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Cosmocracy and Culture in Valerian Muraviev's
Works1
Anastasia G. Gacheva
Doctor of Philological Sciences, Leading researcher A.M. Gorky Institute for World Literature of Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia) E-mail: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5453-0881
The article deals with the concept of culture as a cosmocracy, which is put forward in the works of Valerian Muraviev, one of the leading representatives of the 1920s cosmism. It presents the evolution of Muraviev's view on the phenomenon of culture from the early articles to the philosophical mysteries "Sophia and the Centaur " and "The Culture of the Future." The connection ofMuraviev's constructions with the projective philosophy of Nikolay Fedorov, the ancestor of cosmism, with the idea of the anti-entropical essence of culture, which is characteristic of the representatives of cosmism, is shown.
Keywords: philosophical and artistic creativity of Valerian Muraviev, philosophy of cosmism, culture of the future, cosmocracy, projectivism
Received: June 8, 2019; accepted: July 13, 2019
Philosophy and Cosmology, Volume 24, 2020: 140-150.
https://doi.org/10.29202/phil-cosm/24/14
Valerian Muraviev (1885-1930), a Russian philosopher, political writer and diplomat, is one of those 20th-century thinkers whose entire body of work is only finding its place in the history of philosophy. An heir to the renaissance in the Russian religious philosophy and at the same time one of the prominent representatives of the 1920s cosmism, a man whose ideas were incompatible with the official Soviet ideology, he was doomed to write with little hope to share his ideas. Only one of his works created in the post-revolutionary period (the most prolific years for the writer) was published, at the author's expense — the treatise titled "Mastery over Time as the Main Purpose of the Scientific Organization of Labor" came out in 1924 in Moscow. The rest of the texts were unknown for decades and found their first readers and researchers only in the 1990s (Aksenov, 1992; Muraviev, 1998; Muraviev, 2011).
Muraviev's philosophy is an indispensable part of the cosmic thought of the 20th century, that stems from the "Philosophy of the Common Task" written by Nikolai Fedorov (18291903), a thinker who laid the foundation for a new understanding of man — as somebody not only being an organic part of the macrocosm, — a small universe himself, and thus
1 The research was funded by the grant of the Russian Science Foundation (Project N° 17-18-01432) in IMLI (RAS).
© Gacheva, Anastasia G., 2020
metaphysically equal to the cosmos, — but also an acting one, with the creative power to explore the universe and transform it. Man is in a state of constant development — from the prehistoric times: living exactly like those who lived before, watching the starry sky, creating myths about the Cosmos and making it his own, and 'accommodating' the souls of his fathers in the stars; from the ancient and medieval magic that made natural forces obey his word and gesture; through the development of science making our knowledge of the world more profound — man, according to Fedorov, is moving closer to really acting in the world, enlarging the scope and powers of it. "A child of the tiny Earth, an observer of immense space, of the worlds in that space, must become their dweller and ruler" (Fedorov, 1995, 243) — wrote Fedorov thus determining the route from what exists to what should exist, from the present order of things, in which forces of life and growth are intertwined with those of decline and decay, to the future, transformed order in the world where "life is actually living" in all its forms.
