Boris Groys (editor) · 2018 · EPUB · Calibre ID 80
Resurfaced in The Chemist’s Shelf (2026-10-20).
Role in the triad
The resurrection programme: Fedorov removes Browne’s deferral to God and gives the work to art/biology; Groys makes the museum the machine of immortality; Bogdanov’s ‘Immortality Day’ ends on a pyre.
Why this book
Groys’s Introduction (‘Russian Cosmism and the Technology of Immortality’) states the museum-as-immortality thesis Malevich attacks; Fedorov’s ‘Astronomy and Architecture’ (Earth as cemetery, art as resurrection, contempt for portrait-substitutes); Svyatogor demotes resurrection; Bogdanov’s immortal Fride chooses the stake. Edition MIT/e-flux 2018; texts c.1880s–1920s.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “The museum, by contrast, is a machine for making things last, making them immortal.” (Groys, Introduction) | “And the state must become the museum of its population.” (Groys, Introduction) | “Art, if it is the work of a rational being, must consist precisely in the resurrection of everything destroyed by blind force” (Fedorov, ‘Astronomy and Architecture’) | “For the arts (sculpture, painting) offer but to replace those bodies destroyed, with stone, with metal, with figurations not easily effaced” (Fedorov, ‘Astronomy and Architecture’) | “Being a cemetery, the Earth holds within it as many generations as there are worlds in the universe not ruled by reason” (Fedorov, ‘Astronomy and Architecture’) | “with resurrection being relegated to third place” (Svyatogor, ‘The Doctrine of the Fathers and Anarchism-Biocosmism’) | ““To burn at the stake! At the very least, it will be beautiful.”” (Bogdanov, ‘Immortality Day’, §6) | “Tongues of fire twisted around his body, hissing: “Everything repeats itself!”” (Bogdanov, ‘Immortality Day’, §6)
Themes
Biocosmism · biopower · Bogdanov · common task · Fedorov · immortality · museum as immortality · pyre · resurrection · Russian Cosmism