Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

We were sitting in the safe space. ‘It seems that, very early, you abandoned any hope of being understood,’ she was saying.

I disagreed strongly and handed her a book. ‘Look,’ I told her. ‘My biography.’ It was hardbound, quarto, with oxblood cloth boards and my name in gilt letters on the spine.

She glanced at a few pages and then, revolving the book in her hands, showed me the words.

The lines and paragraphs had the irregular look of bona fide text, but on closer inspection this was revealed to be an illusion.

It reminded me of the Latin gobbledegook designers use in mocked-up layouts: placeholder text. It’s not meant to be read. The real content will be inserted later. They call it ‘lorem ipsum’ after the fragment of Cicero it’s taken from: dolorem ipsum, ‘pain itself’.

But here the text was formed of a single, repeated word: mankurt.

I woke up in my narrow pine bed with the sensation that I had fallen from the sky. This heart was thumping in his chest.

One continuous thread between the broken halves of my life is this: my grasp of the secret kinship between insight and despair. Who said, There is no hope without the concomitant capacity for tears? Johnson? Jack? Perhaps I did.

*

I threw myself into my quest. Every now and again, I would leave messages for Vera, trying to make contact and hinting vaguely at the direction of my researches.

They took me back to St James’s Square, to the stacks of the London Library. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, but I was confident I would know it when I found it. It was two days before I laid my hand on it, shelved on the open stacks under Religion and Philosophy of Religion: a slim, black volume of two hundred pages which had the immodest and doubtlessly sexist title What Was Man Created For? Its author was an obscure nineteenth-century Russian philosopher called Nikolai Fedorov. Because of the conventions of Russian transliteration, his last name is usually written ‘Fedorov’ in English, but pronounced like this, Fyodorov .

Fedorov’s crazy speculations belong to a hidden tradition in Russian thought. It is a strain of utopian philosophy which left a faint trace on Soviet communism, but which was otherwise expunged from history.

What the Gnostics were to the established church, Fedorov and his disciples were to the commissars who founded the institutions of Soviet power. They were the disavowed mystics, the loopy ones who were finally ruled heretical.

Fedorov was an austere and religious man who published virtually nothing in his lifetime, but whose ideas were venerated by a group of followers. Tolstoy was one of his admirers. He died in 1903. A decade and a half later, some of his adherents became senior figures in the new Bolshevik government. They were communists who were drawn to Fedorov’s mystical take on revolution. Fedorov went far beyond political economy. He didn’t take aim at class conflict or inequalities of wealth and power. He wanted to abolish death.

‘The most general evil affecting all,’ he wrote, ‘— a crime, in fact — is death, and therefore the supreme good, the supreme task, is resuscitation. What we are talking about is universal resurrection … To turn all the worlds into worlds guided by the reasoning powers of resurrected generations.’

Fedorov also concluded that, with its numbers swollen by the resurrected dead, humanity would have to colonise other planets. He was a nineteenth-century advocate of space exploration.

Absurd? Naturally. But it was also strangely compelling. Fedorov had somehow retained the innocence of a child’s first speculations. He had no time for the fudged, adult versions of immortality, of vague spiritual realms or reincarnation. His immortality was eternal, physical existence alongside all the people you care about.

When you read it stated in such bald terms, of course it seems ridiculous. But it also chimes with a deep, almost unsayable longing. It is such a painful hope that from childhood on we train ourselves not to indulge it: not to have to leave, never to say goodbye, never to lose anyone.

Fedorov’s ideas survived visibly in the quasi-religious cult which formed around Lenin after his death. One of his followers, a man named Leonid Krasin, was part of the team that devised ways to embalm the dead leader. ‘I am certain’, Krasin said, ‘that the time will come when one will be able to use the elements of a person’s life to create the physical person.’ The inspiration for that thought clearly came from the book I held in my hand.

But Fedorov’s vision had been much more radical and more egalitarian: we were all coming back, not just the leaders. ‘Even more senseless is the idea that immortality is possible for a few separate individuals,’ he wrote, ‘when faced with the mortality that is common to all mankind; for this is as absurd as the belief in the possibility of happiness for a few, of personal happiness in the face of general unhappiness, in the face of a common dependence on so many catastrophes and evils.’

Resuscitation was our general destiny, he believed. And figuring out how to achieve it was the scientific and spiritual challenge that should occupy real revolutionaries.

Fedorov had no idea how it would be accomplished. There was no technological basis for his vision. It was a pseudoscience, in fact: religion disguised with a lab coat. Where it was actually attempted, the results were disastrous. After his death, some of his followers tried to rejuvenate themselves with blood transfusions — Lenin’s sister Maria was among them. One disciple, Alexander Bogdanov, contracted an illness from a blood transfusion and died. The botched job on Lenin’s corpse, where the dream of resuscitation quickly gave way to the less ambitious task of reupholstery, exposed the impossiblity of what Fedorov had preached.

Fedorov’s followers died or were executed in the purges that followed Stalin’s rise to power. His ideas remained an eccentric footnote to the story of the Soviet Union. They belonged to the philosophical endeavours covered by the Russian term bogostroitelstvo : ‘god-building’. Spiritual regeneration, eternal life, resuscitation: all these were declared heresy by the designers of a drab and murderous utopia, obsessed with blast furnaces and pig-iron output.

But in his lifetime, Fedorov never wavered from his central tenet — humanity’s need to devise a method of universal resurrection. It’s an obsession he returns to again and again in his essays, referring to it everywhere with the same Russian phrase: Obshchee Delo — the Common Task.

*

On the evening of August 14th, as the dog days were ending, and rain was falling on my untended garden, my phone rang. It was a withheld number. I answered it and heard a tired voice, swimming through layers of interference as though it were coming through on a ham radio. I immediately recognised it as Vera’s. She was very apologetic. She explained that there had been complications with her operation. ‘I am very weak,’ she said.

I told her I had some questions that needed answering.

Her tone was grave. ‘Nikolasha, I can’t speak freely on the phone. You understand? If you want to discuss anything, you will have to come here. To Moscow.’

The expedited visa cost me almost two hundred pounds. As a form of compensation, I bought the cheapest ticket I could, an overnight flight to Domodedovo that got me into Moscow in time to fight my way round the metro with battalions of commuters.

It had been twenty years since I’d last visited, on an academic grant to spend a summer studying at a shabby language institute in one of the city’s northern suburbs.