No Man’s Space

“Despite the ambitiousness of his ideas (foremost among them, the persistent desire to challenge death itself), Nikolai Fedorov, Russian cosmism’s central philosopher, was a private person who attempted to live his life in keeping with the notion of Christian modesty.”

“Fedorov devoted himself body and soul to his work as a librarian, a context that shaped many of his ideas. It was working in libraries that gave him a daily sense of the importance of the past, of carefully archiving it to save it from utter oblivion.”

“Fedorov’s coeval Leo Tolstoy, the young philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, and the young experimental scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky spent hours on end talking with him.”

“it wasn’t until 1906, three years after Fedorov’s death, that his disciples began assembling his theoretical works, culminating seven years later in the book Philosophy of the Common Task”

“Fedorov’s works were not published during Soviet times. His ideas were a disavowal of both Soviet atheism and the official doctrine of dialectical materialism.”

“The Russian religious thinkers greatly influenced by Fedorov suffered a much sadder fate. Valerian Muravyov was sent to the camps in 1929. Father Pavel Florensky was shot in 1937, the same year that Alexander Svyatogor was arrested and sent to the camps, where he died. Alexander Yaroslavsky was shot in 1930.”

“The hard scientists among the cosmists were more fortunate. Tsiolkovsky lived out his days peacefully. Vladimir Vernadsky taught and researched until his death in 1945. Alexander Chizhevsky did research in the camps—a minor privilege granted him in otherwise desperate conditions—and continued his work after his release.”

“The late 1980s witnessed the thoroughgoing study of the works of Fedorov and the other non-scientist cosmists as well as the unification of all the doctrine’s adherents into something like a single theoretical front within the Soviet Union.”

“Fedorov’s ideas penetrated the West slowly and gradually, often through references in works by Nikolai Berdyaev.” Note: Aha! Berdyaev was a key source in my “Being Planetary” essay.

“George M. Young’s Nikolai F. Fedorov: An Introduction”

“Stephen Lukashevich’s N. F. Fedorov 1828–1903: A Study in Russian Eupsychian and Utopian Thought”

“in 2012, George M. Young published a full-fledged historical study, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers”

“Ben Goertzel in his book A Cosmist Manifesto: Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age”

“Vasily Chekrygin’s futurism”

“Pavel Filonov’s analytical art”

“Malevich’s suprematism”

“Kandinsky’s abstractionism”

“Alexander Labas’s utopian subjects.”

“cosmism had a direct impact on the intuitive artists immersed in Eastern spirituality, for example, the group Amaravella (Sanskrit for “sprouts of immortality”), which was close to the circle of the artist, traveler, and superstar mystic Nicholas Roerich”

“In the 1960s, amid the Khrushchevian Thaw, the triumphal exploration of outer space, and widespread interest in cybernetics, there emerged a geometric and kinetic art that harkened back to constructivism, the avant-garde’s figurative experiments, and the dynamic art of Naum Gabo.”

“The interests of the group Dvizhenie (“Movement”), as embodied by its leader Lev Nussberg and other artists, lay in engineering, science, and technology. On the other hand, they involved a holistic view of the world as a specific environment, a kind of harmonious biocosmos whose basic principle was movement.”

“The singularity of existence, the unity of parts and the whole, and the affinity of everything with everything else (in particular, the synthesis of the various art forms) formed the basis of the aesthetic program of the Russian kinetists.”

“Their futuristic project Macropolis, or Artificial Bionic Cybernetic Environment, was a model of an artificial world at whose heart was situated the city of the future.”

“The focus on synthesizing the natural and artificial, on organizing nature and the man-made world into a single cosmological order, would be present from the Seventies onwards in the works of Francisco Infante, a former member of Dvizhenie who has walked the line between installation art and land art, as captured in photographs.”

