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The idea of the thought experiment is currently enjoying remarkable attention within the fields of literature and science. However, works on this topic often focus only on general transdisciplinary phenomena and ignore structural and epistemic differences between science and fiction. The article aims to demonstrate the need for differentiation in this research field by discussing particular case studies. First, a complex counterfactual thought experiment in Thomas Malthus’s  Essay on Population , its structure and epistemic function are analyzed, showing how overpopulation fantasies are embedded in a both logically and rhetorically constructed  reductio  ad absurdum . Second, the paper describes the fictional transformation of this specific thought experiment in Vladimir Odoevsky’s late Romantic short story  The Last Suicide , which serves as a powerful device in his polemic against Malthus’s Rationalism. Considering both the specific cultural- historical contexts and the ideological aims of the two texts, the paper demonstrates different uses of counterfactual imagination in science and literature.

scientia poetica

Kontrafaktische Überbevölkerungsphantasien: Gedankenexperimente zwischen Wissenschaft und Literatur am Beispiel von Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) und Vladimir Odoevskijs Poslednee samoubijstvo (Der letzte Selbstmord, 1844)