Fedorov thought the transforming activity of man in the course of history and in the nature, that he called 'regulation', meaning conscious governing in the world based on the profound knowledge of natural processes, to be a prerequisite to the world's transition into a more complete, ideal state. The area of regulation, which the philosopher opposed to the exploitation of resources, should be expanded, first, to the scale of the planet, then — to the scale of the surrounding Space, and, further, to the whole universe. Expansion in space, at that, is indispensable from man's ability for regulation growing in the course of time, which is related in Fedorov's system of ideas with pushing back the boundaries of death — by creating a long-living and then — immortal generation and raising all people, who have ever lived, from the dead. When this double restriction of man — in time and space — is overcome and natural processes are regulated on the scale of the universe, the "soulless star worlds looking at us coldly and somewhat sadly" (Fedorov, 1995: 202) will become inhabited by the resurrected generations and the universe will be transformed into a living Cosmos vibrant with creative energy. And a symbol and at the same time a project of this universe, "in which everything originally dead is revived and in which everything brought to live has become the consciousness and governing power of a creature that used to be blind" (Fedorov, 1995: 236) is, according to the philosopher, the church. The synthesis of arts — architecture, fresco, icon painting, singing, the arts of word and movement — accompanying the main Christian sacrament, that of the Eucharist, is understood in Fedorov's philosophy as a prototype for the future union of all spheres of man's action and creation around the principle purpose of resurrecting generations of people who lived before us, regulating the nature, transforming the earth and the cosmos into the Kingdom of God. The humankind perfecting itself internally and externally and gaining the ability to live "in the whole universe" is shown in the "Philosophy of the Common Task" as a "complex artist" of the creation and, according to the thinker, all the resurrected generations will take part in this cosmic, universal artistic and creative act — no longer using the local, earthly material but that in the vast space of huge worlds. (Fedorov, 1995: 401). Thus, Christianity acquires a cosmogonic nature and is seen as a religion that leads man and the being to perfection.
Fedorov's "Philosophy of the Common Task", whose two volumes were published in 1906 and 1913 by his followers (Fedorov, 1906; Fedorov, 1913) became the foundation for Muraviev's ideas (Hagemeister, 1988: 318341). Other influences include Henri Bergson's philosophy of time and Georg Cantor's set theory Aksenov, 2001: 207; Russian Cosmism, 1993; 188-189): they laid the basis for his concept of regulation of the time flow, put forward in his book "Mastery over Time". The being is viewed as a hierarchy of sets: every creature
or object is a set of elements, and at the same time is included, together with other creatures and objects, into sets of a higher level. Time, at that, is an indicator of the dynamics of these sets, which makes it potentially reversible and manageable; the skill of reconstructing unique combinations of elements that form these sets — be it a man, an animal, a thing, a natural or cultural object — makes it possible to reverse the course of time, to "resurrect" all that there was and lived.
Another source of inspiration for Muraviev's thought was the Anglo-American pragmatism. The ideas of Charles Pierce, William James, John Dewey were seen through the prism of Fedorov's ones. Fedorov was not only striving for a philosophy of action rather than a philosophy of contemplation, but also extending the very notion of "action" and viewing it in the framework of Christianity, from the point of view of the Divine "construction" and by representing the humankind as a collaborator of God on "reconstructing the world into the splendid imperishable being it was before its fall" (Fedorov, 1995: 401). Thus, according to this task, the transforming action of the humanity is extended to the whole cosmos. "Philosophy of action" developed by Muraviev since the early 1920s had the same scale. Action was viewed in the eschatological framework and applied to all the creatures in the universe, its result being the "resurrection" (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 304).
For Muraviev, whose theory, following Fedorov's ideas, combines action and faith, pragmatism is only possible if it includes idealism. The new "method of cultural creation", says the thinker, should be based on "the combination of the word, the thought and the action", which is "an inexhaustible source of creativity" and is, in this sense, of a deeply religious character (Muraviev, 2011: 369). This is because religiosity, as seen by Muraviev, is beyond any denomination or an established form of a rite. Religiosity is a principle of a person's worldview, a link between man and the world, in which a feeling of oneness with the cosmos and a desire for perfection are intertwined. It is feeling yourself part of that "cosmic growth" of the world, the development, the "increasing complexity and transformation of the nature", that Vladimir Soloviev wrote about in his works (Soloviev, 1988: 630).