“In 1986, Ilya Kabakov presented his installation The Man Who Flew into Outer Space from His Apartment”

“in 2004, Collective Actions mounted the absurdist performance Voyage to Saturn”

“The performance Wall Newspaper, mounted by Collective Actions the same year”

“Georgy Martynov’s sci-fi novel Visitor from the Abyss”

“2009 project Common Cause (the English title is an alternate translation of “common task”), Makarevich and Elagina imagined Fedorov’s doctrine as a meta-utopia”

“Common Cause involved several installations”

“Oven with Three Ladders,”

“The Celestial Staircase and the Ethereal Island”

“Unknown Reasonable Forces”

“Pavel Pepperstein”

“his sci-fi noir film Sound of the Sun, produced many years ago in collaboration with Natasha Nord.”

“Leonid Tishkov’s “macaroni cosmism.””

“In the last decade, the group Vverkh! (“Up!”) has consistently elaborated the subject of cosmism.”

“the film Elixir, shot by Vverkh! member Daniil Zinchenko”

“Arseny Zhilyaev has tackled cosmism head on. His project Cradle of Humankind, about a network of museums of the future that have entangled the universe, was shown at the Venice Biennale.”

“Zhilyaev’s historical project Cradle of Humankind 2, which dealt with Nikolai Fedorov, was partially implemented at a Moscow pop-up exhibition, accompanied by a conference featuring Anton Vidokle, Natalia Sidlina, and Anastasia Gacheva.”

“The conference was occasioned by the publication of the book Avant-Garde Museology, which presents Russian cosmism as integrated into the historical avant-garde”

“Sidlina was a co-curator of the popular show Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age, which ran from September 2015 to March 2015 at the Science Museum in London.”

“Anastasia Gacheva is a specialist in Russian religious philosophy and the history of cosmism who now runs the Nikolai Fedorov Library and Museum in Moscow.”

“A film trilogy by Anton Vidokle presents a contemporary interpretation of the cosmist worldview.”

“This Is Cosmos”

“The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun”

“While watching the film, the viewer makes a journey to Kazakhstan, where Chizhevsky worked for a long time. Kazakhstan has also been the heart of the Soviet, and now Russian, space programs, as it is the site of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where Russian rockets are launched into space.”

“Vidokle’s third film is currently in the works.”

“why have artists continued to evoke the legacy of Russian cosmism, what with its naïveté, esotericism, mysticism, and, in the case of most cosmists, the emphatic Russophilia of its ideas?”

“Why does art that vigorously evokes the theoretical, discursive aspect of cosmism pay far less attention to rethinking the artistic practices shaped in the womb of cosmism and engaged in direct dialogue and polemics with it?”

“Why has the topic, seemingly pigeonholed and examined from all possible angles, not been exhausted, continuing, instead, to unfold and expand, navigating recent times?”

“What are the causes of this capaciousness and magnitude, of the ability to expand and prolong the subject, multiplying it in hundreds of art projects?”

“What, finally, links the problems of today with the issues that concerned the cosmist scientists a hundred or more years ago?”

“Cosmist outer space was a space in which earthly time and gravitation had been surpassed, a space where biological clocks and their concomitant fears no longer existed. Working with cosmist ideas is attractive, because, first, anything—or, at very least, many things—is seemingly possible in this space, and second, cosmism, as an art project itself, argued we should regard eternal life as art, and art as a tool for cosmologizing the world, i.e., a means for the simultaneous rational and sensual organization of chaos, a gnostic vaccine inoculating humankind from the ultimate dispersion of matter and meaning.”

“Most cosmist concepts contained three components.”

“The first component was immortalism, a focus on ensuring immortality, from rejuvenation by means of blood transfusions in Bogdanov, to the resurrection of the dead in Fedorov.”

“The second component was so-called active evolution: the conscious overcoming of the limitations laid down by consciousness and nature, space and time.”

“The third component was a moral and ethical system that combined elements of Christianity, occult doctrines, asceticism, and Marxism.”

“cosmism had its own, completely unique cosmos. This cosmos was not transhistorical: it was a utopian horizon that had to be reached in the very near future. The individual’s objective was to accelerate the process.”

“While most inhabitants of our planet regard space as the starry heavens above their heads, the cosmists also saw it as vouchsafing the fulfillment of moral law.”

“Russian cosmism was a totalizing project.”

“The cosmists argued that becoming human in the true sense was possible only by humanizing the universe, by completely infusing it with human artistic and creative energy, which would lead finally to this energy’s full revelation.”

