This was exactly how Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903), a humble librarian of the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow, saw progress in a world where there is death―namely as a triumph of the young over the old, of the living over the dead. For Fedorov, this kind of progress was deeply objectionable. The highest goal of all human efforts, he was convinced, must be a world without death, or more precisely―a world in which death will have never existed, so that everybody (including the dead) would be able to become part of it. Fedorov did not publish his ideas during his lifetime. His sketches and drafts were only compiled and published posthumously in the first decade of the 20th century by his followers in two monumental volumes under the title Philosophy of the Common Task.[2]
Fig. 1 Leonid Pasternak, Portrait of Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, 1907
Fedorov appeals to all the living (the “sons”) to come together in a “brotherly” fashion, in order to work towards overcoming death with rational, that is, scientific and technical means, and to physically “bring back from the dead” all the deceased (the “fathers”). The “patrification” (ottsetvorenie), a gradually progressing physical resurrection of all the previous generations, replaces childbearing (detorozhdenie), which only produces mortals and thus perpetuates the cycle of birth and death in a state of blind natural decay.
Fedorov―who was himself a devout Christian―speaks of the “Kingdom of God” and the fulfilment of God’s will using Christian images and symbols (the Trinity as the ideal of kinship, liturgy as a “common task”). However, nowhere is there any mention of God’s involvement in the process of resurrection, the attainment of immortality and the completion of creation. Rather, Fedorov makes a strict distinction between a resurrection or awakening (voskreshenie), which humanity can bring about through the effort of its own powers, and a resurrection (voskresenie) as an event that would befall human beings without their intervention. In Fedorov’s project, resurrection or restoration (vosstanovlenie) refers to an immanent, scientific-technical work, a completely mechanical and materialistic process that consists of tracing, collecting and synthesizing of the dispersed material “particles” (chastitsy) that made up the bodies of the deceased. The product will be a pure “work of art” (khudozhestvennoe proizvedenie), an artefact, created, not begotten, and therefore perfect and imperishable: “The resurrection will not be a matter of miracle, but of knowledge and common labor.”[3]
However, the problem of preserving personal identity beyond death remains unresolved in Fedorov’s work. In contrast to the Christian solution to this problem, Fedorov does not believe in an immortal soul that is separated from the body at death and reunited with it at the resurrection, thereby guaranteeing the identity of the individual. Instead, Fedorov speaks of “consciousness” (soznanie); the relevant passage reads: “the organism is a machine, and […] consciousness relates to it like bile to the liver; put the machine together, and consciousness will return to it!”[4]
Consequently, there is also no afterlife, because Fedorov does not believe in other worlds and what he calls a transcendental emigration of souls to these worlds.
Fedorov’s ethics, which he calls “supramoralism”, demands
…paradise, the Kingdom of God, however not an otherworldly but a this-worldly kingdom, demands the transformation of this-worldly, earthly reality, a transformation that will extend to all heavenly worlds. […] So the Kingdom of God, or paradise, is the work of all powers, of all capacities of all people in their totality […]. Paradise can only be created by human beings themselves.[5]
In their search for the particles of the deceased ancestors humans will free themselves from “the shackles of gravity,” which stand for decrepitude and death. No longer “idle passengers of the Earth,” they will transform their planet into a spacecraft that will serve them in their exploration of the vastness of the universe, so they can use the cosmic space as living quarters for the generations they will have brought to life. They will rebuild the universe, fill it with life and reason and perfect it.
