The esoteric futurism of the Russian Cosmists

Cosmism is the miracle of a synthesis that the West knew for the last time in the Renaissance and that took root in the Soviet Russia of the "space race" in the last century: an attitude rather than a real current, a crossroads of experiences and researches ranging from esoteric futurism to transcendental pragmatism, from magical realism to idealistic materialism, from humanism to transhumanism.


di Andrea Scarabelli
originally posted on the author's blog on The newspaper
cover: Konstantin Yuon, “New Planet”, 1921

 

More than a territory, Russia is one World vision, the correspondence formulated by Nikolai Aleksandrovič Berdjaev between physical geography and spiritual geography, the victory of immensity, vagueness and grandeur, two-faced Janus between a Dionysian paganism and orthodoxy. Russia is a mystery kept in the monasteries and in the nocturnal deserts, it is the very enigma of this conjunction, which reverberates at the anthropological as well as the political-social level. On the one hand, wrote Berdjaev, «despotism and hypertrophy of the state, on the other anarchism and recklessness; on the one hand cruelty and inclination to violence, on the other benevolence and humanity; on one side individualism and heightened awareness of the personality, on the other impersonal collectivism; on the one hand nationalism and praise of the individual, on the other universalism and the ideal ofuniversal man; on the one hand a religious spirit eschatological e messianic, on the other, a devotion that is expressed in the exterior; on the one hand the search for God, on the other a militant atheism; on the one hand slavery, on the other revolt". In any case, the philosopher concludes, "Russia has never been bourgeois".

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It was from a spiritual geography of this type that the protagonists of this story, little known in Italy, were born. The volume of George M. Young just out for Three Publishers in the translation - masterful - by Alessandro Zabini. The Russian Cosmists it is dedicated to the various exponents (disarmingly heterogeneous) of a unique cultural climate of its kind. A few examples: «Nikolai Fyodorov, eccentric librarian and religious thinker; Vladimir Solov'ëv, mystical poet and idealistic philosopher; Nikolai Umov, legendary physicist and lecturer; Konstantin Ciolkovskij, pioneer of space flight and theosophical writer; Vladimir Vernadskij, geochemist ». And then Florensky and Berdjaev, philosophers and mystics, cosmonauts and ascetics, from the exponents of nineteenth-century Russian philosophy to the elite of Soviet scientists.

To unite them is the cosmism, an attitude more than a real current, a crossroads of experiences and researches that range from esoteric futurism to transcendental pragmatism, from magical realism to idealistic materialism, from humanism to transhumanism. Oxymorons, it will be said. But only for us: cosmism is the miracle of a synthesis that the West knew for the last time in the Renaissance (it was later resurrected by isolated personalities, whose lives still wait to be gathered in a single encyclopedia of the magical realism) but which in Russia has been teaching for more than two centuries, continuing to haunt contemporaries. Cosmists are not yesterday's realities but they still exist today, perhaps constituting the best distillation of the Russian spirit, a Eurasian antidote to world Westernization and the Atlanticist colonization of consciences.

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«God became man so that man could become God»Goes an old adage: it is perhaps the quintessence of the cosmist perspective. Superomism in its pure state, but above all superhomism magic. It is the idea that matter cannot be separated from spirit and vice versa: if progress is independent of spiritual development it leads to disasters, where only spirituality freed from practical elements generates an unparalleled alienation. Realism and magictechnique and esotericism, in short: cosmism was the attempt archaeofuturist to reunite the opposites, in view of the expansion of the boundaries of the human being, up to the stars.

An attempt in the name of practice. If modernity has cultivated an unbridgeable gap between theory and practice, the sciences of the spirit and the sciences of matter, in cosmist thought the extent of every discovery is measured by the transformation - not just material, of course - that it is capable of propitiating. Every -logy must become -urgy, every abstract discipline a way of liberation, according to a point of view total which prescribes the mobilization of all disciplines, from technique to art, to achieve the transmutation of the Self once tempted by operative esotericism. Basic (as everywhere in Western esotericism, according to the famous thesis of Antoine Faivre) is the analogical connection between high and low, microcosm and macrocosm. Knowing the sympathetic bonds that bind every being to the whole, it is possible to manipulate nature (bind it, as Giordano Bruno wrote in De vinculis in general), transforming the operator into more-than-man.

