The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers

"I didn’t write directly about the cosmists in the book, but I spent a lot of time reading about them and getting really fascinated with the whole pre-history of transhumanism that is Russian cosmism. But I’m not sure that there is any direct intellectual through-line between those guys and transhumanism. Obviously, there are certain transhumanists who are well-aware of what those guys were doing and are interested in it. I’m sure Anders Sandberg, for instance, is probably well-up on all of that stuff. So, I don’t know that there is any direct lineage at all. That was what interested me about it: so many of these ideas were existing at the time when the technology and the culture were completely different. But their ideas were every bit as crazy as — actually, probably much much crazier than — today’s transhumanists. There was no sense that the technology was even theoretically in the ballpark of being able to do what they wanted to do back then. Yes. One of the ideas that was really intriguing to me was this notion that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky put forward. He had this notion that it was the duty of Mother Russia and the Russian people to resurrect every person who had ever died. He didn’t really talk globally, actually. He was only interested in making Russians immortal, which I find entertaining. The idea was that this generation of Russians digs up the previous generation. He doesn’t go into the specifics scientifically, but it’s your responsibility to bring your father and mother back to life. And then, once they’re reconstituted, they dig up the previous generation. So, eventually, you have the situation where everyone who has ever lived, going back to Adam and Eve as he puts it, is resurrected and brought back to life. It’s completely crazy and it totally reminds me of Flann O’Brien’s novels. But it was taken quite seriously at the time. There were serious Russian intellectuals and artists who were persuaded by this, if not the details then at least by the spirit of the enterprise. These included, most notably, Tolstoy. He wasn’t a signed-up cosmist but he was really drawn to it. So, I think, was Dostoevsky, though to a slightly lesser extent. “There was no sense that the technology was even theoretically in the ballpark of being able to do what the Russian cosmists wanted to do back then” With contemporary transhumanism, there does seem to be a fair amount of Russians who are on board with it as well. I never really got under the skin of it too much but it seemed to me something to do with Russia’s sense of itself and America’s sense of itself. Both of these countries as cultures are really tied in with the notion of technological progress. Obviously, you immediately think of the Cold War, but cosmism predates this by a couple of generations. I just thought it was really interesting that there was a previous transhumanism. With the process of writing and abandoning things from books and cutting out entire sections, at this point I’m not entirely sure why I cut out the whole thing about cosmism. I spent a really long time looking into it, writing about it, and got really fascinated by it. I think it just broke up the flow of the book to a degree. John Gray had already done it really well. That was probably part of it."