In fact, however, Fedorov tends to “patrify” rather than “matrify” the natural universe (he invents the Russian term “patrofikatsiia”).173 The earth tends to be seen as a graveyard of our fathers (“kladbishche ottsov”) rather than our mothers (or rather than both). The face we will confront when we reach the ultimate spiritual summit will be the face of God the Father. These are just a few of the many side-effects of Fedorov’s ordinary Russian sexism (his insistence that a wife’s place is in the home, and his frequent references to “feminine caprice” require no comment).
Particularly interesting is Fedorov’s denigration of mothers—this despite his extensive and life-affirming vocabulary of words based on the Russian root meaning “birth” (“rod,” “rodstvo,” “rodstvennost’,” “ro dnoe ia,” etc.). Once everyone is resuscitated no further childbirths will be necessary. Mothers are among the masochistic “altruists” whom Fedorov disapproves of. Christ did not admonish us to be like mothers, but rather to be “like children.” Contradicting Saint Anthony’s idea that the model of Christian love is the mother’s total devotion to her child, Fedorov says that the son’s love for the father is a better model. Even among animals mothers are totally devoted to offspring, and “the human race… would be no higher than animals if its morality were limited to maternal love.”174
Thus, even if nature were a mother rather than a stepmother, she would not meet Fedorov’s high standards. It seems that even real mothers cannot protect their children from eventual death. Therefore it is up to children to take matters into their own hands, to work together on the “common task” of eliminating death through education and science.
Fedorov’s great enmity toward death may seem exaggerated, but it is also very Russian. Other Russian thinkers have tried to find ways to resurrect the dead in one form or another, and many aspects of Russian culture manifest a preoccupation with resistance to death. In a very interesting 1965 article Peter Wiles viewed such varied phenomena as the Soviet slogans about Lenin’s immortality (“Lenin is more alive than all the living”), the Orthodox tradition of preserving a saint’s remains whole and intact, the Russian religious emphasis on Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the folkloric figure of Koshchei the Deathless, the hyper-development of gerontology in Russian medicine, Lev Tolstoy’s obsession with death—and of course Fedorov’s philosophy—all as manifestations of the Russian preoccupation with death.
The Russian fascination with resurrection is, in essence, a preoccupation with a special form of masochism: does one or does one not submit to death? The ultimate enslavement for every Russian is enslavement to death.
Of course for everyone—Russians and non-Russians alike—death is a serious issue, to put it mildly. But for someone living in a culture of moral masochism death is, in addition, viewed through the filter of masochistic motivation. One does not only feel anxiety, or dread, or eventual philosophical acceptance. One goes further, one welcomes death with open arms, or, on the contrary, one denounces it in disgust. Fedorov’s “project” may be understood as an extended denunciation of death.
The polarity of attitudes toward death may be illustrated by an aspect of the difficult personal relationship between Fedorov and Lev Tolstoy. The great novelist and moralist was always saying things that irritated Fedorov. Tolstoy’s “love of death” was particularly intolerable to Fedorov. On one occasion Tolstoy expressed his affection for the human skull lying on a desk at Fedorov’s house. On another occasion Tolstoy said to a colleague of Fedorov’s: “here I am standing with one foot in the grave, and all the same I’ll say that death is not a bad thing.”175 As Young points out, these remarks apparently led Fedorov to break off personal relations with Tolstoy.
On his deathbed Fedorov did not admit that he was dying.176 He carried his antimasochism to the ultimate extreme.
Viacheslav Ivanov, apparently reacting to Fedorovian ideas about death, had a more accepting, Tolstoyan attitude. In his philosophical discussion of the inseparability of humanity from nature (“Priroda,” in this case not “blind”) Ivanov quite spontaneously lapses into maternal imagery:
From the time that he is conscious of himself, Man remains true to himself in his secret wish: to conquer Nature. “I am alien to you,” he says to her, but he himself knows that he does not speak the truth, and that she, welcoming the future with an inescapable embrace, answers: “You are mine, for I am you [ty moi, ibo ty—ia].” And thus speaks the oracle: you will not be victorious over the Mother [ne pobedish’ Materi] until you yourself turn to her and take her into your arms, saying: “You are mine, for you are I myself [ty moia, ibo ty—ia sam].”177
There is an antagonism between Mother Nature and Man, and Man cannot win until he admits that he and Mother Nature are one and the same. But the victory will be Pyrrhic, once fusion with this particular mother is achieved, for Ivanov is clearly referring to death at her hands. The danger of being dominated by her, of welcoming her masochistically, is not escaped after all. Unlike Fedorov, Ivanov is willing to give up the wish to conquer Nature, to defy death. Ivanov’s masochism in this context contrasts with Fedorov’s antimasochism.
Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948) was a Russian philosopher so preoccupied with masochistic and antimasochistic ideas that he came to view practically the entire world as a would-be slave driver of the individual. In his 1939 book Slavery and Freedom he argues that a great variety of things—God, nature, the collective, civilization, individualism, the state, the nation, war, money, revolution, sex, beauty, and even “Being” itself—all are capable of “enslaving” the individual. This view may be characterized as slightly paranoid.
According to Berdiaev, the individual human being is inclined to cooperate in his or her own enslavement: “man likes being a slave and puts forward a claim to slavery as a right.”178 But one must resist enslavement. The existence of one’s very personality (“lichnost”’) depends on a persistent refusal to be enslaved. This resistance, however, leads to suffering, for in most cases, according to Berdiaev, it is easier to go along with whatever pressures are exerted on the personality than to be assertive or to seek freedom (“svoboda”). The truly free personality therefore cannot avoid suffering. Indeed, Berdiaev says, “in a certain sense personality is suffering.”179
Berdiaev’s advocacy of “free personality” would thus, on its face, appear to be an advocacy of masochism. This is not true a priori, however, for not all suffering has to be self-destructive or humiliating (e.g., temporary suffering in order to obtain something advantageous to the self would not be considered masochistic by the clinicians, as we will see below). Besides, there are very few people who go in for such suffering: “Free personality is a flower that blooms but rarely in the life of the world.”180 It is obvious from reading his books that Berdiaev himself was one of those rare flowers.