurred three years earlier, in the novel by Myroslav Kapii, Kraina blakytnykh orkhidei (The Land of Azure Orchids, 1932).3
It is not difficult to discern that Kapii's novel was excluded from the history of Ukrainian science fiction because of ideological reasons. With the advent of socialist realism in the 1930s, Soviet Ukrainian literature, including science-fiction, was subject to ideological formulas prescribed by the Soviet regime. Authors were required to produce "science fiction with imminent aims" that extolled the prevailing ideology and depicted both the goals and achievements of Soviet socialism in the present and the near future.
Beginning his literary career in the early 1930s, Volodymyr Vladko unreservedly embraced the existing Soviet ideological and literary precepts. This can be seen in all of Vladko's science fiction of the 1930s, especially in his celebrated Arhonavty Vsesvitu.4 In this novel the author extols the virtues of Soviet collectivism, which culminates in the building of a spacecraft that flies to Venus and returns with a new metal "ultragold." Vladko's unswerving loyalty to Soviet ideology and the Party line ensured successive printings of Arhonavty Vsesvitu (eight editions between 1935 and 1961), laudatory reviews, and claims to being the first depiction of space travel in Ukrainian literature.5
By the...