In order to make their way through the universe and to be able to exist in all its worlds, humans will have to acquire the ability to create their own bodies, that is, to synthesize them from the elementary cosmic matter. Fedorov never tires of repeating: “Our body must be our work” (nashe telo dolzhno byt’ nashim delom), because only in this way would humans ever be able to gradually transform themselves from perishable natural creatures to self-regulating, independent artificial entities.[6]
Humans will no longer be forced to transform “the ancestors’ ashes” into nourishment for themselves and their progeny; instead, they will learn to use those very ashes to reconstruct their ancestors with the help of the knowledge and practical abilities they will have learnt through mastering the art of constructing their own bodies (telostroenie). The cannibalistic “suppression and devouring” of the fathers will be replaced by their conscious reconstruction. Love of parents will replace sensual longing, and “the tremendous power which manifests itself in lust” will create eternal life, in order to give it back to those who died. According to Fedorov, the resurrection of all the dead will mark a “complete victory over space and time” and thus the end of history.
The general resurrection and a complete liberation from a blind, death-dealing nature are mutually dependent. Only a fully united community of humans―including dead ones―is capable of converting all that is nature-given, and therefore decrepit, into something man-made, artificial, and therefore perfect. Perfection and immortality are ethically justified only when everybody, without exception, can partake of them, whereby injustice and suffering that have been perpetuated throughout history will be annihilated. In this way, Fedorov eliminates the aporia inherent in all theories of progress: created by everybody for everybody, his paradise is a product of the union of all humans in space and time, there being neither “the doomed” nor “victims of history”.
Fedorov’s project aims at the restoration and redemption of all humankind without exception and thus resembles the eschatological idea of a “single outcome,” namely an apokatastasis panton, the restoration of creation to its holistic state before the Fall of man and the onset of death, albeit―and this is the decisive difference―not as a gift of grace from God, but purely as the work of man, without God’s involvement. The idea of an ultimate healing of the world is directed against the doctrine of the “dual outcome” with the final separation of the saved and those damned for all eternity. However, the idea of an apokatastasis panton is rejected by all Christian denominations as heretical, as the end (eschaton) and the beginning (proton) would coincide, creating a cycle and the history of salvation between the Fall and the Resurrection would lose its meaning. The mere prevention of a resurrection of wrath brought about by God and of a terrible Last Judgement with the condemnation of the sinners to eternal torment and of the righteous to the contemplation of that torment, shows Fedorov’s project of self-redemption and self-perfection to be incompatible with Christian dogma.[7]
The idea of abolishing death and conquering space met with a lively response after the Russian Revolution. Many supporters of the Revolution were inspired by the fervent expectation of a radically new world. On 4 January 1922, an appeal was published in the Moscow newspaper Izvestiia calling for the immediate realisation of the only two fundamental human rights, namely the right to unlimited existence and of movement in cosmic space. The appeal, signed by a group called “Biocosmists-Immortalists”, was preceded by a programme of action which stated:
We declare that the issue of realizing personal immortality now belongs fully on the agenda. […] We also put the ‘victory over space’ on the agenda. We say: not aviation―that would be far too little―but space travel. […] We can no longer be mere spectators, but must become active participants in cosmic life.[8]
In the same year, the Biocosmists published a paper entitled “Immortality” (Bessmertie), which reported on the progress made in the fight against death. While the communists were satisfied with the reorganisation of society and the abolition of the state, believing that this would take them from the “realm of necessity” to the “realm of freedom”, the Biocosmists went much further. They demanded the “maximum freedom of personality”, which meant: the complete liberation of man from the “prison of nature” and his full sovereignty over space and time.
Fig. 2 “Bessmertie” (Immortality). Newspaper of the Petrograd Biocosmists, November 25, 1922.
The most prominent testimony to the struggle against the decay of a human body caused by death is the preservation of the remains of the leader of the Revolution and their public exhibition in the centre of Moscow to this day. As early as January 1924, the Biocosmists had called in Izvestiia for work on overcoming death to be accelerated, since the consciousness of the workers and the oppressed throughout the world would never come to terms with the fact of Lenin’s death.
