Valentin Kruchinin and the Queen of Mars: Early Musical Traces of Soviet Sci-Fi

Valentin Kruchinin was the first major ‘Soviet sci-fi’ composer, writing the music for Yakov Protazanov's silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars in 1924. While his score is regrettably lost, evidence of Kruchinin's musical vision for Aelita remains, including a two-page piano piece, ‘Aelita’, seemingly designed to promote the film. Lacking any ‘space-age’ musical tropes, this brief work instead showcases Kruchinin's affection for ‘eccentric dance’. Resembling a slow foxtrot, Kruchinin's piece brings Aelita's cinematic world into contact with ‘light-genre’ popular fare, much of it borrowed from American jazz and maligned by critics for its ‘bourgeois’, ‘Western’ connotations. Within the context of Protazanov's anti-New Economic Policy film, Valentin Kruchinin's ‘Aelita’ comments on both the imperial past and the decadent allure of the Western present.