REVIEWS 155 The second part explores the issues of reception by treating costume design as a legible poetic language. Informative, engaging and meticulously researched, this is, surely, the strongest section of the book. Some justification is offered for the study’s chronological starting point as it mentions the weakening of the Russian state control of visual and performing arts in the 1870s–80s (p. 119). The overall narrative also becomes more spontaneous, more fluid, and effectively more in tune with the playful and carnivalesque subject-matter of the work (as compared to the discourse of the first part, heavily charged with specialized, and at times cumbersome, terminology). Chapter four interprets non-representative costumes (such as ‘Dawn’, ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Duma’) worn at the series of balls hosted by the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, while chapter five ‘constructs an imaginative projection of the cultural legacy through the character costumes of mythological and historic figures’. In both chapters insightful parallels are drawn with the writings of Leonid Andreev (Black Maskers), Anna Akhmatova and Viacheslav Ivanov, leading (chapter six) to the inquiry into the abstract costume practices in the avant-garde works of Blok, Maiakovskii and Kruchenykh. Seen as an utmost representation of semantic freedom, their works are juxtaposed (chapter seven) to its antithetical manifestation — the use of nudity in theatre and in life. It is a pity that the works of Boris Christa, a leading scholar of Russian Symbolism and a pioneer in the analysis of vestimentary semiotics, remained outside this otherwise methodically conducted study. By exploring the representation of masquerade in textiles and literary texts, an insightful connection is established between its fictional and social manifestations (scrupulously drawn from memoirs and journalistic accounts). This connection is undoubtedly the hallmark of the work, which not only expands the denotational spectrum of the trope, but highlights an important facet of the modernist aesthetic platform: that of stylizing life as an identity performance, revealed in a variety of its multiple expressions. Language Centre Olga Sobolev London School of Economics and Political Sciences Young, George M. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2012. x + 280 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $33.95: £19.99. This book takes the reader on a museum-like guided tour of the life and thought of the principal actors of Russian Cosmism, whose PrometheoFaustian projects include the attainment of immortality, the resurrection of the dead, the colonization of the entire universe and the steering of human evolution towards an ever more asexual and spiritual state. The unacquainted SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 156 reader is thus in for a change of scenery, to put it mildly. The Russian Cosmist movement originated with the eccentric and abstemious nineteenth-century Moscow librarian Nikolai Fedorov, for whom our first and foremost task is nothing less than to overcome death. He began with the truism that no one wants to die. All of us, even those who are mortal enemies, are united against a greater common enemy, death (p. 24), and all our problems are ultimately grounded in this overarching problem of death. Every little thing that human beings busy themselves with, however seemingly trifling — from handwriting to female attire — is fundamentally a question of life and death, because it is part of our struggle against our impending disintegration. No solution to any human problem can be final until a solution is found to the problem of death. Once a solution is found, solutions to all other problems will follow (p. 47). According to Fedorov, therefore, humanity’s ‘common task’ is to find a path to immortality here in this world. Not only should we become immortal ourselves, but we also ought to resuscitate our ancestors. He hypothesizes that dust from the dead is diffused throughout the cosmos. One of our tasks thus consists in collecting these dust-particles and inventing the technology to bring the dead back to life. But, one might ask, where would we put all these living dead? This is where the task of exploring and colonizing the universe comes into play. Eventually, all ‘of the cosmos would be colonized by the resurrected ancestors […]. This would […] solve the...