The Collective Body: Russian experiments in life after death
The Future of Immortality:
Life and Death in Ccontemporary Russia
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/
