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 linked the exploration of space with ideas of universal brotherhood and the conquest of death.

Fyodorov's central theme is the overcoming of death. He considered death the chief evil of the world and was convinced that humanity itself could and must defeat it. This meant not only the immortality of the living, but also the resurrection of all the dead — the “fathers”. Fyodorov called this task, which required the union of all people, the “Common Task”; his writings, published posthumously by his disciples, were accordingly titled “The Philosophy of the Common Task”.

His contemporaries called him the “Moscow Socrates”. Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Solovyov all spoke of him and his ideas with respect. As for Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the future father of Russian cosmonautics, in his youth he educated himself from books at the Pashkov House. The Chertkov Library and the library of the Rumyantsev Museum, where Fyodorov worked, were housed there at the time. Tsiolkovsky later admitted that Fyodorov had taken the place of his university professors.

Fyodorov led an ascetic life: he tried to own no property at all, and gave away a considerable part of his already modest salary to his “stipend students”. See an illustrated atlas of his life and work.

Nikolai Fyodorovich's audacious ideas were forgotten for a long time in his homeland and almost unknown beyond it, but in recent decades interest in them has returned — and not only in Russia.

Abroad, Russian cosmism is frequently invoked by transhumanists — members of a movement that emerged at the end of the twentieth century. Many of them regard Fyodorov as their forerunner: radical life extension, cryonics, and “digital resurrection” echo his ideas directly. The “Church of Perpetual Life” in Florida even venerates him as a prophet. Though it is a church more in form than in substance: at its regular “services”, scientists, futurologists, and life-extension activists give talks. Western audiences' attention to cosmism was drawn in particular by George M. Young's book The Russian Cosmists (2012) and the anthology Russian Cosmism, edited by Boris Groys (2018).

The N. F. Fyodorov Museum-Library operates in Moscow, with an ongoing philosophical seminar. Notably, it was here that the first seminar of the Russian Transhumanist Movement was held, in January 2005. Fyodorov Readings have also been held since 1988: in 2023 the jubilee Twentieth International Scientific Readings in Memory of N. F. Fyodorov took place. At the same time, cosmism in Russia has also been taken up by essayists writing about the “Russian idea”.

Interesting Fact:

Almost twenty years after Fyodorov's death, at the close of the Civil War, a group of biocosmist-immortalists emerged in Moscow. They considered death logically absurd, ethically impermissible, and aesthetically grotesque, and declared the chief rights of the individual to be “the right to being (immortality, resurrection, rejuvenation) and to freedom of movement in space”. The poet Alexander Svyatogor, the ideologist of biocosmism, wrote in his 1921 manifesto that “our Earth must become a space vessel, steered by the wisdom-tempered will of the biocosmist”. He was indignant that the Earth, “like a goat tethered to a shepherd-sun, eternally circles round and round in its orbit”. The image is thoroughly in the spirit of Fyodorov, who wrote that humanity must be “not an idle passenger, but the servants and crew of our earthly ship, propelled by some force as yet unknown”. Svyatogor himself, however, disowned any such kinship: Fyodorov's utopia, he wrote, “devoid of the idea of creativity”, was “organically alien” to biocosmists.