The mummification of Lenin’s body was thus understood by some of his contemporaries as a measure that could only be explained by the idea of a necessary and inevitable resurrection. Konstantin Mel’nikov, the architect who designed the glass shrine for the ‘eternal preservation’ of Lenin’s body, ‘solved’ the problem by presenting him―as in the fairy tale of Snow White―as ‘sleeping’, incorruptible, waiting to be resurrected. At the time, Fedorov’s followers issued the slogan “Mortals of all lands, unite!” and proposed the creation of a “world cemetery” in the permafrost regions, where the deceased would await their future resurrection uncorrupted.[9]
The question of how far-reaching the influence of Fedorov’s ideas was at the time is still controversial today and is surrounded by much speculations and legends. Fedorov’s Philosophy of the Common Task had been published in a tiny edition before the First World War. Those who came into contact with his writings or with his followers were few in number; and thinkers who were influenced by his monolithic idea were not always even aware of its origins. The same is true of the artists of the avant-garde.
The avant-garde’s conception of art has a number of characteristics that suggest an influence from Fedorov’s world of ideas. Both share utopian and totalitarian traits, a rejection of the world as it is, and a demand to move from representing the world to transforming it through an active, “life-building” art―morally motivated in Fedorov’s case, more aesthetically motivated in the avant-garde. Both reject the contemplative attitude and the traditional mimetic function of art by defining it as a project of the world as it should be.
The creation of a “new man” and a “new life”, the belief in the omnipotence of the human mind, in science and technology, the overcoming of time and space, of gravity and death, the advance into new dimensions, the reaching out into space―all these “Fedorovian motifs” appear in the works of the avant-gardists. Admittedly, formulated in such general terms, they correspond to the spirit of the times and do not necessarily have to be traced back to the Philosophy of the Common Task. These motifs can also be found, for example, in the work of the Italian Futurists, especially Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who proclaimed as early as 1902: “The time has come to conquer space and ascend to the stars!”.[10] With the help of technology, Marinetti’s “new man” will impose his will on matter and reshape the whole world to his liking; he will finally create artificial beings which, because they are not conceived and born but mechanically constructed, will be immortal and omnipotent.[11]
When considering the question of possible influence, one should not overlook the significant differences between Fedorov and most representatives of the avant-garde (especially the Futurists). For example, the provocative glorification of youth and the future in their manifestos and performances, the rebellion against being tied to tradition, preserved in museums and libraries, against everything “yesterday” that paralyses progress, against the dead oppressing the living, all of this was completely contrary to the basic intention of Fedorov’s backward-looking utopia, which was concerned with the preservation and restoration of everything that had been.
It was―and still is―not only Fedorov’s followers who greatly overestimated his influence. Researchers of the avant-garde also tended to make misjudgements. A leading American art historian, for example, believed that Kazimir Malevich’s architectural utopias were inspired by Fedorov, since the latter had been concerned with “millions of returning souls” into the cosmos.[12] Nothing of this kind can be found in Fedorov and so this assertion was rejected by none other than Nikolai Khardzhiev―Malevich had never been interested in Fedorov.[13]
Another famous art critic and philosopher, repeatedly claims that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Soviet space travel and one of the most prominent representatives of so-called “Russian Cosmism”, was so deeply influenced by Fedorov that he conducted his rocket research “with the goal of transporting our resurrected ancestors to other planets”.[14] This is far from the truth. Apart from the fact that Tsiolkovsky mentions Fedorov only once briefly in his writings, he never thought of resurrected ancestors, since his “solution” to the problem of death was completely incompatible with Fedorov’s central idea of personal resurrection through technical means. While for Fedorov death is the greatest enemy that must be overcome, for Tsiolkovsky it is only “an illusion of the weak human mind”.[15] Whereas Fedorov’s great project was aimed at the perfection of humanity in its entirety and also included all those who had died, Tsiolkovsky was concerned solely with the breeding of a future superhumanity while eradicating all inferior beings (including humans). He also called for an extreme increase in the earth’s population, the radical exploitation of the planet and the complete destruction of biodiversity.[16] To lump Fedorov and Tsiolkovsky together under the label of “Russian Cosmism”―a hybrid ideological construct created in the 1970s[17] that has fed into a nationalist discourse on Russian identity in post-Soviet Russia―is therefore quite misleading; Fedorov and Tsiolkovsky are sharp antipodes in terms of their basic assumptions and goals.