Only in this way does the integral expansion to which humanity is called take place. An expansion matter, in the depths of the cosmos, and spiritual, that is to say the hermetic construction of one's personality. Unlike the modern individual, closed in on himself, the cosmist man transcends himself: individually, bringing together all one's inner antinomies; socially, cultivating those relationships, vertical and horizontal, which constitute the social fabric, dismembered by individualism and capitalist utilitarianism; cosmicallyfinally, rejoining with the universe, bringing about a profound Copernican revolution in consciences (which is why cosmonautics will be the natural development of cosmist thought). If ours, as he said J. R. R. Tolkien, is "an era of better means for worse endsThen it is only necessary to change mentality, to recalibrate the aim, returning us to the cosmos and thus realizing our most intimate essence.

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He was the ideal progenitor of this school Nikolaj Fyodorovich Fyodorov (1829-1903), who lived immersed in the obsession with death, in the total inability to understand how life should end. He devoted all his energies to devising procedures to defeat her, even postulating the resurrection of the dead as the highest task of the new humanity. The resurrection, in its pages, thus ceased to be a dogma to become a scientific problem, with a spiritual background: if the cosmos undergoes organic decomposition, wrote Fyodorov, it is up to us to act in the opposite direction, thus realizing our divine nature. Solve and coagulate. A task that should reunite countries and armies, united against nature, a ruthless mother.

"The resurrection" he wrote in Philosophy of the common Work, his masterpiece, “It will be the work not of a miracle, but of knowledge and common work. That awaited day, that day longed for in the course of the ages, will be the order of God and the fulfillment of man. "

A universal mission not based on democratic ideas or on hypothetical League of Nations but conducted under the aegis of a Russian Orthodox autocrat, representative of a religion whose undisputed superiority derives from the centrality of the resurrection in it. But if Orthodox Christianity places the resurrection at the end of history, for Fyodorov it is possible. here and now. This is how heaven on earth is realized - an idea that in a secularized form would have characterized subsequent Marxism, as focused on a certain heretical philosophy of history, and which prompted the philosopher Adriano Tilgher to write: «One understands nothing of Marx's thought if it is not it is seen as a synthesis of an essentially religious and messianic nature ”.

But Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, above all else, made the titanic effort to bring together science and spirituality, action and contemplation. His successors would have become spokesmen for one of the two instances, declining themselves into "religious" and "scientific" cosmists, but he was both. When Dostoevsky discovered his ideas, wrote to him: «Let me say that in essence I completely agree. I read them as if they were mine. " And he put them in Karamazov brothers, a masterpiece of Russian gigantism mentioned above. It is against a cosmist background that characters such as Raskol'nikov from Crime and Punishment and the Karamazovs, masters of the Nietzschean active nihilism, titans and orphans of God always about to collapse, vanguards of a future humanity. It was Dostoevsky himself who spoke of Fyodorov to Soloviev, who said he was in line with the ideas of the cosmist master. Ditto for Tolstoy, who declared: "If I did not have my own doctrine, I would become a follower of that of Nikolai Fyodorovich." A sympathy, however, not paid at all. Once, in the library, seeing the volumes piled up, Tolstoy exclaimed: "We should burn them all!" Irritated, Nikolai grabbed his head and barked: "I've met many stupid people in this world, but never anyone like you!"

Anecdotal aside, the Philosophy of the common Work (published posthumously in 1906-1913) remains a great effort to synthesize action and contemplation, East and West, Asia and Europe, as well as clarification of the Russian destinal task, third face of Janus from a point of view geopolitical and spiritual. The Tsar would have held the divinely assigned role of father of all peoples; Moscow would become there Third - and last - Rome.

In short, from the past to the present, there and back. To this dyad Nikolai added the future. But without indulging in any way to the dogmas of nineteenth-century progressivism:

“If stagnation is death and regression is not heaven, progress is real hell. "

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And this is because real progress is what unites the right and left sides of knowledge, man and universe, micro and macro. Nothing to do with materialistic progress, which cannot adapt itself to the complexity of man, who belongs simultaneously to different planes of being and is the main actor ofactive evolution, a principle that prescribes participation in the destiny of the cosmos, in the conviction that the human race does not constitute the apex of evolution but that, on the contrary, it is located on an axis that it is our task to follow, ascending.

