#144 The Red Star - Mikhail Bogdanov w/ Parker Longbaugh

I, I like how in the, the forward to the book, even I think it was written by the translator.

Even he said, yeah, the, the book's not that gripping.

It's good.

It's, it's an ideas book.

Even he repeatedly, I think he described the pro the pros is pedestrian.

Yeah.

At one stage.

So if even the guy who sat down and translated the book is not that enthused by it, you know you've got problems.

I mean, I guess we're going to have to take his word for it since we don't read Russian and haven't read it in the original language that the language actually is.

No, it's even worse in Russian

because he said that...

In translating, he focused more on liveliness and clarity rather than trying to exactly convey the precise reading experience of this.

Oh, no, he localized it.

We've

got the better version in English.

I need to punch this up to keep people asleep.

Yeah, yeah, he was trying to resuscitate a corpse with this one.

Anyway, so what is The Red Star? The Red Star, the first Bolshevik utopia by Alexander Bogdanov.

It's a science fiction book about communists on Mars, really.

The premise is funnier than that once you get into the details, which we will, but it was originally published in 1908 in St. Petersburg, reissued in Petrograd and Moscow in 1918, and again in Moscow in 1922, and Proletkult staged a version of it in 1920.

The translation, the Charles Rugal one that I think we all read...

Yeah.

It's based off the 1908 edition.

I don't know how big the chain, the differences between the additions are.

I suspect given how much of this book is sort of like chewing dry concrete, I don't know how much the 1918 edition would be in terms of improvement versus this one that we read.