The combination of the mind that thinks and the mind that believes, the conscious action of which is to lead the humankind (an idea characteristic of the Russian religious philosophy) led to Muraviev's reconsidering and restructuring the very methodology of classical philosophy, as well as its postulates. In his texts he uses both the philosophical categories (the All, the multiple, the being, the Absolute, time, space etc.) and the fundamental concepts of theology (God, the Kingdom of God, Sobornost, theosis, divine grace etc.) the first extending their scope through the second and vice versa. The philosopher creates a new logic based not on a "concept" but on a "name" and thus giving an opportunity to fuse the particular and the general, the part and the whole, and presents his view of the world as an hierarchy, a ladder of names embracing the reality in its dynamics and leading to the Name of the names, i.e. to God. Finally, like his predecessors, representatives of the 19th century cosmism — Nikolaj Fedorov, Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin, Vladimir Solovyev — Muraviev consistently introduces projectivism in philosophy not only by emphasizing the concept of the due but also by insisting that it is vital to implement it, and the due is seen as indispensable from blessing and perfection (Shishkin, 2007). Thinking about the world becomes a project of its transformation. Hence the titles of his works: not a "Philosophy of Time", but "Mastery over Time", or, in the first edition, "Overcoming Time"; not "Philosophy of the History", but "Mastery over History"; not "Philosophy of Culture", but "The Culture of the Future".
Culture is one of the subjects that unite all the parts of Muraviev's complex body of works, that are multidimensional and of different genres, from the above-mentioned treatises
to "Sophia and the Centaur" (1921-1925), a philosophical mystery written in the form of Plato's dialogues, from the play called "Death's adviser" (1927) and the science-fiction novel "Isle Buyan" (1928) to social-political articles printed in such literary magazines as "Russkaya mysl" ("Russian thought"), "Russkaya Svoboda" ("Russian Liberty"), "Narodopravstvo" ("Popular sovereignty"), "Zarya Rossii" ("Russia's Dawn"), the book of essays "From the Depths"("Iz glubiny"); from reports and reviews that appeared, often anonymously, on the pages of the "Organizatsiya truda" ("Labor management") magazine to philosophical aphorisms "buried in a desk drawer", the very form of which was a manifestation of the philosopher's principle of the relation between the part and the whole, the One and His Hypostasis.
The understanding of culture as a tradition, as something where the "humankind's memory" is enshrined, as the continuity of generations (the article "Unknown Russia", 1914) (Muraviev, 1998: 25-45) that was characteristic of Muraviev's early works and was similar to the ideas of the Slavophiles, was replaced in his more mature works — the philosophical mystery "Sophia and the Centaur" (1924-1925), the "Mastery over Time" (1924) and his work "The Culture of the Future" (1926) — with regarding culture as a cosmogonic force that overcomes entropy and death, transforms the being, perfects man. Between the starting point of the development of the philosopher's thought and its end, brought, first, by the arrest in 1929 and then, by his death from typhoid fever in the exile next year, there is a number of milestones and each of them (which makes Muraviev's viewpoint special) is not abandoned, but, though transformed, takes part in the final synthesis.
Among these milestones, of special significance are Muraviev's articles in the weekly magazine "Russkaya svoboda" ("Russian Liberty") (1917), written in the year that began with the demise of the tsarist autocracy and the declaration of liberties and rights, and ended in the Bolshevist revolt. Soon after the February Revolution Muraviev, full of social enthusiasm, expresses his belief in the opportunity to revitalize Russia, to create the supreme, communal2 forms of state organization based on spiritual unity and formulates "an ideal of a culture-based state", which "is a combination of people's particular aims all melted into the harmony of their uniquenesses" (Muraviev, 1917: 21). This ideal is opposed to the common, already established model of an "economics-based state" tailored to fit the "imperfect" man who needs material incentives and whose life is based on his, private, interests. The "economics-based state" with its down-to-earth, secular objectives downplays culture, leaving it the role of a sponger. The other, higher model, the "culture-based state", places culture in the focus of the development and sees it as a basis for action. And the culture itself changes. It is no longer a culture of individuals who burst ahead leaving behind the pitiful, illiterate mass of people behaving automatically — it is a "communal culture" (Muraviev, 1917a: 19).
