Fëdorov, Nikolai Fëdorovich (1829–1903)

Born in southern Russia near Tambov as an illegitimate son in the princely Gagarin family, Nikolai Fëdorovich Fëdorov always wrote from the viewpoint of the outsider looking in, the unlearned addressing the learned, raising for serious discussion the ‘naïve’ questions that philosophy had previously failed to answer: Why do we kill? Why do we hunger? Why are some people kin and others strangers? Why do we die?

With support from the Gagarin family, Fëdorov received a sound education, first at the Tambov gymnasium, and then at the respected Richelieu Lyceum in Odessa. In 1851, upon the death of the uncle who was his benefactor, Fëdorov left the Lyceum without a degree, ending his formal education. For the next several years, he wandered from village to village through central and southern Russia, serving as a teacher of elementary history and geography in such places as Lipetsk, Bogorodsk, Uglich and Podolsk. As a teacher, Fëdorov seems to have been loved by his pupils but viewed by headmasters as an overzealous nuisance. Narratives from people who knew him in those years depict a devoted, saintly, eccentric educator who engaged his pupils in unusual group research projects and who on one occasion even gave up his own teacher’s uniform to pay for the burial of an indigent pupil’s father.

In 1869, Fëdorov took a position as assistant librarian at the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow, where he became a legend among writers and scholars over the next thirty years. Living alone as an ascetic vegetarian, sleeping on a humpback trunk in a tiny rented room, wearing the same overcoat winter and summer, giving away most of his meagre salary to the poor, always the first to arrive at work and the last to leave, he was said to know not only the location and title but also the contents of every book in the vast library. When a scholar would order books on an obscure research topic, it was said that Fëdorov would usually bring double that number, including titles that the scholar had been unaware of but that gave new depth or direction to the research.

His writing was done for the most part in collaboration with disciples, late at night, on work holidays, and in his last years after retirement from the library. His great work, published in two posthumous volumes under the title Filosofiia obschago dela (The Philosophy of the Common Task) (1907?–13), is essentially a 1,200-page miscellany of long and short essays, unfinished drafts, fragments and inspired jottings, all variations on a single theme. In the world as it is, ruled by nature, the universe of matter and man is disintegrating into isolated particles; in the world as it ought to be, regulated by human reason, eternal unity and harmony will prevail. Therefore the human task, our common duty, is to join a universal project to guide our own evolution to the point where we may exercise benign control over nature and complete the perfection of ourselves and our universe.

Knowledge, in Fëdorov, is neither subjective nor objective, but ’projective’, action guided by reason towards the realization of an ideal. The ’project’ is the bridge between the real and ideal, and between all other opposite poles in Western dualism.

By uniting all to overcome the only true enemy of all, namely death, Fëdorov believed that the project of resurrection would also solve the social, economic and other problems of his day. Energies and resources now directed towards war or commercial exploitation would be redirected towards resurrection. Historical enemies would find mutual assistance not only possible but necessary. Unbelievers, who in theory might find Christianity unacceptable, would, by resurrecting the dead, become in practice followers of Christ.

The first steps towards resurrection might consist of little more than the brief, temporary resuscitation of a person who had just died. But, as all scientific technology, sociopolitical organization – indeed, all human knowledge and action – gradually became directed towards the goal of resurrection, more than brief and temporary resuscitation would become possible. Eventually the synthesizing of bodies should be feasible, and ultimately, Fëdorov believed, whole persons could be recreated from the least trace. To recover particles of disintegrated ancestors, Fëdorov imagined, research teams would have to travel to the moon, the planets, and to distant points throughout the universe. Eventually these outer points of the cosmos would be inhabited by the resurrected ancestors, whose bodies might be synthesized so as to live under conditions that could not now support human life as it is known.

Fëdorov published almost nothing during his lifetime, and his posthumous works were circulated haphazardly in tiny editions. Nevertheless, his ideas had a strong impact on both late nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century Russian intellectuals. In varying ways and to varying degrees, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and Vladimir Solov’ëv all incorporated Fëdorov’s ideas into their work. In the twentieth century, Fëdorov’s influence is apparent in the works of the rocket scientist Tsiolkovskii, the writers Briusov, Belyi Maiakovskii, Khlebnikov, Platonov and Pasternak, the religious thinkers Bulgakov, Florenskii and Berdiaev, and the natural scientists Vernadskii, Chizhevskii, Kholodnyi, Kuprevich and Maneev.

Viewed strictly as a philosopher, Fëdorov was an amateur who contributed little to the history of the discipline, but as an imaginative thinker his bold, comprehensive project of resurrection represents a unique coalescence of several previously divergent tendencies in Russian thought, Slavophile and Westernist, scientific and religious, traditionalist and futurist, probably making him, as Berdiaev observed, ‘the most Russian’ of Russian thinkers.