There is, however, one artist whose work was undoubtedly deeply influenced by Fedorov and his ideas, if only in the last two years before his untimely death: Vasily Chekrygin.[18]
Fig. 3 Vasily Chekrygin, Self-Portrait, 1918, graphite pencil on paper, 21,4 × 19 cm.
Born in the provincial town of Zhizdra in central Russia in 1897, Chekrygin grew up in Kiev and attended the icon painting school of the Cave Monastery there. In 1910, at age thirteen, he went to Moscow to attend the famous Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. There he met Vladimir Maiakovsky and joined the circle of Futurists around Maiakovsky, David Burliuk, Lev Zhegin and Kazimir Malevich. Although Chekrygin later described himself as “one of the first Russian followers of Futurism”,[19] his main interests were Old Russian painting and biblical themes. In January 1914, Chekrygin met Marinetti in Moscow, who invited him to Milan, but the young painter soon turned away from Futurism and began to develop his own, religiously orientated concept of art. After the Revolution, he gave painting lessons and lectured on painting at the Higher Art and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS).
At the beginning of the 1920s, Chekrygin was deeply involved in the theoretical debates about art that were taking place in avant-garde circles. At the centre of these debates was the question of art’s role in the creation of a “new life” and the use of new forms of expression that seemed to be opened up by the idea of a “synthesis of the arts”. It was at this time―probably at the end of 1920[20]―that Chekrygin “surprisingly”, as he later reported,[21] came across Fedorov’s teaching. The intermediary was probably the painter and art theoretician Lev Zhegin, who recalled that he had bought Fedorov’s works at the Sukharev market in Moscow at the beginning of the 1920s and introduced Chekrygin to them.[22]
From then on, the Philosophy of the Common Task became a kind of catechism for Chekrygin. He enthusiastically embraced Fedorov’s idea of the common task and the role assigned to art in this project and not only based his own artistic work on it, but also formulated it in letters to Nikolai Punin and Mikhail Larionov and in the philosophical poem The Cathedral of the Resurrecting Museum, dedicated to the memory of Fedorov.[23]
Starting from a critique of contemporary art movements, which he accused of being illusionist instead of real and contemplative instead of active, Chekrygin―in close reference to Fedorov―developed the idea of a synthesis of the arts that would serve to reshape the universe, transforming it from a product of nature into a work of man, i.e. a work of art. For this purpose, according to Chekrygin, nature has created the human artist, who has the ability to create ideal images that nature itself cannot produce; he is thus able to anticipate that perfection which is not present in nature and which can only be brought into it by human action.
Like Fedorov, Chekrygin places humankind at the centre of the new synthetic, “living art” (zhivoe iskusstvo), which is intended to be universal and whose aim is to “resurrect the dead fathers in reality,” to “redesign the universe” and to “master the cosmic processes,” especially gravity, which, if not mastered, would lead to the downfall of the universe. For Chekrygin, man is both creation and creator. He is an embodiment of the “highest synthesis of the living arts”.[24] He is a living, though still incomplete and imperfect artistic creation, destined to overcome himself and become the regulator and creator of his own, still mortal nature, in accordance with Fedorov’s demand that “our body must be our work”.