Muraviev understands that the ideal he declares goes beyond the conventional model of the state and that the legal-economic principle the autocracy is based on is replaced with a religious-ethical one. He follows, literally, the course in the country's evolution set by Fedor Dostoevsky in his novel "The Brothers Karamazov": transforming the state, "from a society almost heathen in character into a single universal and all-powerful Church" (Dostoevsky, 1972-1990. 14, 61). Muraviev repeats Dostoevsky's words with one significant addition — he names the tool for this metamorphosis: "The church — this is the ultimate ideal for the state. <...> It is the Church that the Russian Revolution has as its outcome, to which it makes progress through culture" (Muraviev, 1917: 22). Culture, in Muraviev's view, is like yeast that
2 "Communal" is used here and later to translate the Russian adjective "соборный", which is closely related to the notion of Sobornost ("Соборность"), a free spiritual unity of people both in religion and in the secular life, characterized by brotherhood and mutual love.
ferments the dough of history, alters people's feelings and thoughts. Moreover, in a state that is being transformed into the church culture reveals a quality that has been neglected through centuries of secularization: it becomes a religious action thus representing its etymological sense: 'cultura' ("tilling", "cultivation", "taking care").
It was not long, however, before the hopes that the February revolution would make for a new, mature way of life, in which "law" would disappear "taken over by culture" and culture would become "religion" (Muraviev. 1917: 22) faded away. Social tension was aggravating and Muraviev strived in vain to show the ideologists of the "class socialism" that it was impossible to build a well-balanced society on the gap between social strata; in vain was he repeating that achieving equality through forced uniformity is anti-cultural; that the right for hatred deforms the personality and awakens that very base, malign force that culture is meant to cleanse and improve. Then came the October 1917, bringing the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the horrors of the civil war, chaos and destruction in the country. This was the period when Muraviev created the first drafts for his "Sophia and the Centauf', with apocalyptic images of desolation and the end of life: the desolate, grassed-over Kremlin, knocked-down crosses, demolished buildings, desecrated churches, squalid, beast-like people resembling Herbert Wells's Morlocks who fight for food — and the cynocephali, the new superiors, people with dogs' heads zooming in the air on motorbikes. The black gap, the collapse of the state, loss of historical consciousness and man's degradation to a beast-like condition — these are the consequences of the loss of a religious dimension of life, of the culture, that "assembles" the society and man.
It was, in a sense, an antithesis to a thesis voiced on the pages of the "Russkaya Svoboda". However, Muraviev did not stay long at this point: the position of denial giving right for the underground "sitting-with-the-hands-folded" (Dostoevsky, 1972-1990. 5: 108), as well as a life of a dreamer were not for him. At the same time, the soviet power was starting to reassemble and restore the country and its destroyed economy. In his debate with Trotsky, that unfolded in the end of 1919 — beginning of 1920, Muraviev attempts to define historical construction on a different, higher scale once again: he is prepared to partially accept the Bolshevists' position, but emphasizes their narrow-mindedness in what refers to their ideas and the construction that is determined and prescribed by the new ideology. In the philosopher's view, the Third International is an emasculated, secularized Third Rome, an attempt to create a false pseudo-theocracy having nothing in common with the truly religious dimension of life, an attempt to create a new proletarian culture without realizing what the ultimate purposes of culture are. At the same time, Muraviev, disposed to action and projectivism, expresses his readiness to take part in the new construction, hoping to expand its scale. Even more so, the life-building public sentiment of the time was much stronger than that of the authorities. According to Svetlana Semenova, "one can speak of a general post-revolutionary, cosmic, active-evolutionist current of thought", of "new themes of the universal labor, of radical transformation of the world and the human nature, of combating death and achieving mastery over space" (Semenova, 2001: 11) that there were in the air at the time.
