Russian Cosmism by Groys Boris (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 540 Helfant surmises that it was a practical solution to an intractable issue, provoked by the peasants’ frustration against landowners, who only organized wolf-hunts in certain months — leaving them vulnerable to wolf attacks for the rest of the year. Helfant’s monograph draws on recent work on animals in Russian literature by Amy Nelson, Jane Costlow and Henrietta Mondry, as well as key ecocritical researchers like Erica Fudge. Garry Marvin’s work on English foxhunting helps Helfant to demonstrate the vast semiotic difference between pursuing wolves across wild, untamed Russian land and chasing foxes in the tidy English (and European) countryside. S. K. Robisch, in his recent and expansive study, Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature (which, oddly, Helfant ignores), concludes that the ways in which we read the wolf, whether through fiction or folklore, are important because they shape our real-life interactions with the animal and its environment. Minutely researched and grippingly presented, with vivid illustrations, That Savage Gaze is a fine example of ecocriticism: as representations of wolves lend us insight into the context of nineteenth-century Russian society, we follow Russian writers’ struggles to see the world through lupine eyes. It’s time to reintroduce the wolf, and other threatened species, to Russian Studies. Department of Modern Languages Muireann Maguire University of Exeter Groys, Boris (ed.). Russian Cosmism. e-flux, Inc. and MIT Press, New York and Cambridge, MA, 2018. ix + 249 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Author biographies. Index. $27.95: £22.00. The new anthology, Russian Cosmism, contributes to a growing engagement with the holistic and anthropocentric views of this movement, whose adherents endeavoured to redefine the role of mankind in the universe by blending occult traditions and the sciences of the future. In the founding text of this tradition, Philosophy of the Common Task (Filosofiia obshchego dela, 1906), the Orthodox Christian philosopher and librarian Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903) called for the unification of the whole of humankind with the goal of overcoming disease and death, the resurrection of the deceased and the coming immortal human race, which would colonize space. After Russian Cosmism remerged as a broad intellectual movement in Russia at the end of the 1980s, artists and scholars in the West have turned to Fedorov’s view of the universe and the work of scholars he inspired, drawing on his belief in progress and unity in the face of contemporary ecologic, economic and social chaos and disintegration. REVIEWS 541 This volume presents a single text from Fedorov alongside twelve others from revolutionary anarchists and Marxist thinkers who expanded on his philosophy following the October Revolution. Most of these writings are here translated into English for the first time, having only recently been published in Russia after being suppressed since the 1930s. Bibliographic information about the writings and short biographies about each of the authors are included at the end of the volume. Boris Groys’s introductory essay contextualizes the collected texts by focusing on how Russian Cosmism conceived of technology as a messianic force, which would preserve the living and restore the dead, leading to a profound transformation of human society and culture. In pursuit of immortality, the restorative and preservation work of museums was held up as a model for overcoming the limits of death. Working toward the highest goal also entailed that human beings would continue to evolve, utilizing reason to reconstruct a society in which human relations as individuals would no longer be separated by death and private time. Without temporal and spatial limits, humanity would come to know true social solidarity. This pursuit required individuals to be united by a central, powerful state, which could guarantee the new basic right to exist and the freedom to move through space. Presenting various strands of Russian Cosmism, the writings included in this volume coalesce around the notion of human development and progress as it relates to man’s struggle with nature and mortality, and humanity’s relationship to space. The two texts by Aleksandr Chizhevskii connect human beings directly to cosmic activity, as he asserts a causal relationship between an increasing number of sunspots and the sociological characteristics of mass behaviour...