# Fedorov, Nikolai

Explore Nikolai Fedorov’s “common task”—resurrecting the dead through science and united labor—and its links to transhumanist thought.

Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829–1903), a Russian Orthodox philosopher who worked most of his life as a Moscow librarian, gave the name *obshchee delo*, “the common task,” to the duty he believed binds every living person: the raising of all who have died, through science and united labor in accord with God’s design. The Russian *delo*, a deed or undertaking, makes resurrection a work for human hands. Most Christians have treated the raising of the dead as an act God alone performs at the end of time, and Fedorov regarded such waiting as a failure of filial love. Historians of transhumanism, Mormon transhumanists among them, count him an early religious precursor and the founder of Russian cosmism.

## A Librarian in Moscow

Fedorov was born in the province of Tambov, probably the illegitimate son of Prince Pavel Gagarin, and was denied his father’s name. After years as a provincial teacher of history and geography, he spent about twenty-five years at the library of the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, where he was reputed to have read every book he catalogued. He lived in voluntary poverty, and Leo Tolstoy, writing of him in 1881, said that he led “the purest Christian life” and gave away all he had. The austerity of the man lent a peculiar authority to a doctrine that otherwise sounded fantastic to most who heard it.

Among the readers Fedorov guided was a partly deaf teenager, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who had come to Moscow at sixteen and later laid the theoretical foundations of spaceflight. Fyodor Dostoevsky, sent an account of the ideas by Fedorov’s disciple Nikolai Peterson, replied that he agreed with them. In 1881 the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov wrote to Fedorov that his project was “the first step forward of the human spirit along the path of Christ” since the emergence of Christianity. The writings appeared only after Fedorov’s death, printed by Peterson and Vladimir Kozhevnikov in small editions not offered for sale.

## The Common Task

Fedorov diagnosed modern society as “unbrotherly,” divided by class, nation, and above all generation, and he traced each division to the forgetting of the dead. In a generation that tells its parents to make way for the young he heard “the voice of hate, the obvious hate of prodigal sons.” The parable he invoked closes on a return from death: “this thy brother was dead, and is alive again” (Luke 15:32). From this premise Fedorov reasoned in a chain. If the forgetting of the fathers is the root of division, then the remedy is a remembrance active enough to restore them, and if their bodies have dispersed into the earth, then restoration requires mastery over nature itself.

Humanity would first learn to regulate weather and harvests, then search out “the molecules that form part of the beings who gave them life,” and finally settle “all the worlds” to house “the risen and re-created generations.” Fedorov complained that the museum “has not yet asked, ’Will these bones come to life?’” The question is Ezekiel’s. Set down in a valley of dry bones, the prophet hears the Lord ask, “Son of man, can these bones live?” and hands it back: “O Lord GOD, thou knowest” (Ezekiel 37:3). At the prophet’s word bone, sinew, and flesh come together, yet the bodies stand only when *ruach*, breath, wind, and spirit together, enters from the four winds. Human labor at God’s command assembles the body, and the divine breath gives it life.

## Saviors on Mount Zion

Lincoln Cannon has observed that the thoughts of Fedorov and Joseph Smith about “our duties toward our ancestors have much in common.” Paul had asked the Corinthians, “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?” (1 Corinthians 15:29), and Joseph Smith took the question as a charge to perform ordinances on behalf of ancestors, so that “they without us should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:40). He read Obadiah’s promise that “saviours shall come up on mount Zion” (Obadiah 1:21) as describing the living who build temples and labor there for their kindred. Within the framework of the Restoration, the perfection of each generation is bound to the faithfulness of the others.

The correspondence reaches into the institutions Fedorov imagined. He wanted a library, a museum, and a graveyard beside every rural church and school, preserving “their thoughts and the work of their hands,” and he observed that the earliest histories of peoples were genealogies, like those of the Bible. Discussion of the parallel has centered on resurrection, while this archive has drawn less notice, though it answers closely to Latter-day Saint practice, which gathers the names and stories of the dead into genealogical collections and carries those names into temples. In both cases the work of salvation begins with memory, since the dead must be known by name before anything can be done on their behalf.

## Agency and the Restored Person

Fedorov looked to the Russian autocrat to become the father of all nations, and he wrote that “the exclusive attachment to a woman leads the man to forget his fathers.” Restoration scripture seals husbands, wives, and children together, so that the turn toward a spouse belongs to the same welding that joins the generations. The Association’s entry on cosmism notes that some of Fedorov’s heirs leaned toward coercive schemes that subordinated the person to the cosmic project, and it ties the Mormon transhumanist form of the hope to agency, compassion, and consent. The difference may be named as one between the restoration of a person and the reconstruction of a likeness.

The distinction now has a technical edge. In 2020 Microsoft received a patent for a chatbot modeled on a specific person and assembled from letters, posts, and recorded voice, though the company said it had no plans to build one, and proposals to reconstruct the dead from genomes and digital archives lend the common task an engineering form. The danger lies in mistaking a responsive likeness for a returned ancestor, and in building one without a consent the dead cannot give. In Joseph F. Smith’s vision the messengers of the Lord go among the dead to “proclaim liberty to the captives who were bound, even unto all who would repent of their sins and receive the gospel” (D&C 138:31), a liberty to choose.

Fedorov’s museum and graveyard beside the village church find their Latter-day Saint counterpart in the family history library near the temple, where names from the archive are carried into ordinances. The Restoration shares Fedorov’s conviction that the living owe the dead a labor of restoration, and Mormon transhumanists share his hope that science and technology will someday take part in that labor, whether through medicine that turns back death or records rich enough to serve a resurrection. The temple supplies what the museum lacked. Each name receives an ordinance the dead may accept or decline, and a common task pursued in that spirit would restore the dead as agents, free to receive or refuse what their descendants have prepared.

*See also*: [Baptism for the Dead](/topical-guide/baptism-for-the-dead), [Cosmism](/topical-guide/cosmism), [Genealogy](/topical-guide/genealogy), [Immortality](/topical-guide/immortality), [Resurrection](/topical-guide/resurrection), [Saviors](/topical-guide/saviors), [Simulation Hypothesis](/topical-guide/simulation-hypothesis), [Uploading](/topical-guide/uploading), [Vicarious](/topical-guide/vicarious)