The Republic of the Southern Cross

Abstract

Written by Valery Bryusov (1873-1924) and published in 1907, “The Republic of the Southern Cross” is a short story, which describes the doom of a futuristic city (an industrial utopia at first glance), built on the Southern Pole, due to the epidemic of a mental illness. Even prior to the unravelling of the tragedy, Star City could hardly be considered an ideal society: the lives of its inhabitants were controlled by a despotic Council formed by the local factory directors down to the finest detail. It is, thus, a dystopian narrative, an antecessor to more well-known works of the genre, such as Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), as well as a pioneer in the long and rich science fiction tradition in russophone literature. Bryusov, one of the greatest names in the Russian Symbolist movement, surprises by making use of a dry style, more adequate to the journalistic fashion in which the story is told. The concise, and even abrupt, description of the atrocities that took place in the capital of the Republic only intensifies the repulsion felt by the reader. We sought to preserve such precision in the translation. Aside from this version, the short story has been translated to English, French, German, Italian, and more recently, Spanish. The latter, made by Eugenio López Arriazu, was published in the fifth edition of the Argentinian jornal Eslavia, in 2020.