“The cosmist scientists were experts in many disciplines. They simultaneously pursued both the hard sciences (moreover, several at once) and religious philosophy.”

“A few centuries after the Renaissance man and long before the scientistic rage for interdisciplinarity, cosmism imagined an artist-cum-researcher thinking beyond disciplines and formal restrictions, and motivated by the desire for the absolute intellectual and creative freedom that was available to everyone.”

“Like Renaissance culture, cosmism was anthropocentric, but it was an anthropocentrism focused on the collective rational subject, one that had absorbed the lessons of Russian religious thought and the theories of the utopian socialists.”

“Cosmism’s totality was also ensured by the fact that it dealt with a social ideal that embraced (and permeated) the entire universe.”

“Fedorov, who conceived the concept of the common task, thought we should combat the individual’s non-fraternal condition by developing “means of restoring kinship.””

“All men and women were brothers and sisters because they shared the same universe.”

Commentator’s Note: Resonance with my concept of “belonging with being” in my thesis.

“Declaring the “cosmic growth of humankind” its goal, cosmism was, of course, a modernist project, but it was the project of an alternative modernity.”

“It experienced the tremendous impact of scientific theory, becoming its esoteric extension.”

“The dream of human immortality was not a romantic fantasy, but an integral system of viewpoints that grew out of a principled refusal to view the world through the eyes of the lonely and selfish individual, that is, through the eyes of the nihilist.”

“Immortality implied an unwillingness to separate the human of the present from the human of the past, as well as the destruction of all obstacles standing between people, so they could easily feel as one.”

“Cosmist materialism often resonated with the materialism of Henri Bergson, who insisted on the duration and continuity of matter, which was intuitively, not analytically, knowable.”

“The outcome of such cognition—cognition enacted due to a kind of power surge, an excess of intuition—was, in fact, the evolutionary process, which included this eternal duration, involving the constant penetration of past into present.”

“An inalienable part of this collective well-being was the preservation of human physicality, the triumph over death.”

“The postmortem movement of bodily matter was, in fact, eternal space travel.”

“One of the most striking evocations of the debates on matter can be found in Andrei Platonov’s unfinished novel Happy Moscow, in the passage where Dr. Sambikin shows his friend the “cause of all life.” Dissecting a corpse, Sambikin points out the empty section in the intestines between undigested food and excrement. This emptiness, which “sucks all humanity into itself,” is simultaneously the soul and the engine of world history.”

“The future as a project, even a romantically tinged project, has been simply lacking nowadays. Everyone clearly sees that technological development is primarily focused on consumer technologies, that is, on the targeted improvement of everyday life, not on building orbiting cities in outer space.”

“The current pace of changes in the market requires rapid adaptation from the people swept up in it, meaning it becomes impossible to plan one’s own life. We are unsure of what tomorrow will bring, and we neurotically monitor and scan reality, on the lookout for all the new trends.”

“Reality is rendered an object of constant evaluation and short-term investment; all our intellectual and creative powers are focused on it.”

“human beings would find themselves in fundamentally new anthropological circumstances by taking full responsibility for the universe”

“attention to cosmism, on the one hand, reflects general concern and anxiety about the Anthropocene. On the other hand, it is a valuable conjuctural action, an attempt to connect local history with the global scientific context.”

“According to Fedorov, the universe of the future would be a “resurrectional” museum, a museum of resurrected human bodies, a museum that had conquered death, i.e., a museum of life. It would be a total museum where, as in cosmism itself, physics would be fused with mathematics, culture with biopolitics, the artificial with the human. Such a museum would radically reorient our sensibility from the subjective to the objective.”

“although it might seem that cosmism stretches like elastic, admitting everyone to its realm, it has miraculously avoided clear-cut appropriation. It does not yet belong to anyone, nor is it affiliated with anyone. Cosmism is still a no man’s land, which makes it not only a popular local subject but also a temporarily safe buffer zone for the organization and deployment of opposing forces”

“That is why Russian cosmism, extremely attractive to supporters of various ideological views, is the site of an impending war.”

“Translated from the Russian by Thomas Campbell.”

“Marina Simakova is a Russian researcher and cultural critic based in Saint Petersburg.”