Nikolai Fyodorov 1829 – 1903

Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov was a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher, librarian, and the founder of the movement of thought known as Russian cosmism. He worked for many decades as a quiet and self-effacing librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, where he attracted a circle of admirers including Tolstoy, Solovyov, and the young rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. His Philosophy of the Common Task, published posthumously by his disciples, proposed that the common task of humanity is the conquest of death and the eventual scientific resurrection of all ancestors who have ever lived, an idea that shaped much of twentieth-century Russian utopian and space thought.

Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov was born in May 1829 at the village of Klyuchi in Tambov province, the illegitimate son of Prince Pavel Ivanovich Gagarin. He studied at the Tambov gymnasium and the Richelieu Lyceum at Odessa, which he left without a degree in 1851, and earned his living for almost twenty years as a teacher of history and geography in provincial schools. From 1874 until 1898 he served as librarian of the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, where he lived a life of monastic poverty, sleeping on a chest, owning no possessions, and refusing both salary increases and decoration.

He published almost nothing in his lifetime; his disciples Vladimir Kozhevnikov and Nikolai Peterson collected the manuscripts and conversations into the two-volume Filosofiya obshchego dela (Philosophy of the Common Task) in 1906 and 1913. Among his admirers and visitors were Tolstoy, Dostoevsky (who read his ideas through Peterson), Vladimir Solovyov, and the young Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Fyodorov argued that the supreme moral and Christian task of humanity is to overcome death itself by means of science: to regulate nature, redistribute the cosmos, and finally resurrect every previous generation of fathers, since to leave them in the grave is the deepest of all sins. His Russian cosmism inspired both Tsiolkovsky's rocket programme and a long line of twentieth-century Soviet and post-Soviet speculation on space, biotechnology, and immortality. He died in Moscow in December 1903.