*That is plenty weird. I had no idea that AELITA: QUEEN OF MARS could be classified as a "Red Pinkerton," meaning American detective pulp thrillers re-interpreted for a Soviet readership as ideological Communit adventure novels.
From: "Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde. Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s" by Julia Vaingurt. The entire book is quite eye-opening.
Chapter 7, “Red Pinkertons: Adventures in Artificial Reality,” continues to analyze the myth of techno-miraculous America with reference to virtual travels to that country in Russian science fiction. Specifically, I explore the extremely popular genre of the Red Pinkerton, an ideological adventure novel with elements of detective and science fiction. Examining four parodic novels in this mode, Valentin Kataev’s Ostrov Erendorf (Erendorf Island), Marietta Shaginyan’s Mess-Mend, ili Ianki v Petrograde (Mess-Mend, or A Yankee in Petrograd), and Aleksei Tolstoy’s Aelita and Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin, sometimes rendered Engineer Garin’s Death-Ray), as well as a film in this same category, Lev Kuleshov’s Neobychainye prikliucheniia mistera Vesta v strane bol’shevikov (Extraordi- nary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks), I expose the mechanisms by which the discourse of Americanization is both perpetuated and deconstructed, and highlight the exuberance with which the technological fantasy is conceived and exploited.
(…)
The Union of Five was a warm-up exercise for Tolstoy’s Engineer Garin’s Death-Ray (1925–26). Probably the least parodic of Red Pinkertons, this work incorporates every cliché of the genre: degenerate American millionaires; a conspiracy of the old world against the new; brilliant Russian working-class detectives; multiple locations; and wondrous technology applicable toward both sublime creation and the deadliest destruction.
Here Tolstoy continues the theme of collaboration between Russian science and American capital. The former is represented by the supremely ambitious Russian engineer Garin, and the latter by Rollings, an American billionaire involved in a shady chemical business. In the project of world domination, Garin and Rollings need each other, knowledge plus capital equaling power.
Beyond their mutual thirst for conquest, these two share a love interest: Russian actress and femme fatale Zoia, who personifies the desirability of the old Russia in all its beauty and corruption. But the conspirators’ love triangle with Zoia is adulterated by an additional side. It seems that while the American is deeply in love, in Zoia, with the old Russia, Garin is equally taken with the Russian worker-detective Shel’ga, who seems to reciprocate the engineer’s interest.
The Red Pinkerton might seem a strange phenomenon for several reasons, first and foremost the dubious political background of Nat Pinkerton himself. His creators —Allan Pinkerton and sons— headed the famed private law-enforcement agency that specialized in antiunion activity and strikebreaking, and conceived of the detective series as a self-advertisement.
Did Bukharin and other advocates of Red Pinkertons miss the strong antiproletarian overtones? Several conjectures are possible. As the popularity of Nat Pinkerton reached Europe, local forgeries of the detective stories began to proliferate; many of the tales read by the Russian public, for instance, were not of American origin. Retaining the acrobatic style and brisk pace of crime fiction, the inauthentic Pinkertons did not feature the same antiunion tendencies that motivated the originators of the series.
The Soviet attitude toward literary Pinkertonism, moreover, was similar to that toward Taylorism, Fordism, and other 1920s American imports: it was believed possible to distill from capitalism what was useful—in the case of Taylorism, industrial efficiency; in the case of Pinkertons, suspenseful plots — and implant these gains in a socialist context. With respect to industrial development, this theory did not produce the hoped-for results, but the Red Pinkertons were a more successful endeavor.
Another incongruent aspect of the Red Pinkerton is its apparent anachronism. Interest in American (or American-style) Pinkertons in Russia peaked by the beginning of the 1910s, and had dwindled considerably by the 1920s. The red-hued renaissance of Pinkertonism in the 1920s can be attributed to the influence of American cinema. American movies, including detective films, overwhelmed the Russian market. A public in love with Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford, and Buster Keaton craved everything American, and what “American” was, the public learned from movies.
This is why, upon the introduction of Jim Dollar, the fictive author of one of the most popular Red Pinkertons, Marietta Shaginyan’s Mess-Mend, or a Yankee in Petrograd (1924–25), the reader is informed that Dollar has no literary training, and that his storytelling is constructed on cinematic principles. Red Pinkertons were, indeed, often subtitled kinoromany, cinema-novels. (((That is really quite a strange Russian literary development.))) The interpolation of cinematic devices into Russian literature is a major manifestation of Americanization.
Perhaps sharing this view, Kuleshov came to borrow from American films not only montage devices, but their very material as well, appropriating a range of character types and actions that American cinema culture had proven to be cinematogenic, capable of satisfying universal scopophilia. In his Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of Bolsheviks, Kuleshov casts replicas of American film heroes right along with American montage techniques.
For the role of Mr. West, a curiosity-driven, globe-trotting American, Kuleshov finds a Russian actor, Porfirii Podobed, bearing an uncanny likeness to Harold Lloyd; the traveler’s assistant and bodyguard is Cowboy Jetty, (((cries out for Texan re-appropriation, especially by us Slavophiles))) whose costumes and antics inject a dose of the Western into this experiment in American-style film art.
Importing thus the archetypal comic lead and cowboy, the director includes their associated behavioral conventions and stylistic devices: Mr. West’s face features exaggerated, Harold Lloydian expressions of delight and horror (fig. 24), while Cowboy Jetty performs all manner of acrobatic stunts, jumping from windows, brawling, and falling down stairs (figs. 25–26)….
