‘Hearing’ through the Ether: Communication Devices and Textual Disintegration in Andrei Zarin’s Dar Satany

Abstract For Russian spiritualists of the early twentieth century, the invention of radiotelegraphy provided an empirical basis for their ideas about communication with the otherworldly. For them, the ability to transmute messages into electrical signals offered proof of their own potential to connect with anyone regardless of distance, time, or space. Using the journals Rebus and Spiritualist , this article traces the emergence of a wireless discourse and examines the movement’s practical engagement with early remote communication. Illustrated instructions on how to produce devices like homemade electrical telegraphs and ‘transmitter’ mirrors show how technological innovations were fueling the movement’s varying ambitions, from communication with the dead to the unification of humankind and beyond. Analyzing these devices reveals that technology and human bodies were coming to be thought of as more alike than not. This paper also explores the way that spiritualist authors promoted this vision for a wireless cosmology in their literature by depicting new imagined devices, and offering an alternative epistemology based on aural experience. Taking Andrei Zarin’s novella Dar Satany (1900) as a case study, this article illustrates the similar ways that spiritualist and telegraphic practices exerted pressure upon older, textual media by breaking down language and turning it into something to be deciphered.