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A Russian View of Immortality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
It is arguable that without a decline in the credibility of life after death, Western civilisation, with its frenetic attempts to manipulate man's physical environment, could hardly have developed as it did. As long as human life is regarded sub specie aeternitatis, changes in the conditions under which it is lived can hardly be thought of as being of supreme importance. Conversely, current indications of a renewal of interest in the great theme of personal immortality may owe something to the eclipse of our science-based culture and the increasingly precarious nature of life in this world. It is still far too soon to be sure. In the circumstances it may be of interest to look at a work written almost 200 years ago by a man who has often been hailed as the first Russian revolutionary. Though it has never been translated, it is generally known in English as the Treatise on Immortality. Highly literate and articulate, the author affirmed his belief in the indestructibility of the human spirit in face of imminent bodily dissolution. The arguments he deploys are not essentially dissimilar to the terms of the immortality debate today. First, however, a minimum of information about the writer is necessary if his views are not to be presented in a vacuum.
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References
page 479 note 1 See for instance two recent books: Aldwincle, Russell: Death in the Secular City (Allen & Unwin, London, 1972)Google Scholar; Lewis, H. D.: The Self and Immortality (Macmillan, London, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 479 note 2 Radishchev, A. N.: O cheloveke, o evo smertnosti i bessmertii—in vol. 2 1941 of the three-volume ‘Complete Works’ Moscow-Leningrad 1938–52. Rendered literally, the title would read ‘On the Mortality and Immortality of Man’. All translations are my own, and I have tried to retain something of Radishchev's style, which is archaic and at times ecstatic.Google Scholar
page 479 note 3 The best and most easily accessible brief account of Radishchev in English is probably R. P. Thaler's introduction to Radishchev, A. N.: A Journay from St. Petersburg to Moscow, tr. Wiener, Leo (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1958).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 479 note 4 I retain the French word ‘philosophe’ because people like Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert were not, strictly speaking, philosophers.
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page 482 note 2 In The Devils (often called The Possessed in English).
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page 484 note 1 Treatise, op. cit., p. 141.
page 484 note 2 Cf. McConnell, , op. cit., p. 160:Google Scholar ‘Radishchev at no time suggested a hierarchy above man, between him and God’, with Treatise, op. cit., p. 111: ‘If this gradual progression, if this ascent of substances is not a figment and vain imagination, one must inevitably infer substances much higher than man and invisible powers’. Since the author throughout his work lays great stress on the gradual progression that he speaks of here, it is clear that the condition is a hypothetical one: angels do exist, though they are not part of the visible creation.
page 484 note 3 ‘In Radishchev, although he defends himself against a charge of materialism, one can still discern a pupil of Helvetius. He is more anxious to set forth than to refute the conclusions of pure atheism’—Tatiana Wolff: Pushkin on Literature (Methuen, London 1971), pp. 389–90.Google Scholar
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page 485 note 3 Treatise, op. cit., p. 73.