“Who read my manuscript?” M. Gorky and A. Bogdanov on immortality

Abstract

The study begins with a dispute between M. Gorky and A. Bogdanov about the latter’s now lost short story Death [Smert]. The author verifies the story’s attribution and supports the hypothesis that it served as the first draft of the utopian Celebration of Immortality [Prazdnik bessmertiya], a story that anticipates the present-day debate on transhumanism. An unconditional maxim of Bogdanov’s philosophy — that an individual loses him/herself in a group — is evoked in the story with a tragic undertone. The scholar traces apocalyptical and suicidal motifs in Gorky’s and Bogdanov’s prose and identifies the differences in the writers’ treatment of these issues. L. Borisova suggests that the idea of an individual grows in prominence in Gorky’s and Bogdanov’s works alike. From the viewpoint of God-building, Gorky argues for achievement of physical, and therefore personal, immortality as the ultimate goal and reward for any human being. Bogdanov accepts the possibility of immortality but warns that it will cause the demise of the personality. The study points to the differences in the perception of N. Fyodorov’s Philosophy of the Common Cause [Filosofiya obshchego dela] and Bergson’s metaphysics of immortality by Gorky and members of the Vperyod Socialist sub-faction.