A timeline of Russian cosmism maps key developments relevant to cosmism starting from 1772 to 2000. The timeline is a work in progress: new entries, images, and films, especially those pertaining to the twenty-first century, will be added in the near future. Go to website →

Cosmists regard progress not as a goal or an end in itself, but rather as a necessary sacrifice that is an integral part of humanity’s struggle to survive and evolve. Real development, they believe, can only begin after humanity triumphs over death and learns how to resurrect the dead. This vision suggests that the future becomes the reconstruction or restoration of the past, and the arrow of time bites its own tail.

Almost a decade before the revolution, Bogdanov depicted a postrevolutionary Marxist museum in his science-fiction novel Red Star from 1908. “I imagined there would be no museums in a developed communist society,” exclaims Bogdanov’s astonished protagonist upon his arrival on Mars, home to a highly advanced Communist civilization. The museum has indeed survived, but its function has been modified. The museum is no longer a bourgeois ghetto, a repository for all the delusional hopes for the resolution of social contradictions. The liberating force of proletarian revolution has dissolved class divisions as such, and art, once an autonomous professional sphere, has been integrated into the everyday life and work of humanity.

Arseny Zhilyaev: Your recent films, which deal with the problematic of Russian cosmism, may come across as strange or even exotic. I know that your initial encounter with this topic was rather unusual. How did you start to work with this subject? Anton Vidokle: About ten years ago Boris Groys told me about a very strange movement in Russia around the time of the Revolution. His description of it sounded so macabre and vampiric that I thought he had invented it. The story was too…

It was the second month since I had been resurrected under the Cradle of Humankind program, and the second week of our orbital revolution around the Earth on a rocket. I was very pleased with myself, as my intuitive guesses had turned out to be extremely close to the truth. I was now flying back and forth around the rocket and almost crying tears of joy, like a child. The puzzled workers tried to ask me how I was feeling, but I just gave them masculine hugs and laughed crazily. I spent hours…

The exhibition starts with the [following] topic: “The serfdom system had been based on the corvée exploitation of the peasant by the noble landowner.” The main content is expressed by means of a mock-up: there is a peasant plowing with an authentic ancient plough; over him, there is a symbol of noneconomic violence—an authentic three-tailed whip, and beside it, a landowner, one belonging to a type of parasitizing lord. In front of the model the material is structured according to [these]…

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Since Baudelaire’s time, the artist has been imagined as someone rooted in the tradition of overcoming tradition. Artists have been obliged to keep abreast of fashion and spend their time in endless flânerie, thus resisting being stopped or captured in space. In the twentieth century, the public figure or activist was primarily a…