In search of a TOST': The rise of Cosmism in contemporary Russian culture

Abstract

The landscape of contemporary Russian culture is ground zero for the recent revival of Cosmism, the late nineteenth century utopian quest for immortality and space colonisation. Overwhelmed, as we are in the west, with accounts of geo-political conflicts with Russia, it is especially timely to interrogate the underlying social narratives that are inseparable from these conflicts. To do so, we must simultaneously juggle the discourse of post-colonial studies, a close look at the circulation of nationalism, the nostalgia for Soviet times, an explosion of religiosity, and the ideological and cultural work being done by the prominent cosmist devotees, Anton Vidokle and Arseny Zhilyaev. 'In search of a "POST": The rise of Cosmism in contemporary Russian culture' navigates through the specter of contemporary neo-liberal Russian culture on its way to Cosmism's other-worldly narrative of a cult of the ancestors and the immortality for all. Since the 2000s Cosmism has entered intellectual vogue. Touted as a harbinger of post-humanist ideas,1 it offered a vastly different view of the future, one that blurred the borders between the scientific, the religious and the fantastical (Smith 2016:4). Cosmism thus appears to function as a temporary refuge from the human denigration subsequent to the Fall of the Soviet Union and, more recently, the death caused by the Covid-19 Pandemic. Cosmism's focus on theorising is at the expense of formal explorations and new visual languages. They are not challenging the status quo but perpetuating centuries' old Russian traditions of millenarism2 and mystical fabulism and thereby not promoting any real advancement in constructing a new identity for a post-Soviet society.