Solaris for Lem and Tarkovsky. Novel and film between the impossibility of progress and the abyss of the past

In 1961 the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem realized Solaris, one of his best known and most appreciated works. Describing the encounter with an indecipherable planet-ocean, Lem highlights the impossibility of truly communicating with the Other and brings out the aporias and complexities of positivist thinking. Eleven years later, Andrey Tarkovsky adapts Lem’s subject for cinema. In the homonymous movie, though, the Russian director imprints his own peculiar conception of time and history: the Tarkovskian ocean becomes a source of connection with a past seen as the only hold for the present, a crystal in which, however, the actual seems to succumb to the virtual. Lem’s peculiar conception of progress is here put in contrast against the personal and humanistic nostalgia of the Russian director. The aim of the text consists in this comparison: two divergent philosophies of time expressed by two authors through their respective work.