The Collective Body: Russian experiments in life after death

The Future of Immortality: Life and Death in Ccontemporary Russia
By Anya Bernstein
Reviewed by Sophie Pinkham


The story of the Russian battle against death begins in the second half of the 19th century, when the country was in a state of entropy. Writers like Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the author of What Is to Be Done?, were imagining new modes of communal, egalitarian living, while revolutionary activists and terrorists sought to eradicate the old class hierarchies. In this heady atmosphere, the Russian quest for immortality was born. At Moscow’s central library, Nikolai Fedorov, a teacher turned philosopher-librarian, was writing feverish treatises on a form of collective life that could transcend both time and death.

Fedorov believed that if humankind could train its full energy on the struggle to live forever, all war and other forms of conflict would vanish. He called this project the “common cause.” Just as he worked as a librarian to preserve the books in his care so they would be available to future generations, so too could humankind work to preserve each person in a library of eternal life. Every human being was a unique and precious repository of information and experiences, and Fedorov wanted to ensure that they would all remain available in perpetuity.
Fedorov’s ambition was not limited to those still living. He imagined resurrecting every person who had ever lived. Inverting the idea of the duty of the living to future generations, he argued that we owe a “resurrectory debt” to our parents, and he insisted that as technology advanced, we would pay off this debt by piecing our families back together from bones and even specks of dust. (A crackpot visionary rather than a scientist, he was short on specifics about how we might do this.) To solve the problem of housing the vast resurrected population, he looked to space, proposing the colonization of the galaxy—a hope shared by people like Thiel and Elon Musk today. But Fedorov imagined the work and benefits of immortality as collective and universal. He accumulated a number of followers during his lifetime and after his death, and his reputation as an eccentric visionary endures in Russia...
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/anya-bernstein-future-immortality-russia-cryogenics-review/



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