The realisation of the “great synthesis” lies in the future; the task of contemporary art must be to prepare for it by “partially revealing the future renewal of the universe”, i.e. anticipating its completion. Then, according to Chekrygin, “art will also master the hidden forces in reality and will be the victorious creation of a celestial architecture that will build the heavens and restore the bodies hidden in the earth”.[25] Man would be both the subject and the object of an all-encompassing transformation, renewal and perfection, a “self-creation” (samosozdanie) that would transform him from a natural (born) being into an artificial (and thus immortal) one. The realisation of this plan required the unification of all creative forces and went far beyond the merely imaginary resurrection of the dead in the church service, which is why Chekrygin described it―in Fedorov’s words―as “a liturgy outside the church walls” (vnekhramovaia liturgiia). While the liturgy within the church celebrates the mystical transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, the liturgy outside the church walls should be the real transformation of the particles of the ancestors into living bodies.
Chekrygin wanted to depict this vision in a huge fresco for the Cathedral of the Resurrecting Museum and thus create a model for the desired synthesis of all the arts. Once realized, this synthesis was to be the true resurrection of the dead. The plan was not realized. On June 3, 1922 Chekrygin died at age twenty-five after being run over by a train near Moscow.[26] He left behind some 1500 works, many of them charcoal sketches for the future fresco, most of which were done shortly before his death. Titles such as “Beginning of the Liturgy Outside the Church Walls”, “Dawn of the Cosmic Age”, “Mastering the Meteorological Process”, “Transfer of People to the Stars”, and “Resurrection” reveal Fedorov’s influence and led contemporary critics to accuse him of subjectivism and “mysticism”. Chekrygin’s work fell into oblivion at the end of the 1920s and has only been revived since the 1970s.
Fig. 4 Vasily Chekrygin, Sketch of the fresco Resurrection, 1921, charcoal on paper, 48,8 x 38, 3 cm.
Numerous drawings depict the resurrection of the dead. However, they do not yet show any clear reference to Fedorov’s project. This could, for example, also be the resurrection of Lazarus, which took place in a magical way with the help of God and not by scientific-technical means.
Fig. 5 Vasily Chekrygin, Composition of Resurrection, 1921, charcoal on paper, 38,8 cm x 29,6 cm.
Here we see the ascent of the resurrected to their heavenly abodes, now already in the spirit of Fedorov.
Fig. 6 Vasily Chekrygin, Resurrection: The Artist-Son Paints the Image of an Ancestor, 1921, charcoal on paper, 38,8 cm x 29,6 cm.
This drawing shows the special role of artists: The mere image of the deceased is the first step towards his real recreation.
Fig. 7 Vasily Chekrygin, Artists, Trying to Reconstruct the Bodies of the Fathers, print, 1919-1920, 25,5 × 17,5 cm.
This drawing also shows the artists attempting to reconstruct the bodies of the deceased fathers.
Fig. 8 Vasily Chekrygin, Mastering the Meteoric Processes, 1922.
This drawing perfectly illustrates Fedorov’s project, according to which steerable airships (aerostats) equipped with lightning rods will regulate meteoric processes and utilize atmospheric electricity.
Fig. 9 Vasily Chekrygin, World Exposition, 1921, charcoal on paper, 39.5 cm × 30.5 cm.
This drawing illustrates one of Fedorov’s basic ideas. For Fedorov, the Paris World Exposition of 1889 was a symbol of the bourgeois civilisation as a “realm of death”. He saw it as a self-portrait of the parasitic urban bourgeoisie and an exposition of the fetishes of its hedonism and aggression. For Fedorov, the origin and driving force of the bourgeois civilisation was the “cult of woman”. Woman embodied blind nature and thus the source of mortality. She also appears as the seductress of the “prodigal sons” who, blinded by her beauty, fall prey to sensual lust. The pursuit of pure pleasure―an expression of the prevailing “pornocracy”―focuses entirely on the here and now: it despises the old, rises above the past and forgets the fathers. In its absolute self-centredness, it proves to be utterly destructive. Sexual competition fuelled by women―Fedorov is downright misogynistic―creates the “cult of the thing” and the industrial production. It also brings political and social discord into the world, consolidates the highly individualized, unbrotherly state and thus prevents the “cult of the ancestors”, in which the sons recognize their duty to their fathers and unite in the common work of their resurrection.