In 1922 in his poem "the Fourth International" Vladimir Mayakovsky came up with the slogan of "the third revolution of spirit" that should follow the October. Mayakovsky was apt to express the sentiment of many of his fellow literary workers who were wishing for not only a social but also a planet-wide transformation, for a reasonable, creative regulation of the matter, for the future immortal humankind breathing life into the universe. Such dreams were voiced by the poets of the "Kuznitsa" ("The Smithy"): Ivan Filipchenko, Mikhail Gerasimov,
Vladimir Kirillov; were represented in the early works of Andrey Platonov; those of Sergey Yesenin and Nikolay Kluev, Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky himself. The "biocosmic" movement headed by an anarchist poet Aleksandr Svyatogor (Agienko) and a political writer Pavel Ivanitsky, who was interested in Fedorov's ideas, came up with the slogan of "immortalism" and "interplanetarism", reproducing the philosopher's idea of the urge to overcome the two fundamental restrictions for the humanity, those of space and time, on a different level (Nikolaj Fedorov, 2008: 405-418, 1103-1105). Artists, architects, engineers, suprematists and constructivists, were making projects for the future, cherishing the dream of "a man able to fly", of space cities and settlements on the Moon and Mars (The Avantgarde, 2014), and Vasily Chekrygin, an intellectual artist relied on Fedorov's theoanthropourgic aesthetics and placed a future man-artist, who would be the planner and helmsman of the creation, regulating and creating its own nature, making it no longer suffering and mortal, but immortal and perfect, in the centre of the new art (Chekrygin, 2005: 214).
It was in the framework of this cosmic-transformational current of the Russian philosophical thought of the late 1910s — early 1920s, which Muraviev's theory started to develop. At that time he acquainted with Fedorov's "Philosophy of the Common Task" and his belief that philosophy can not only think of the future, but also make a project of that future, gained a new, unwavering pillar. Muraviev found a close relation and similarity between his understanding of culture and Fedorov's one: the thesis of the necessity to turn from the culture of the "false resurrection" to the culture that would be able, coupled with scientific knowledge, to restore life and become a "re-creature" (Semenova, 2004: 334-335), and that, at the same time, would not be confined to the earth, but spread farther, to the universe; of the "Copernicanist architecture" to become an art of space construction and of increasing regulation of "the Solar and other star systems for the sake of restoring them and governing them by reason" (Fedorov, 1995. 2: 243).
Fedorov, at that, views the space action of the humankind from a religious perspective, not a one-dimensional, secular one, presenting it as keeping the commandment "to take possession of the land" that was given to Adam when he was created, as obedience to Christ's will "Be perfect, <...> as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). This is of special importance for Muraviev, who endows culture with a religious perspective. Since the acquaintance with Fedorov's ideas had been made, Muraviev's intuitions about the future synthetic religious culture were given a creative impulse. In his notes about religious and philosophical subjects, in his philosophical diary of 1920—1922 and in the first drafts of the "Sophia and the Centaur", the image of the Church takes on a truly cosmic dimension, goes beyond the boundaries of time and history and expands so that it equals to the image of the universe in which the death and division are overcome; to the image of the "new heaven and the new earth" given in the last chapter of the "Revelation"; and also to Gnostics' mystical way of viewing the Plerome. "All the worlds, all the hierarchies of living creatures are related in the cosmic church" (Muraviev, 2011. 1: 499). It embodies not simply a perfect organization of the society, but a perfect syzygy organization of the being, coming to replace the "double impenetrability" of creatures and things, which Vladimir Soloviev regarded as a sign of the fallen world (Soloviev, 1988: 540-541); it embodies the complete unitotality, the absolute life. The Church is the universe in a state of being perfect. At the same time, it exists in a historical dimension, as a dynamic all-encompassing unity; it is a Hodegetria leading the world and man on their way to theosis. She allows persons, who are like separate atoms, who do not remember being all initially kindred and, therefore, are in a sense 'incomplete', 'not integral', 'fraction-like' — She allows them to feel themselves not merely parts of the whole,
but the whole, since, according to the "law of the hypostases", a microcosm for Muraviev, (as well as for Plotin, whom he considered the greatest thinker of the Hellenic period) "is at the same time <...> a macrocosm viewed from a specific perspective" (Muraviev, 2011. 1: 499). Muraviev's philosophical-visionist essay "Man in Life" ("Человек в жизни", 1925) depicts a new man, equal to the universe in his inner, spiritual power, who reveals it in action: "This is Adam Kadmon from the ancient books, who has become aware that he is a Microcosm, driven by a single urge and strong with a great power, like everything that goes to space and finally finds its place in the creation" (Muraviev, 2011. 1: 50). Every person, at that, is related to all the other ones and to myriads of living creatures in the world, related "not by some one part of themselves, as it is sometimes the case with earthly unions, but wholly, with all their being and action" (Muraviev, 2011. 1: 50).
