Abstract
The text deals with A. N.
Tolstoy's novel Aelita from the early 1920s, one of the founding books of Soviet sci-fi, which describes a flight of two representatives of the planet Earth to Mars. It analyses both the text and its film version from 1924 as well as the period context of both.
It focuses on finding out which of Tolstoy's philosophical and political ideas are mirrored in the novel and to which extent it serves as a peculiar fantasy laboratory for testing primarily earthly questions as the fictional journey to Mars speaks, before all, about the 1917 Russian revolution and about the approach of a part of the Russian intelligentsia towards it. Tolstoy's book is thus even today an interesting proof of a very lively, interconnected, but mostly neglected relationship between culture, politics, and technology.