Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
(1821–1881)

In December 1877, N. P. Peterson, a schoolteacher and student of Fyodorov, sent Dostoevsky an unsigned account of his mentor's ideas without giving his name. Dostoevsky's reply of 24 March 1878 opens with a question about who this thinker is: “He has interested me greatly.” And then: “In essence, I completely agree with these ideas. I read them as if they were my own.” Dostoevsky never did learn the name: Fyodorov objected to any mention of himself in print, and the authorship came to light only after his death in 1903. The two never met in person.

The same letter raises the central question: is the resurrection of ancestors an allegory, a clarified knowledge that descendants have of the past, or a literal event? Dostoevsky states his own position at once: “We here — that is, Solovyov and I, at least — believe in resurrection that is real, literal, personal, and that it will come to pass on earth.” That same day he read Peterson's account — anonymously — to Vladimir Solovyov, who was then delivering his “Lectures on Godmanhood”; the conversation lasted two hours.

The reply that Fyodorov dictated to Peterson went far beyond the bounds of a letter and became the beginning of “The Question of Brotherhood, or Kinship…” — Fyodorov's principal work, which later opened his “Philosophy of the Common Task”. Dostoevsky's questions turned out to be exactly the impetus that led Fyodorov, for the first time, to set out the doctrine of resurrection coherently and in writing.

Immortality and resurrection are a persistent theme in late Dostoevsky: as early as his “A Writer's Diary” for 1876, he called the idea of the immortality of the human soul the single highest idea on earth. Scholars also connect Fyodorov's ideas with the conception of “The Brothers Karamazov” — work on the novel began in that same year, 1878, and the themes of sonship, brotherhood, parricide, and resurrection run through the drafts and the final text. A caveat is necessary: Dostoevsky nowhere names Fyodorov, and this connection remains a scholarly reconstruction rather than a documented fact.

Even the parallel is not exact: for Dostoevsky, resurrection is the fulfilment of a promise; for Fyodorov, it is the work of science and of people's own labour. But what Dostoevsky identified as most essential in the teaching was precisely the duty of the living toward the dead: resurrection as an obligation, not an expectation. Here man is not a passive witness to the world's design but an active participant in it — an idea developed in the 1880 Pushkin Speech as a calling to become a “universal man” and to arrive at a universal brotherly union. From here runs a direct line to cosmism's key tenet: man as the regulator of nature and transformer of the Universe.