What enlivened a grey February afternoon in a bookshop was chancing on a new English version of The Amphibian (1928) by Alexander Belyaev.

The film adaptation of this had already introduced me to the premise of a young man who can live underwater, as it seems to be a permanent fixture on Russian television and is regarded with affection by many East Europeans of a certain age.

Until now though, I had not enjoyed the opportunity to snuggle up with the novel that had inspired the film. Karo Publishers based in St Petersburg – best known for their translated versions of Golden and Silver age greats by Pushkin and Tolstoy et al – have changed all that by bringing out The Amphibian last year.

Blockbuster.

Lenfilm’s Chelovek Amphibia (1962) constitutes a glitzy and exotic boy-meets-girl fantasy romance. The film provides a testimony to the swagger of the Khrushchev era when the Soviet Union was winning the Space Race.

With its impressive photography and sun-drenched location shots on Baku this film can hold its head up alongside America’s The West Side Story which came out in the same period.

The doomed lovers aspect of the film seems similar too: here an outcast boy with shark gill implants loves a local maiden. In contrast with American Science Fiction films, however, this situation is not a product of nuclear radiation nor science-gone-wrong, but of benign medical intervention.

Soviet Michael Crichton.

The author, Alexander Romanovich Belyaev, had grown up in a religious household in the cathedral town of Smolensk. He became a lawyer before being struck down with tuberculosis which made him dependent on care for about six years.

During this trial Belyaev encountered the writings of Verne and Wells and this fired him up to embark on a career as one of Russia’s first career science fiction authors. He was to churn out seventeen – 17!- tales in this genre.

Belyaev’s life ended in 1941 or 1942 in the town of Pushkin outside St Petersburg from lack of nutrition. He was 58.

Nevertheless he had reached a wide readership in his lifetime. Professor Dowell’s Head (1937) and The Amphibian are the ones most known to the Anglophone world but if you go onto book discussion sites you will find that Belyaev still commands a reading public outside of that, and his other books remain popular too.

 

Unexpected.

Belyaev had The Amphibian published in a notorious era later seen as being the onset of Stalinism. The Soviet government ended the relaxed New Economic Policy amidst a fall in grain production and a new financial slump. The buzzword of the day was `sabotage` and the first Five Year Plan was being hatched and the show trials began. Hard times.

The Amphibian, in contrast, catapults us to the fishing community of Rio de Plata near Buenos Aires. The focus, furthermore is not on new mechanics but on fantastic medical science.

Water boy.

The pearl divers are thrown into superstitious dread by the appearance of a `sea devil` in their waters. This has created a journalistic splash too.

Icthyander (the amphibian) – for it is he – a young man of about twenty, is able to spend long periods swimming underwater on account of the shark gills implanted into his body. This superpower sets him apart from normal society.

His adoptive father, Doctor Salvatore – who had saved Icthyander’s life with this surgical innovation represents the maverick medical genius ( of the kind that Boris Karloff would later portray). Nevertheless he seems saner than the conniving rabble around him and gifts the poor Mexicans with free medical help. Otherwise he is a recluse, living in a walled laboratory which he shares with his servants and sundry modified animals.

Icthyander, meanwhile is smitten with a local beauty and entangled in a hopeless love tryst. The hard-bitten pearl diving mercenaries are plotting to kidnap him and put him to their own use. It will all end in a sensational court case in which Doctor Salvatore is in the dock – and against the world…

Fable.

The detached narrative is told with spare and simple prose, reminiscent of Paul Gallico, perhaps.It could work as junior fiction, although maybe it is L. Koslenikov’s 1959 translation that makes much of the dialogue seem clunky.

The beating heart of it all is the prolonged underwater sequences where we get Icthyander’s eye on the world. Here Jacques Cousteau is anticipated in fiction.

The theme of human-animal hybrids had been dealt with earlier by Mikhail Bulgakov in Heart of a Dog (1925) but this tends to be viewed as an allegory rather than science fiction.

There also exist indelible rumours claiming that the Stalin regime was attempting to breed human-monkey hybrids for military purposes. So perhaps Belyaev was closer to the truth than he thought!

Belyaev (via Salvatore) seems to mount a defence of medical progress against the prohibitions of religion in this novel. It is not clear, however, that the author had anything more in mind than writing a ripping yarn which could whisk the reader away from the daily grind of Soviet society of that time.

Contemporary echoes.

The novel stands up better than the film which is too Old School for most people’s tastes today.

However,the science fiction geek of our time expects more involved narratives which involves multiple technological twists and turns as opposed to a one premise fable like this. The Amphibian is out of fashion.

Or is it?

Fellow baby boomers may recall an American TV show (1977-1978) called The Man From Atlantis This featured Patrick Duffy as an amphibian man. (It would be churlish to point out that one of Belyaev’s novels from 1926 is titled Posledniy Chelovek iz Atlantidi – The Last Man from Atlantis!)

Then there is Guillermo del Toro’s film The Shape of Water from two years back. The similarities between this and what has been discussed does not need to be spelt out (it even features a Soviet scientist!)

So The Amphibian remains an extraordinary novel – as extraordinary as the sad life of the man who dreamt it all up.

Chelovek Amphibia- Full movie.