I've been thinking about Fyodorov a lot over the past few years. Nobody on earth has taken utopia as seriously, on an intellectual, spiritual, and pra

A letter about Nikolai Fyodorov

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2024-11-02 20:00:05

I've been thinking about Fyodorov a lot over the past few years. Nobody on earth has taken utopia as seriously, on an intellectual, spiritual, and practical level, as the Russians. We have the Brits (by way of Sir Thomas More) to thank for the name and a general distrust of the idea, and America may have been founded on some ostensibly utopian notions, but it's the Russians who ultimately took the idea with the seriousness it merits and followed it to its (tragic, in their case) conclusion.

Fyodorov was a contemporary of the intellectual and literary heavyweights we sometimes just abbreviate to “the Russians”: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev. Half a century after Fyodorov's death, Camus would write that if you wanted to be a philosopher, you should write novels. These writers were the embodiment of that observation. It's strange, then, to think that just a few decades earlier, Russia was considered an intellectual wasteland:

That's Pyotr Chaadayev writing about his homeland in a magazine called Teleskop, circa 1836. It's a quintessentially Russian statement: overly dramatic, full of tragic feeling, yet recognizably true. The name of the periodical (Telescope) is prescient, given the role Russia would have in opening space more than a hundred years later, and the direct role Fyodorov would have in inspiring those who paved the way.