Rudá hvězda: utopistický román A. Bogdanova [The Red Star: a utopian novel by A. Bogdanov] by Bogdanov, Aleksandr (pseud. of Malinovskii, 1873-1928) - 1921

Prague: Komunistické knihkupectví a nakladatelství Rejman, 1921. Octavo (19.5 × 13.5 cm). Original illustrated wrappers; 160 pp. With a striking, unattributed cover illustration adding a subversive Christian twist. Publisher's ads advertising works by Lenin, Radek, Zinov'ev and Zetkin. Wrappers somewhat worn and soiled; front wrapper just starting to tear; text evenly toned; still about very good. Second Czech edition of Krasnaia zvezda [Red Star], Aleksandr Bogdanov's first Bolshevik utopia, published in 1908. The first translation was published in 1912 with the title "Červená hvězda." Both Red Star and its sequel, Engineer Menni, were set on seventeenth-century Mars and envisioned a universal struggle between Socialist workers and bourgeois functionaries. Aside from creatively employing Marxist theory, Bogdanov's novels explored his notion of "proletarian culture" and his abstract interest in organization, which led to the development of "Tektology," an all-encompassing systems theory in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, given their plot, both Red Star and Engineer Menni were among Stalin's favorite novels published before the Revolution: "In [Bogdanov's novels] the builders of socialism on the planet Mars have to rely on an engineer named Menni, educated before the Socialist Revolution, who is both brilliant and traitorous. Menni recommends a path for a canal that purposefully delays construction and causes the deaths of many laborers. Menni is arrested, the mistakes are rectified, and the canal is completed" (Loren R. Graham). Bogdanov's works were hardly successful when first published, but were avidly read and reprinted after 1917. This Czech edition is unrecorded aside from the copy at the Czech National Library.