In his "Man in Life" Muraviev literally reproduces the idea of the "cosmic growth", which Vladimir Soloviev spoke of; the ladder of life that appeared in Henri Bergson's "Creative evolution" that influenced Muraviev's thought no less than Fedorov's "Philosophy of the Common Task". For Bergson the "élan vital", that determines the upward development of life forms, is characteristic only of living creatures ("an animal relies on a plant, a man rises over animals, and the humanity, in time and space, appears as an enormous army that is running by our side, in front of and behind of us, carrying its burden, able to overcome any resistance and many impediments, perhaps, even death" (Bergson, 1998: 264)). Muraviev reproduces the intuitive thinking of the ancient philosophers about the living Cosmos on the new stage of development and, sharing his understanding of personalism with Nikolaj Lossky, who endows everything that exists, even an electron, with a potential for personality, and from his perspective the creative, upward movement is proper to any elements of the universe: "Our space, with all the worlds and their inhabitants, as numerous as grains of sand on a seashore <...> is not static, but carries out a great work by joined forces" (Muraviev, 2011. 1: 51). It is this "great work" that, in Muraviev's view, is "culture" in all its scope. Culture is seen as a process of transforming the universe, bringing it closer to the state of the Church, the world's enlightenment.
The same image of the culture as a "common task" and a "liturgy beyond cathedrals" that defeats evil, chaos and death appears in the philosophical mystery "Sophia and the Centaur" (finished in the same year, 1925), in the heroine's dialogues with her companion Kitovras and the constructors of the "New Bensalem". This culture of transfiguration is opposed to previous cultures, that "were based on aggressive exploitation, on using and keeping the divisions", as it "makes all the members of the humanity participate in the transformation of the world, unites them in the common rhythm of a powerful, cosmic endeavour and resurrecting, by their joined force, all the living ones. What is more, it gives all the world's creatures an opportunity to become "creatures intelligent and conscious", so that finally "all the nature is involved into the great process of transformation of the world, mastering time and creating a new heaven and a new earth" (Muraviev, 2011. 1: 393).
Along with the mystery, in which the idea of a universal, communal culture that brings about the world's transformation was expressed fully and comprehensively, without reference to the censure, Muraviev was working on the book "Mastery over Time as the Main Purpose of the Scientific Organization of Labor" (1924). As distinct from the religious works that were doomed to be "buried in a desk drawer", this book was designed to be allowed for publication in the Soviet Russia. In this book, Muraviev, relying on the sapienti sat principle, strived to explain the cosmic scale of social action that was a subject of his debate with Trotsky. The task was of current importance then, as Trotsky in his speech at the fifth anniversary of the
Sverdlov Communist University declared against cosmism in proletarian poetry when he was speaking about the essence of revolutionary character of life and about the role of the teacher of the new man, who carries the idea of revolution. He also made a clear statement that any "cosmic" revolution striving "to build bridges, yet unknown and unheard of, to other worlds in space", is out of question; that a constructor of the future is a "concrete man of this time" and that there is not an abstract, cosmic, but a quite special, historical and political sense behind it (Trocky, 1923). Muraviev disagreed with Trotsky once more, being against such a simplification; he emphasized that a true revolutionary character of life involves not only a social, but also an ontological shift and that "the day after the revolution is the day to master nature" (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 390; for more detail, see: Gacheva, 2017). Thus, in his book with a name suiting well the general mood of the 1920s, the time of the inspiring idea of a scientific organization of labor, he endows the transforming human activity with cosmic, ontological character by understanding labor as a planet- and space-scale transformation, as a collective action that perfects social relations and, what is more, the being itself.
