Stanisław Lem is a classic of Polish science fiction, hugely popular among Russian-speaking readers since the Soviet era, when we weren’t exactly spoiled for science fiction. Apparently that very status is what kept me from writing a review of Solaris for so long—because, shame on me, I only read it recently.
If Lem himself is a star, then Solaris is probably one of his most famous works—yet most people who know it do so through its screen adaptations. The best known is the 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Soviet actors Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk. In 2002 the Americans made their own version too: Soderbergh cast none other than George Clooney in the lead. And there was also an earlier TV adaptation with Vasily Lanovoy, released four years before Tarkovsky’s version.
It’s worth noting that Lem himself treated the adaptations of this novel rather coolly, because, first, he couldn’t imagine how it could be filmed at all—and second, he really disliked the way directors chose to reinterpret his idea. He even quarreled with Tarkovsky, calling him a fool, and later said that instead of Solaris, Tarkovsky had made “Crime and Punishment in space.”
I never liked Tarkovsky’s version either, even as a kid—it always felt too claustrophobic and psychologically heavy to me. And that’s probably one of the reasons I was afraid to pick up the novel for so long. But once I understood that “they all filmed something completely different from what’s in the book,” I finally decided to read it. What if the book is much better? I’d already had a similar experience with Ender’s Game, where they managed to reduce a masterpiece of a novel to some barely coherent nonsense about kids fighting wars.
In the USSR they published a slightly abridged translation of the novel, but these days you can find complete versions too. Fans argue about which one sounds better; for me it wasn’t that important how exactly they translated the heroine’s name, or whether Solaris is treated as a masculine name for the planet or a feminine one (less familiar, but that’s the variant the author considered correct). I wanted to read the whole thing as Lem intended it, without the cuts of Soviet censorship.
The premise of the novel is that for many decades now, scientists from Earth have been studying the phenomenon of the planet Solaris, which has no continents at all and consists of a single vast ocean made of an incomprehensible substance. For all those years, a research station has been orbiting the planet; countless experiments have been conducted on it, and time after time it reacts in different ways. Many volumes of scholarly works have been written, but nobody still has any idea what it actually is.
The main character of the book is the psychologist Kris Kelvin, who has been dreaming of Solaris since childhood—and now arrives at the station as a researcher, joining his former teacher who lives there, along with other members of the research team. But it suddenly turns out that something truly bizarre is going on aboard the station: his teacher died unexpectedly right before Kris’s arrival, and the remaining members of the expedition are, to put it mildly, acting very strangely. And Kris himself suddenly starts to doubt his own sanity.
That’s how the book begins—one where the characters come to the conclusion that Solaris is not just a planet, but an intelligent being that is trying to study humans in the same way humans are trying to study it. At certain points the scientists even call it a young god, discussing the theological aspects of divinity (those passages, as I understand it, were exactly what got cut from the Soviet edition).
And while the book raises plenty of psychological questions about human existence, for Lem this seems secondary. What interests him far more is how humanity could even recognize that it has encountered an alien intelligence if we differ from it in every possible way. How could we interact with it if our categories are completely different? Tarkovsky wasn’t interested in that aspect at all in his adaptation—he dove into exploring the inner world of the human being instead. That’s why he ended up making something entirely different from what Lem wrote.
Yes, the novel raises fascinating questions about how different intelligences might interact, how their levels of development and motives can be compared, and who is really studying whom all these years. These themes are genuinely worth thinking about. I can understand why, at the time it was written, the book appealed to so many people—topics like this were quite popular in science fiction back then, even if every author approached them in their own way.
And although I’ve heard countless interpretations of the novel’s hidden meanings—both positive and skeptical—I didn’t really like the book. It raises a problem, but the writing is rather dry, and there are many lyrical digressions full of reflections that don’t really serve the story. And there’s barely a plot at all—there are events, there are characters, but their story essentially doesn’t end in any meaningful way, leaving you with more questions than answers. And the reflections themselves could have been expressed much more briefly.
The book does leave an aftertaste: you end up thinking through all the nuances of how different species might interact, and you start remembering works by other authors who explored similar themes (even if not in such a hyperbolic form). Still, even though Tarkovsky’s version (and, in a way, its 2002 reincarnation by Soderbergh) offers a completely different interpretation, to me their vision feels more coherent than Lem’s own. Or maybe it’s just not my kind of book, and I didn’t understand it—no matter how hard I tried.
My rating: 2/5
