Russian cosmism

The Russian cosmism was first created in the second half of the 19th century as a philosophical mindset of humanities and science trends in Russia.

Philosophy and Current Art

The term "cosmism" or "cosmists" has been used for a number of Russian scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries since the 1970s. These include the astrophysicist Konstantin Ziolkowski as well as Wladimir Iwanowitsch Wernadski , Wladimir Sergejewitsch Solowjow , Nikolai Fyodorow , Pawel Florensky and Alexander Tschischewski .

On the initiative of Nicholas Roerich , who visited Moscow in 1920, an exhibition of young cosmological artists was organized in the USA, which served as the occasion for the creation of an artist group Amarawella , which was formed in 1927. This group's manifesto said

"Our work, which is mainly intuitive, focuses on the discovery of various aspects of the cosmos - in the human face, in the landscape and the rendering of abstract types of inner life."

Head was Petr Fatejew selected, the strong momentum of the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra received. Together with Boris Smirnow-Russezki, Alexander Sardan, Sergei Schigolew and others, they created an artistic modeling of the cosmos as a giant musical instrument with which the entire earth is in harmony. Even Ivan Kudryashov showed his cosmic abstract paintings at the exhibitions of the Society of Easel Painters (OST) in the mirror of Suprematism .

In the search for forms of their expression of the creative development of the spirit, these artists turned to the models of the future man and the ideas of life on foreign planets. Heaven and earth form a unity and humans fit in harmoniously.

The attempts of this group with futuristic approaches were stopped very early by the Stalinist regime. The last exhibition took place in 1929, and arrests of members began in 1930, which led to the group's dissolution.

literature

Susanne Anna (ed.): Russian avant-garde . Daco-Verlag Günter Bläse, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-87135-026-5 .
Michael Hagemeister : The "Biocosmists" - Anarchism and Maximalism in the Early Soviet Period . In: Contributions to East Slavic Philology 1 . Munich 1983, pp. 61-76.
Michael Hagemeister: Nikolaj Fedorov and "Russian Cosmism" . In: Eberhard Müller / Franz Klehr (ed.): Russian religious philosophy. The legacy regained: appropriation and distance . Stuttgart 1992, pp. 159-170.
Michael Hagemeister: “Russian cosmism” - an anachronism or the “philosophy of the future”? In: In the drawing room . Festschrift for Karl Eimermacher for his 60th birthday. Dortmund 1998, pp. 169-201.
Michael Hagemeister: The conquest of space and the mastery of time. Utopian, apocalyptic and magical-occult elements in the future blueprints of the Soviet era . In: Jurij Murašov / Georg Witte (ed.): Muses of Power. Media in Soviet Culture of the 1920s and 1930s . Munich 2003, pp. 259–286.
Michael Hagemeister: “Our body must be our work.” Mastery of nature and overcoming death in Russian projects of the early 20th century . In: Boris Groys / ders. (Ed.): The New Mankind. Biopolitical utopias in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century . Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 19-67.
Marie-Luise Heuser : Russian cosmism and extraterrestrial suprematism . In: Annette Tietenberg / Tristan Weddigen (eds.), Planetary Perspectives. Images of space travel . (Critical Reports Volume 37, Issue 3, 2009), Marburg 2009, pp. 62–75.
Boris Groys, Anton Vidokle (ed.): Kosmismus (= library 100 years of the present , 7th volume), Matthes & Seitz, Berlin, 2018, ISBN 978-3-95757-416-9 .