Fig. 10 Vasily Chekrygin, Beginning of the “Liturgy Outside the Church Walls”, 1921
This drawing shows the various preparations for the process of resurrecting the deceased, the “liturgy outside the church walls” in Fedorov’s words. Bones are dug up. Books contain information about the ancestors. At the bottom right, a rod microscope is used to search for tiny particles of the deceased, while the standing figure uses a telescope to spot the future homes of the resurrected in heaven.
To this day, Fedorov and his work are generally selectively received and reinterpreted―when modern transhumanists refer to him in their quest for self-optimization and individual immortality, or when his call for the creation of an inner-worldly paradise is interpreted in religious terms, or when he is declared the founder of “Russian Cosmism”, as propagated today by the ultra-nationalists of the Izborsk Club in Russia. However, Fedorov was neither a traditional Christian thinker nor a transhumanist nor a kindred spirit of the so-called “Russian cosmists”. As I have tried to show, he is much more original in calling for the redemption of all past generations and the cancellation of guilt towards the “victims of history”. And he became an inspiration for at least one important avant-garde artist―Vasily Chekrygin.
Michael Hagemeister (b. 1951) is a historian and Slavist. He has published widely on Russian philosophy and intellectual history, apocalyptic and utopian thought, and Russian antisemitism, with a particular focus on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. He has been employed at universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. His publications include Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, eds. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister (2005/2016); ‘Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and the Occult Roots of Soviet Space Travel,’ in Birgit Menzel et al., eds., The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (2012); ‘Le “cosmisme russe”, “philosophie de l’avenir?”,’ in Françoise Lesourd, ed., Le cosmisme russe: Tentative de définition (2018). He is currently writing a biography of the Russian religious writer Sergei Nilus, as well as a monograph on Nikolai Fedorov and Russian cosmism.
[1] Keynote lecture at the Fifth International Khardzhiev Conference, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, March 1, 2024. Slightly revised for publication and bibliographic details added.
[2] Nikolai Fedorov, Filosofiia obshchego dela: Stat’i, mysli i pis’ma Nikolaia Fedorovicha Fedorova, eds. Vladimir Kozhevnikov and Nikolai Peterson, vol. 1 (Vernyi: Tip. Semirechenskogo Oblastnogo Pravleniia, 1906), vol. 2 (Moscow: Pechatnia A. Snegirevoi, 1913); idem, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 1995-2000). On Fedorov, see Michael Hagemeister, Nikolaj Fedorov: Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1989) https://digi20.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb00052974_00001.html (last accessed April 15, 2024); Svetlana Semenova, Filosof budushchego veka Nikolaj Fedorov (Moscow: Pashkov dom, 2004); George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and his Followers (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Françoise Lesourd, ed., Le cosmisme russe: Nikolaï Fiodorov (Toulouse: Université de Toulouse, 2018; Slavica Occitania 47).
[3] Nikolai Fedorov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2, 203.
[4] Ibid., vol. 1, 258.
[5] Ibid., 404.
[6] In view of this, it is not surprising that Fedorov has been discovered by supporters of transhumanism and declared the mastermind of this elitist, technocratic ideology of progress. The “Russian Transhumanist Movement” counts Fedorov among the founders of “scientific immortalism”. Fedorov has also arrived in the land of unlimited possibilities and invented religions, for example with the founders of the “Church of Perpetual Life” in Florida, who have chosen the Russian as their prophet and read masses for their deceased members who have had themselves (and some of their pets) frozen in the hope of being resurrected to eternal life.
[7] In contrast, Fedorov’s followers in post-Soviet Russia interpret his doctrine as “active Christianity”. On the sectarian Fedorov movement, see Anya Bernstein, The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019).
