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Alexander Bogdanov was a Bolshevik activist who was a rival to Lenin and friend of Trotsky. The subject of renewed interest in the past years (he was the basis for the character Arkady Bogdanov in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and is extensively discussed by McKenzie Wark in Molecular Red), Bogdanov devoted his later life to performing experimental blood transfusions on himself in the attempt to extend human life. For Bogdanov, blood transfusion was part and parcel with the attempt to break free of normative and coercive laws and customs; to seize control of the reproduction of the body at a biological level; to expand the field of collective struggle into the individual organism itself by the power of biological engineering.
Bogdanov also wrote a number of science fiction stories and novels. “Immortality Day” is included in Russian Cosmism. Fride is an immortal space communist who has grown weary of the infinite satisfactions of his post-scarcity utopia. The story concerns Fride’s decision to take his own life in order to experience death, the one thing that immortalist space communism can’t offer. In his suicide note, Fride writes, “After one thousand years of my existence I have come to the conclusion that life on Earth is a cycle of repetitions, especially intolerable for a man of genius, whose entire being yearns for innovation. This is one of nature’s antinomies. I resolve it with suicide.” With a certain Nietzschean flair, Bogdanov suggests that death is the critical negation that allows for history, and humanity, to develop. The story displays both a wild sense of utopia as well as an understanding of the dialectical limits of any such utopia.
full: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/russian-cosmism-versus-interstellar-bosses-reclaiming-full-throttle-luxury-space-communism/
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