A review of The Apostle of Immortality
Science Fiction: Berdnyk's Stories
"Apostle of Immortality" by Oles Berdnyk.
Translated by Yuri Tkach.
Toronto-Chicago-Melbourne: Bayda Books, 1984. 129 pp.
This volume of short stories by Oles Berdnyk is, according to the foreword, the first English-language edition of the works of the man considered by many to be Ukraine's premier science-fiction writer.
The six stories in the volume were translated by Yuri Tkach and cover the period 1962-1975. They are:
A Journey to the Antiworld (1963)
The Alien Secret (1962)
Two Abysses (1967)
The Constellation of Green Fish (1975)
A Chorus of Elements (1967)
The Apostle of Immortality (1975)
In his foreword, Walter Smyrniw of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, calls the 57-year-old Mr. Berdnyk "a bold thinker who was not afraid to dwell on new concepts and introduce them into his fiction."
Mr. Berdnyk’s first collection of short stories, Poza Chasom i Prostorom (Beyond Time and Space), was published in 1959, three years after the author was allowed to return to Ukraine from six years of exile in Siberia and Kazakhstan. He managed to publish a total of 17 volumes of science fiction works and other stories before he was expelled from the Writers’ Union in the mid-1970s for his activities with the burgeoning human-rights movement.
In 1976, he was one of the 10 co-founders of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. In 1979, Mr. Berdnyk was arrested and subsequently sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment—six years in a labor camp and three years’ internal exile.
In May 1984, the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina ran what it said was a recantation by Mr. Berdnyk, noting that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR had pardoned the author.
Mr. Berdnyk's major works, particularly his last novel to be officially published, Zorianyi Korsar (Star Pirate, 1971), touch on the theme that man can reach god-like status through an inner, transcendent evolution, a view that downplays conventional science and separates Mr. Berdnyk from other Soviet science-fiction writers. It was this emphasis on a higher transcendent reality that led to Mr. Berdnyk’s troubles with Soviet officials, who demanded strict adherence to “socialist realism” tenets that see revolution only in terms of dialectical materialism.
According to Mr. Smyrniw, the stories contained in this volume touch on such themes as man’s quest for immortality, as well as such issues as deviation and dissent as forms of progress.
