The following story by Alexander Bogdanov, excerpted from the volume “Russian Cosmism,” was first published in 1912 under the title “Immortal Fr

Alexander Bogdanov: Immortality Day

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2024-11-08 21:30:38

The following story by Alexander Bogdanov, excerpted from the volume “Russian Cosmism,” was first published in 1912 under the title “Immortal Fride: A. Bogdanov’s Fantastic Narrative.” Describing the story for Artforum, Kate Sutton writes:

Bogdanov’s wry narrative follows the interplanetary chemist Fride as he hits a midlife (early-eternity?) crisis, spurred on by the realization that, having dedicated centuries to the intellectual pursuits of astronomy, literature, and art, he had exhausted his brain’s capacity for engagement. Not only that, but while he may have figured out a way for physical bodies to live forever, emotional wiring is more complicated. Fride has sired some fifty children by at least eighteen wives and countless lovers, but he lacks the ability to form attachments to his offspring as their numbers increase. The dilemma, Bogdanov suggests, is that life’s value might just lie in its limitations.

Bogdanov was a prominent Bolshevik and a pioneer in blood transfusion who founded and directed the Institute for Blood Transfusion until his death in 1928. (As it happened, Bogdanov died from a transfusion, after exchanging his blood with the blood of a critically ill student, who ultimately recovered.) He was part of a generation of Russian Cosmist thinkers who believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but to cure death using science and technology. Today, when the philosophical imagination has again become entangled with scientific and technological imagination, the works of Bogdanov and the Russian Cosmists prove newly relevant.

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