The Elite

"Aelita" of Alexey Tolstoy is a masterpiece of domestic science-fiction classics, a great novel about space travel, alien civilization and poetical love, developing on the background of post-revolutionary searches of the 1920s. In Petrograd, engineer Mstislav Loss builds an interplanetary ship and together with the courageous Red Army Gusev leaves to Mars. On the remote red planet, the researchers discover a fascinating but highly developed civilization of the Martian, descendants of the residents of the ancient Atlantide. While Gusev, faithful to his temperament, raises a revolutionary rebellion against the oppressors among the Martian proletariates, Loss falls in love with the beautiful rulers of the planets, the blue-cold Princess Aelita. Their rock novel becomes a symbol of the meeting of two worlds, condemned to a dramatic end under the ruin of political revolts and the extinctive world of Mars. Tolstoy with amazing painting and bright romanticism combines a sharp-sighted cosmic fantasy, romantic drama and social thinking about the fate of civilizations. **About what the book in three words:** Mars, Love, Revolution. **Who to read:** Fans of classical science fiction and adventure prose, lovers of romantic stories on the background of space decorations, as well as everyone who wants to get acquainted with the key works of Russian literature of the twentieth century.