Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
(1821–1881)

In December 1877, N. P. Peterson, a schoolteacher and student of Fyodorov, sent Dostoevsky an unsigned outline of his mentor's ideas without giving his name. Dostoevsky's reply of 24 March 1878 begins with a question about who this thinker is: "He interested me greatly". And then: "in essence I completely agree with these ideas. I read them as if they were my own". Dostoevsky never learned Fyodorov's name: Fyodorov opposed mentions of himself in print, and his authorship was revealed only after his death in 1903. They never met in person.

In the same letter, the main question is posed: is the resurrection of ancestors an allegory, enlightened knowledge of the past by descendants, or a literal event? Dostoevsky states his position at once: "we here, that is I and Solovyov at least, believe in real, literal, personal resurrection and that it will come to pass on earth". That same day, he read Peterson's outline — anonymously — to Vladimir Solovyov, who was then giving "Lectures on Godmanhood"; the conversation lasted two hours.

The reply dictated by Fyodorov to Peterson went far beyond the scope of a letter and became the beginning of "The Question of Brotherhood, or Kinship…" — Fyodorov's major work, which later opened "Philosophy of the Common Task". Dostoevsky's questions turned out to be the very impulse that compelled Fyodorov to set forth the doctrine of resurrection in coherent and written form for the first time.

Immortality and resurrection are a recurring theme in late Dostoevsky: in his "Writer's Diary" for 1876 he called the idea of human soul immortality the sole highest idea on earth. Scholars connect Fyodorov's ideas with the conception of "The Brothers Karamazov" — work on the novel began in the same year 1878, and the themes of sonship, brotherhood, parricide and resurrection run through the drafts and final text. A caveat is necessary: Dostoevsky never names Fyodorov anywhere, and this connection remains a scholarly reconstruction rather than a documented fact.

Yet the coincidence is not complete: for Dostoevsky, resurrection is the fulfilment of a promise; for Fyodorov, the work of science and of people's own labour. But what Dostoevsky defined as most essential in the teaching was precisely the duty of the living towards the dead: resurrection as an obligation, not an expectation. Man here is not a passive witness to the world's design, but its active participant — a thought developed in Dostoevsky's Pushkin Speech of 1880 as a calling to become a "universal man" and achieve universal brotherly unity. From here runs a direct line to cosmism's key principle: man as the regulator of nature and transformer of the Universe.