The same axis on which the fusion of rationality and mysticism is located which is the apex of the second human achievement Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev, a day and night cosmist who tried to transform Fyodorov's ideas into a complete metaphysical system. A realization ultra-human, which embraces religiosity without being exhausted and transforms man and the world, inaugurating a new earthly era. This ultimate synthesis is based on the «joint activity of life and humanity for the transformation of the latter from carnal, or natural, to spiritual and divine. In its entire structure, the reunited world will be a complete, plausible image of the Triune God ». The ultimate purpose of the renewal is union with the immortal Christ, here understood as thetranscendental man he talked about René Guénon, which switches all one's potential in actuality, placing oneself at the center of the cross, or theeternal man to whom Jacques Bergier e Louis Pauwels have dedicated the homonymous study.

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At the spiritual zenith of cosmism shines the star of Pavel Aleksandrovič Florensky, the "Russian Leonardo", ambitious advocate, as George M. Young writes, of "a global vision of the world that reconciles science, religion and art, reason and faith, orthodox tradition and futuristic thaumaturgy". Florensky loved the mathematics, with which a new mystic could have been built up to date. Enlisted in various Soviet projects, he remained in love with the Russian Middle Ages until the end of his days. He was particularly fascinated by the icon ("Illustrated theology", in the magnificent definition of Prince Eugene Trubetskoy), which he saw as take them wide open to the Elsewhere, models belonging to divine and human reality, means for the verticalization of existence, for the transfiguration of the flesh into spirit. But he himself was a living window between two worlds. If Philip K. Dick had declared that he possessed an alter ego who lived in the time of St. Paul, Florensky had two or three, going around the history and the planes of being. A man irreducible to a single plane of reality, who participated in various Soviet initiatives, as already mentioned, while maintaining a perennial inner detachment:

“He seemed to observe Bolshevism from a mystical height, as if it were a necessary phase of the project. "

A phase that one fine day decided to do without him, executing him near Leningrad on 8 December 1937.

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Similar to Florensky, another giant of cosmist thought was the troubled Berdyaev, who renounced his aristocratic heritage to become a Marxist, rejected Marxism to become a Christian and stopped being a Christian to "embrace a future active Christian life based on freedom and creative faculty". In him theHomo mysticus got the better ofhomo religiosus, as Young writes. Among other things, it was he who divided human history into three epochs: of the Law (Old Testament), of the Redemption (New Testament) and a third that would have fulfilled the premises of the previous ones. A very ancient tripartition, in reality, but which in Berdjaev assumes specific traits. It is in fact the last era that will see the triumph of creative faculty. A faculty quite different from that which pervades the modern mentality everywhere, prey to ideological itches and an unparalleled obsession with authorship. Irreducible to any aesthetic, literary or material categorization, the creative act is above all ontological:

«It will create new beings instead of cultural values, it will continue creation, it will reveal the aspect of human nature to the Creator. Literature will again be. Art will be transformed into theurgy, philosophy into theosophy, society into theocracy. "

This is the faculty that will restore man to his greatness, lost when Eternity decided to dive into history. It is a soteriology immanent in the historical process and not relegated to the end of time. An eschatology achievable here and now.

After the death of Fyodorov, there were three generations of intellectuals who chose to take up the baton: the first at the beginning of the twentieth century; the second in the early XNUMXs; finally, a third after the XNUMXs, still active. As already mentioned, there were "religious" and "scientific" cosmists. In Soviet times, the former had a difficult relationship with power. Many were embarked on the so-called "ship of philosophers", Who in 1922 exiled them permanently, others chose to stay and were persecuted, censored or liquidated tout court. If the "religious" cosmists had to wait for the collapse of the USSR to re-emerge, the "scientific" cosmists were not recognized as "enemies of the people", since their studies, somehow, "worked" practically. Indeed, they even found themselves collaborating with power, which on the other hand profused itself in ideological pirouettes to deny what were the roots of those technical achievements. L'Ussrin short, he stopped at the fruits of their knowledge, without reaching the roots. Which were, for a change, metaphysical.

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Indeed, there were many cosmists who declined Fyodorov's ideas in the domains of applied sciences.

Sergej Nikolaevich Bulgakov, for example, he tried to transform economics into spiritual science, placing himself among the many heretical economists who would not be inadvisable to re-read today, in the midst of the sinking of capital. A despiser of money (on the basis of Fyodorov himself, obsessed with the idea of ​​dying with a few coins in his pocket), Bulgakov proposed an alternative paradigm to Marxism and capitalism, guilty in his eyes of having depersonalized humanity. Praised in the shadow of the two blocks, Red Star and White Star, work was not for him a simple practical activity, but a cosmogonic force capable of creating worlds (a vision similar to that of Ernst Junger, which many misunderstood, including Oswald Spengler and Carl Schmitt) and above all to heal the wound from which the story began, amending the expulsion from Eden.

