突变与竞争——布尔加科夫小说《不祥的蛋》中的科学话语谱系

Mutation and Struggle: On the Genealogy of Scientific Discourse in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Fatal Eggs

米哈伊尔·布尔加科夫的小说《不祥的蛋》包含了20世纪20年代苏联历史、政治与科技话语的多层重叠。本文试图以小说所涉及的生物学背景出发,聚焦文本中所涉及的科技图景与科学话语,讨论它们与俄国科学史上相关领域学术沿革和知识传播之间的联系,并由此辨析科幻事件背后所触及的现实期望与焦虑。具体地说,《不祥的蛋》中科幻图像的谱系可回溯至俄国知识界关于进化论与系统发生论中重要概念由来已久的两大论争,这两种论争在20世纪早期随着基因理论等新知识的崛起产生了新的动向。第一个争论面向的是进化论中的“天择”,辩论的焦点是达尔文所代表的“自然选择”与拉马克所代表的“获得性遗传”之间的矛盾。第二个争论面向的是达尔文主义所强调的“物竞”,其议题为:进化的普遍导向是有机体间的竞争和掠夺,还是合作和互惠?《不祥的蛋》中的科幻场景反映了这两个议题在20世纪20年代社会背景下的新生命和多重外延:它们一方面映现出基因理论、优生学等科学新领域的诞生与传播.另一方面也传达了十月革命后苏联社会与文化生活中的焦点问题与诉求。

Rich in semantic and symbolic potential,Mikhail Bulgakov's novella The Fatal Eggs engages with many aspects of Soviet life in the 1920s,touching upon historical,political and scientific issues.This article focuses on the scientific component of this work.By locating the text in the polemics of Russian intellectual history,the paper discusses the historical connotations and political implications of recurring biological concepts,viz.“mutation”and“struggle”,in Bulgakov’s writing.Bulgakov’s novella responds to the Russian polemical tradition concerning two critical conceptions in evolutionary biology and phylogenetics-“natural selection”and“struggle for existence”-which gained new socio-political associations in the 1920s,coinciding with the rise of genetics in the Soviet Union.Realized and dramatized in the science-fictional situations of the story,the biological processes of mutation and struggle connect two semantic fields of the work:On the one hand,they are linked to emerging theories and practices in genetics and eugenics;on the other hand,they serve to illustrate the heated discussions on socio-political issues that arose in the wake of the October Revolution.