Graal Arelsky

Stepan Stephanovich Petrov , better known by his pseudonym Graal-Arelsky (; 1889–1937), was a Russian Ego-Futurist poet. He co-founded the Academy of Ego-Poetry with fellow Ego-Futurist Konstantin Olimpov. Arelsky is also an identified astronomer. He also maintained that man is a creation of nature so that she rules his actions and egoism, which she placed inside of man and should be developed, is what unites all humanity. He summed up his philosophy thus:

Arelsky was also one of the authors of Prolog Ego-Futurizm, a brochure on Ego-Futurism published in October 1915, along with Igor Severyanin, Olimpov, and George Ivanov. A manifesto was also released the following month.

His second book of poems, "Leteysky shore", was published in 1913 and marked the author's transition from acmeism, cultivated in the "Workshop of Poets", to the "scientism" promoted by him. It presented samples of "scientific poetry" - poems about space and planets and about Giordano Bruno. Arelsky subsequently dedicated his novel The Enemy of Ptolemy (1928) to the latter.

After 1917, he published the poem Wind from the Sea (1923), the play in verse The Nymph Ata (1923), and wrote children's poems. He published several stories of science fiction, including the short story collection Tales of Mars (1925), the short stories Citizen of the Universe (1925), The Man Who Went to Mars (1927), and Gift of the Selenites. He also published a work of popular science, Sun and Time: Popular Astronomy for Peasant Youth (1926).

Several notable literary works were published after he left Ego-Futurism and joined the Acmeist Guild of Poets. These include the Tales from Mars (Povesti o Marse), a compilation of three interconnected fictional stories which culminate in a Martian workers' revolution against their capitalist oppressors.

The science fiction saga "Tales of Mars" consists of three parts ("Professor Dagin's Observatory", "Two Worlds", "Towards a New Sun"), connected with each other only by the place of action - Mars. Arelsky traced a direct connection between the development of the social system and scientific and technological progress, but in a peculiar way: his novel does not feature the struggle of classes, but the struggle of mono-ethnic civilizations: highly developed and primitive. According to science fiction researcher A. Pervushin, this book is the forerunner of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

Arrest and death He was arrested on December 16, 1935. On April 1, 1936, he was sentenced by the Special Collegium of the Leningrad Regional Court to 10 years in labor camps under article 58-10 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. He was sent to the Ukhta-Pechora camp to serve his sentence.

He died on April 5, 1937, in the village of Chibyu, Komi ASSR. He was rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the RSFSR on December 23, 1964.