Fedorov and Svyatogor: Christian and secular aspects of Russian Cosmism

I don’t know Russian, so I can’t read the original works of my favorite Russian Cosmist thinkers [*], and much isn’t available in translation.

The collection “Russian Cosmism” (2018), edited by Boris Groys, includes “[crucial] texts, many available in English for the first time, written before and during the Bolshevik Revolution by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism.”

I have been reading with interest the essays of Alexander Agienko (“Svyatogor”), the founder of the Biocosmist movement. Svyatogor’s Biocosmism is a hardcore, secular version of Fedorov ideas.

In “The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers” (2012), the best reference work on Russian Cosmism in English, George Young astutely notes:

“Svyatogor and the Biocosmists anticipated not the Cosmist tendency as a whole, which still treats science and religion as parts of a holistic unity, but the transhumanist, cryogenic, cyborgianist, and other branches of technological immortalism that have emerged both in Russia and internationally in recent decades. These latter groups customarily grant Fedorov a tip of the hat but do not attempt to defend or follow him.”

This shows that the tension between secular and religious transhumanism was already evident at those times.

Svyatogor was an anarchist-futurist poet and agitator who embraced the Russian revolution.

The Soviet state was, according to Svyatogor, needed to destroy the old and establish the new. What is the new? “The most important thing for us is the immortality of the individual and its life in the cosmos,” answers Svyatogor: Man, under the Soviet state, is to become physically immortal and conquer the cosmos. Then, the resurrection of the dead envisioned by Fedorov will follow. But Svyatogor criticized Fedorov from a secular perspective:

“Fedorov, who adheres to a religious and platonic dualism that is alien to us, affirms the existence of two worlds: a perfect, divine world, and a human world… But recognizing one, real, infinite world, we start by realizing the personal immortality of the living and interplanetarism, on which our “common task” is based, with resurrection being relegated to third place…”

“Our third task is the resurrection of the dead. What concerns us here is the immortality of the individual in the fullness of his spiritual and physical powers. The resurrection of the dead involves the full reconstruction of those who are already dead and buried. That said, the quagmire of religion or mysticism is not for us. We are too grounded for that and are in fact in the process of waging war on religion and mysticism.”

A review of “Russian Cosmism” published in Los Angeles Review of Books introduces Svyatogor’s ideas as:

“Svyatogor goes on like this in one breathless sentence after another as he lays out a vision of art and revolutionary politics that demands “victory over space,” immortality, and the resurrection of the dead. Svyatogor, as both a writer and a revolutionary, advocated for full-throttle luxury space communism, and he wanted it right this very second.”

One difference between Fedorov and Svyatogor is that, while Fedorov’s writings are often complicated and difficult to understand, Svyatogor wrote simple and crystal clear manifestos “to create an awareness of our ideas in their most basic form, as close as possible in format to slogans, to express our scientific or philosophical ideas in a nutshell.”

Focusing on physical immortality and space travel asap, Svyatogor seems more realistic than Fedorov, because the resurrection of the dead is a greater technological challenge, by orders of magnitude, than physical immortality and space travel.

Not that Svyatogor was always realistic: He thought that the Soviet regime was to inevitably embrace his Biocosmist philosophy… but the same Soviet regime eventually condemned him a labor camp.

The resurrection of the dead is likely to require “magic,” transcendent ultratech based on science vastly more advanced than ours (see my book [*]). It seems plausible that beings able to resurrect the dead would be practically indistinguishable from God, as noted by Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer [*].

This is, I think, a synthesis of Fedorov’s religious and Svyatogor’s secular approach to Cosmism: The boundary between secularism and transcendence is not a sharp line, but a space-filling fat fractal. You can consistently choose to be on one or the other side, or on the fractal boundary itself.

While Fedorov interpreted resurrection as restoration, Svyatogor interpreted it as recreation with improvements. Here, Svyatogor’s ideas tunnel through the fractal boundary between secularism and transcendence, approaching the central Christian concept of resurrection in a new body and a new world, perfected by God.

[*] My book “Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology” is available for readers to buy on Amazon (Kindle and paperback editions).

Please buy my book, and/or donate to support other Turing Church projects.

Image of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space from Wikimedia Commons.