[8] Aleksandr Sviatogor [Agienko], “Biokosmicheskaia poėtika,” in Biokosmizm (Materialy – no. 1), Moscow 1921, 3–4. For the ephemeral Biocosmist movement, see Sviatogor: Poėtika. Biokosmizm. (A)teologiia, ed. Evgenii Kuchinov (Moskva: Common place, 2017); Russian Cosmism, ed. Boris Groys (New York: e-flux, 2019), 59–89.
[9] Nikolai Setnitskii, “O smerti i pogrebenii,” in Vselenskoe delo, 2 (Riga [recte Harbin]: Oriens, 1934), 146.
[10] “L’heure est venue de conquérir l’espace et de monter à l’assaut des Étoiles!”, quoted from Christa Baumgarth, Geschichte des Futurismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1966), 12. The influence of Italian Futurism in Russia should not be underestimated. Malevich, for example, continued to quote from Marinetti’s writings in Soviet publications well into the 1920s. Jean-Claude Marcadé, “Marinetti et Malévitch,” in Présence de F. T. Marinetti. Actes du Colloque International tenu à l’Unesco (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1982), 256-257.
[11] Ibid., 136–138.
[12] John E. Bowlt et al., “Engines of the Russian Cosmos,” in El Cosmos de la Vanguardia Russa: Arte y exploración especial 1900–1930 (Santander: Fundación Botín, 2010), 327–328.
[13] Nikolai Khardzhiev, “Detstvo i iunost’ Kazimira Malevicha,” in K istorii russkogo avangarda. The Russian Avant-Garde (Stockholm: Gilea, 1976), 89.
[14] Boris Groys, “Becoming Cosmic,” in Mikhail Sergeev et al., eds., Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2021), 164; idem, “Russian Cosmism and the Technology of Immortality,” in Russian Cosmism, 11–12.
[15] Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, “Volia Vselennoi,” [1928] in idem, Genii sredi liudei (Moscow: Mysl’, 2002), 228.
[16] On Tsiolkovsky’s “cosmic philosophy,” see Michael Hagemeister, “Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and the Occult Roots of Soviet Space Travel,” in Birgit Menzel et al, eds., The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (Munich and Berlin: Otto Sagner, 2011), 135–150.
[17] See, e.g., Nikolai Gavriushin, “A byl li ‘russkij kosmizm’?,” in Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 3 (1993), 105.
[18] On Chekrygin, see Elena Murina and Vasilii Rakitin, Vasilii Nikolaevich Chekrygin (Moscow: Russkii Avangard, 2005).
[19] Chekrygin to Nikolai Punin, December 6, 1920, in ibid., 208.
[20] Chekrygin, “Mysli” (December 31, 1920): “I am reading Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, the Moscow philosopher,” in ibid., 218.
[21] Chekrygin to Nikolai Punin, February 7, 1922, in ibid., 215.
[22] Aleksei Dorogov, personal communication, Moscow, April 5, 1984; Dorogov referred to a communication from Zhegin.
[23] Vasilii Chekrygin, “O Sobore Voskreshaiushchego muzeia,” [1921] in Murina and Rakitin, Chekrygin, 235–254. As I learnt from Anastasia Gacheva, the leading Fedorov researcher in Moscow, the manuscript of this important text, which had been kept in the archive of Chekrygin’s granddaughter Natalia Kolesnikova in Havana (Cuba), has recently been given to the Tretyakov Gallery, which is preparing a commented edition.
[24] Vasilii Chekrygin, “O namechaiushchemsia novom ėtape obshcheevropeiskogo iskusstva,” [1921] in Murina and Rakitin, Chekrygin, 231–234, here 233; French translation in Troels Andersen ed., Art et poésie russes 1900-1930: Textes choisis (Paris: Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou: 1979), 194–199.
[25] Ibid., 234.
[26] In 2021, Chekrygin’s lost grave was rediscovered and his remains exhumed. Fedorov’s followers celebrated this as the beginning of his resurrection.