In this book, as well as in the collection of articles called "Laborology" (1924), compiled together with Aleksandr Gorsky and Nikolay Setnitsky, his like-minded fellow cosmists, organization of labor, viewed from the perspective of Fedorov's projectivism, becomes the "organization of the world-impacting" ("организация мировоздействия"; the term coined by Aleksandr Gorsky) — (Gorsky & Setnitsky, 1995: 143)), and "transformation of space" and the establishment of a "cosmocracy and and pantocracy" of the humankind, giving life to nature and transforming it "from an uncontrollable and chaotic world devoid of reason and full of conflicting forces into a world as a perfect whole permeated and governed by reason" (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 145) are declared the ultimate purpose of culture.
The cosmists of the 1920s, Valerian Muraviev included, spoke, like Nikolay Fedorov, Vladimir Soloviev, Sergey Podolinsky and Nikolay Umov before them, of the anti-entropic nature of labor and cultural activity of the humankind. The same ideas were expressed by Pavel Florensky. In his Auto-abstract written in the mid-1920s for "The Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Granat Russian Bibliographical Institute", he defined the bases of the creative outlook in the following way. The major law governing the world is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy viewed in the broad sense, as a law of the Chaos in all the parts of the universe. The world is opposed by Logos, the source of negative entropy. Culture is a conscious struggle with the levelling process in the world; it consists in isolating and slowing down that process in the universe and increasing the potential in all areas, it being the essential prerequisite for life, as opposed to the equality as death (Florensky, 1988: 114). Muraviev views culture in exactly the same way, as a basis for organizing the world, its 'cosmisation' as a transforming and creating (in religious terms — transfiguring) activity of man. It is far from being excessive or unnecessary; it is as an important element of the being as life and consciousness, essential for preserving and increasing them.
Thus, creating culture is seen as an evolutionary duty of man that (the idea that Muraviev did not mention in his "Mastery over Time", but expressed in his obscure works on religion and philosophy) at the same time, is his religious duty. Like Fedorov, who addressed his idea of the common task "to the religious and the secular, to the believers and atheists" (Fedorov, 1995. 1: 35), Muraviev develops his idea of culture in two frameworks: the pages of the mystery and the philosophical diary are devoted to culture as a theanthropic communal creation process and addressed to his fellow religious and philosophical thinkers, while the "Mastery over time" and other works ready to be published in the Soviet Russia 'speak' to a person of that time, who rejects the religious dimension of his action, and it is the active-
evolutionary sense that comes to the fore in it. Both discourses, however, involve the idea of cosmic, creative type of action itself.
Muraviev distinguishes between two types of creative culture viewed as a tool for the world's transformation. The first one, called symbolic, is closely related to the projective nature of culture and is most readily realized in philosophy, science and art, since these areas investigate reality, create ideal projects of world transformation. The second one, the "real culture", includes "those types of activity that actually — not symbolically — change the world around us.). These are: economics, production, agriculture, technology, medicine, eugenics, applied biology, pedagogy etc." (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 133). These two cultures are divided now, but in the future culture, with its consciously set purpose of regulation, the "theoretical and symbolic activity" and the real, labor-related one will go hand in hand, and what is only a symbolic acting now should grow into a real "creation of life".