But one of the brightest examples certainly is Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, father of cosmonautics in love with Jules Verne and in turn the author of science fiction novels. Ciolkovskij made an infinite number of models of space rockets and wrote important reports that contributed to the realization of Sputnik 1. "The eccentric from Kaluga, who had planned interplanetary expeditions while cycling the dusty paths of the villagesHe became a national hero under the Soviet Union, which used him to the same extent that he himself exploited the USSR. Charmed by sciencegnosis e theosophy, a cult object among New Age adepts, had a very personal vision of the cosmos. A living cosmos endowed with intelligence, according to different gradations and hierarchies: if in the lower realities the matter prevails over the spirit, ascending the universal scale is the spirit to orient it. At the apex, the spirit escapes from matter, merging with cosmic energy rays. Here is the magical background of this very unique scientist, deliberately kept silent by his clients: if he designed space rockets it was because he believed that the apex of cosmic achievement was not found on Earth.

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Not to mention Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskij, who set himself the arduous task of leading humanity from biosphere  to the noosphere. Convinced that there was no contradiction between science and spirituality, at a time when academies were often hostages of ideology, he fought for the freedom of research. And, based on the principles of his metapolitical view of him, he had no difficulty in judging both unnatural and unnatural. Bolshevism, in its forced respect of the peoples and the contempt of the educated, as much as the National Socialism, with its aberrant doctrine of race.

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Under communism these currents sank, but only apparently, as documented by Francesco Dimitri in his (unfortunately nowhere to be found) Magical Communism. Today we know that all the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century had an esoteric background. Well, communism was no exception, it proved to be a more ambiguous reality than it appeared on the surface, if it is true, as Young tells us, that Eisenstein he was close to Rosicrucian ideas and directed «a 'Gnostic circle' of followers, all prestigious exponents of Soviet cinema and visual arts». And that, even if "he devoted not a few of his energies to trying to eradicate every" superstition ", as he himself defined religion, Stalin he was an extremely superstitious second man Dmitry Shostakovich". Also because he was a former seminarian.

«When materialism reigns, magic resurrectsWrote Huysmans. And here is theimmortalism advocated by cosmists it becomes Promethean theurgy. That of the seekers of God gathered around Dmitry Sergeevich Merezkovsky, for example, eager to create a new Eden on Earth, explorers of disparate disciplines including non-Euclidean mathematics and depth psychology, subatomic physics and Ouspensky's metaphysics, anthropology and linguistics ... A synthesis that produced unexpected results and the whose originality still awaits to be studied from a scientific point of view.

It is always the synthesis between realism and magic that is felt in these currents, which came to influence the futurist-supremacist-cosmist work of Aleksej Kručenych Victory over the Sun or Mystery di Skryabin, Wagnerian work of art which, as Young tells us, should have been executed

“At the foot of the Himalayas, without spectators, exclusively with participants, over the course of seven days, in a cosmic crescendo that would end with the end of the world and the human race, followed by the advent of a superior superhuman species. "

He was always a cosmist Alexander Bogdanov, Lenin's rival before the revolution and author of the novel in 1908 The red star. Well before Corrado Guzzanti's fascists, a Soviet scientist went to Mars, finding there a utopian, egalitarian and harmonious society. In addition to a prolific science fiction writer, Bogdanov was the author of the monumental Tektology, published in three volumes that ended up anticipating system analysis and cybernetics. All these authors were convinced that the history of humanity was divided into three successive phases: telluric, limited to our planet; solar, extended to the system that includes the Earth; sidereal, expanded to the whole universe. And they conceived the challenge to the Unknown as an ascending process to be realized through science and technology, but also the ascetic discipline. A message of intimately Russian origin, but with universal elements.

But the portrait gallery of de The Russian Cosmists it is above all a hymn to the creative imagination, which testifies to the existence of moments in which the real and the fantastic they cease to be antithetical, getting married and generating ecstatic experiences that shatter the barriers of our Euclidean prison. "Magic is not a science of the past. It is the science of the futureHe wrote rightly Colin Wilson. Words on which it is necessary to meditate retracing the events of these singular authors, who saw in materialism and spirituality two moments to be synthesized, magical realists traveling to an inner cosmos. That cosmos that awaits future humanity.

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