Akim Volynsky as a Cosmist

Abstract

The article treats the original concept of “cosmism” of Akim Volynsky, a famous art critic and philosopher of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, who was not previously considered a Russian cosmist. A great admirer of N.F. Fedorov (his phrase “in Fedorov alone is the atonement for all the sins and crimes of the Russian people” is well known), Volynsky criticized the basic teachings of the “Moscow Socrates.” He viewed Fedorov’s principle of regulating nature dangerous and unacceptable, the idea of the labor resurrection of ancestors as pure positivism, and the philosophy of the common cause itself as the apogee of Western technocracy. According to Volynsky, Fedorov’s concept, turned to the past, does not imply the emergence of something new, the growth of the “cultural pyramid.” He contrasts the West with its tendency to interfere with the course of natural things with the East, inclined to a gradual and systematic spiri­tual transformation of reality. Volynsky has no doubts that the General Resurrec­tion is coming, but it will not be a labor-based one, but a gift of the “beneficent course of cosmic forces”. Man will become immortal not as a result of a global technological project, but when the complete spiritualization of matter has come into existence. Anticipating the ideas of modern transhumanists, Volynsky pre­dicts that man will be transformed into a certain information or energy entity (“a beam of light”), which will exist simultaneously in all times. He calls it the “General Resurrection”. The aim of the article is to complete the picture of the development of Russian philosophical thought