Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov
Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov
(1829–1903)
Illegitimate son of Prince Pavel Ivanovich Gagarin.
An outstanding religious philosopher and founder of Russian cosmism—a school of thought that connected the exploration of space with ideas of universal brotherhood and the conquest of death.
Fyodorov's central theme was the conquest of death. He regarded death as the world's greatest evil and was convinced that humanity itself could and must overcome it. The task involved not only the immortality of the living but also the resurrection of all the dead—the 'fathers'. This task, which required the union of all mankind, Fyodorov called the 'Common Task'; his writings, published posthumously by his disciples, were indeed titled 'The Philosophy of the Common Task'.
His contemporaries called him the 'Moscow Socrates'. Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Solovyov spoke of him and his ideas with respect. As for Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the future father of Russian cosmonautics, as a youth he taught himself by reading books at the Pashkov House. The Chertkov Library and the Rumyantsev Museum Library, where Fyodorov worked, were housed there at that time. Later, Tsiolkovsky acknowledged that Fyodorov had served as his university professors.
Fyodorov lived an ascetic life: he tried to own nothing and gave away a significant portion of his already modest salary to his 'stipendiary students'. See an illustrated atlas of his life and activities.
The bold ideas of Nikolai Fyodorovich were long forgotten in his homeland and almost unknown abroad, but in recent decades interest in them has returned—and not only in Russia.
Abroad, transhumanists—members of a movement that emerged at the end of the twentieth century—readily cite Russian cosmism. Many of them regard Fyodorov as their precursor: radical life extension, cryonics, and 'digital resurrection' directly echo his ideas. The 'Church of Perpetual Life' in Florida even venerates him as a prophet. Though it is a church only in form, not in substance: at its regular 'services', scientists, futurologists, and life-extension activists speak. Attention to cosmism among Western audiences was attracted in particular by George M. Young's The Russian Cosmists (2012) and the anthology Russian Cosmism edited by Boris Groys (2018).
In Moscow there operates the Fyodorov Museum-Library with a continuously functioning philosophical seminar. Notably, it was here that the first seminar of the Russian Transhumanist Movement took place in January 2005. Since 1988, Fyodorov Readings have also been held: in 2023, the jubilee XX International Scientific Readings in Memory of N. F. Fyodorov took place. Meanwhile, Russian cosmism has also been taken up by publicists writing about the 'Russian idea'.
An interesting fact:
Nearly twenty years after Fyodorov's death, at the end of the Civil War, a group of biocosmists-immoralists emerged in Moscow. They regarded death as logically absurd, ethically intolerable, and aesthetically monstrous, and proclaimed the chief rights of the individual to be 'the right to existence (immortality, resurrection, rejuvenation) and freedom of movement in space'. Aleksandr Svyatogur, the poet and ideologue of biocosmism, wrote in his 1921 manifesto that 'our Earth must become a cosmic vessel, piloted by the wisdom-tempered will of the biocosmist'. He was indignant that the Earth, 'like a goat tethered to a sun-shepherd, eternally revolves its orbit'. The image is entirely in the spirit of Fyodorov, who wrote that mankind must be 'not an idle passenger, but a servant, a crew of our earthly vessel, driven by some as yet unknown force'. Svyatogur himself, however, repudiated such kinship: Fyodorov's utopia, he wrote, 'bereft of the idea of creativity', was 'organically alien' to biocosmists.