The concept of culture as cosmocracy reaches its maturity in Muraviev's work "The Culture of the Future" (1926). In this book the philosopher, relies on his doctrine of messianic acts by which he understands acts of history, uniting the individual and the general action and considers different aspects of the future cultural work: "the ethical and spiritual transformation of man", the "the physical transformation of man", "the transformation of social groups", "the transformation of things", "the transformation of organisms", "the transformation of the space wholes" (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 640). In this work, as well as in the article preceding it, "the General Productive Mathematics" (1923), the philosopher, following Fedorov's ideas, insists that regulation should have an effect not only on the world around, but also on the psycho-physical sphere. A synthetic culture striving to overcome time and space, establish "cosmocracy and pantocracy" of the humankind, should purposely develop applied sciences dealing with "an issue of perfecting man biologically", "transforming and renewing" his physical nature (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 137-138). He anticipates the future development of a "special kind of art connected with the improved anthropology", calling it "anthropourgy" (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 137-138). The cultural-transformational action reaches its apogee, combining the symbolic and real practice in the same act, making for the active appliance of the achievements of medicine, chemistry and genetics in the process of perfecting the human organism. "Perhaps, in the future, new combinations will be invented, without any of the disadvantages of the modern organic matter. New bodies will be created, more flexible, powerful, and more mobile. They will move at enormous speed, they will consume light and the gravity will affect them at a lower degree. At the same time, they will be able to think, and feel, and touch, and act over a distance" (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 177). Muraviev even predicts the possibility to control the process of the appearance of a new life: there will no longer be any "unconscious birth", but that resulting from a collective "communal" act of creation: "as musicians in an orchestra achieve a good ensemble, and the combination of the inspiration, temperament and technique of each person gradually gives rise to the symphony they perform, the creators of the new man should unite in the same harmonious revelation of the mentioned ideal (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 175).
Interestingly, the "transformation of organisms" was to take place, according to Muraviev, not only within technology and science, but also as a result of the inner, psycho-physical regulation. In addition, he anticipated such a course in the development of the spiritual and mental spheres that would make it possible, like yoga practices, to control one's own organism by power of thought and spirit; moreover, a "wireless connection" would be achieved to other people, and to animals, and to "the infinitely little creatures" in the world, up to atoms and molecules, as well as "guiding them towards a religious and cosmic ministry" (Muraviev, 2011. 1: 499).
With all the futuristic daring and sometimes radical character of Muraviev's ideas of the 1920s the notion of tradition, dominant in his early works on culture, is still present here, but in a new, more profound version. It manifests itself in a most clear way in Muraviev's handling of the subject that was of the highest importance for Fedorov — that of the resurrection. The past is not rejected by the philosopher, who does not support the idea of the linear progress, does not pass into oblivion. It stays in memory, is imprinted on the name, on the 'recipe' for a thing and can, therefore, be recreated and resurrected.
At the end of his book "The Culture of the Future" Muraviev writes about that remote future of the human activity when it could expand beyond the Earth. As distinct from the "Man in Life", in which the philosopher presents his ideas of the cosmic future in the form of a mystical-allegorical vision, reminding of the Old-Testament prophets and famous mystics, like Emanuel Swedenborg, the "Culture of the Future" depicts events that could well appear on the pages of a science-fiction novel — and this genre, unlike the fashionable fantasy fiction, is of a predictive, projective character. Inspired by the famous image of the Earth transformed into a spaceship, that appears in Fedorov's "Philosophy of the Common Task", Muraviev imagines how our planet, "like a spaceship operated by earth-navigators", "would not go in an orbit determined from outside, but follow the course chosen by scientists relying on their own complex calculations"; how "the conscious dwellers of planets would have the opportunity to communicate and together develop a plan to conquer the Sun" and how after that they would become sun-navigators and go, by a controllable Solar system, to other star worlds" (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 225, 226), meeting on their way dwellers of other galaxies, also conscious creators. And, as a response to possible skepticism reminding that modern science and technology have their boundaries, he argues, (his ideas in keeping with those of the projectivists Nikolaj Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Vladimir Vernadsky): "we know from experience that these boundaries are not absolute, and there is every evidence that they will be pushed forward at an increasing pace, and intelligent creatures will follow farther, conquering space" (Muraviev, 2011. 2: 226).
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