1950-60’s

The next period to witness a blossoming of Soviet science fiction was largely due to the burgeoning success of the Soviet space program during the 1950-60’s. It was also related to the weakening of censorship and the bolstering of international relationships. During this period, ideas of a human spaceflight because a defining topic for Soviet sci-fi.

The artist Andrey Sokolov was a frequent contributor to T-M magazine. His aspiration – to depict the cosmos realistically – was based on the first photographs taken in space during this period; as well as his own interview with cosmonauts. From 1965 he often collaborated with the artist and cosmonaut Alexey Leonov – the first astronaut to perform a spacewalk. However, often their collective depictions of Soviet spaceships were intentionally inaccurate as the Soviet space program remained highly, and notoriously, confidential. For the 1967 illustrated book ‘Wait for Us, Stars!’ Sokolov and Leonov created a sci-fi visualisation of a “Space Elevator” that was based on the ideas of Tsiolkovsky (1895) and the technical calculations of Yuri Artsutanov (1960). The British writer Arthur C. Clarke acknowledged drawing inspiration from this illustration for his novel The Fountains of Paradise. Indeed, the first edition of this novel features the Sokolov and Leonov illustration on the front cover.

Importantly, this evolving genre of sci-fi illustration allowed artists to overcome the limitations of social realism. For instance, in the postcard series Sokolov and Leonov developed a frame-by-frame narrative structure; that started with real events and ended with pure fantasy. Another device they developed was to frequently divide a picture into two parts. One of which displayed real spaceships in full colour, and another which showed a black and white image of the distant future.

The designer and graphic artist Alexander Pobedinsky was both an illustrator and a member of editorial board of T-M magazine. His impact on the visual appearance of the magazine was highly significant. Pobedinsky was widely renowned not only for his advertising posters – which mimicked social realism- but also the complex psychological realism of his book characters. Among his most popular works are his illustrations for Ivan Yefremov’s socio-philosophical novel The Andromeda Nebula, first published in T-M magazine in 1957. Ivan Yefremov himself was one of the first Soviet writers who managed to create a highly detailed and elaborate world in the distant future. In The Andromeda Nebula and several subsequent novels he described, under the name of ‘Velikoye Kol’tso’ (the Great Circle), a cosmic community of civilisations that had reached a high level of technological, physical, and moral development. Pobedinsky’s illustrations helped readers to visualise these idealised future communities, scenarios and peoples. Yefremov presented this futuristic scenario as a polemic against the novel The Star Kings (1949) by the American writer Edmond Hamilton. Yefremov cultivated a strong conviction that a highly technological future would lead to a period of social equality and humanism; not one of wars and power struggles.