Overview

The idea of abolishing death was one of the most influential myth-making concepts expressed in Russian literature from 1900 to 1930. In this book Dr. Masing-Delic finds the seeds of this extraordinary concept in the erosion of traditional religion in late-nineteenth-century Russia. Influenced by the new power of scientific inquiry, humankind appropriated various divine attributes one after the other, including omnipotence and omniscience, but eventually even aiming toward the realization of individual, physical immortality, and thus aspiring to equality with God. This aspiration, expressed in the ideas of Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Fedorov and in the renewed concepts of Gnosticism, brought such different writers as Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok, Fedor Sologub, Nikolai Ognev and Nikolai Zabolotsky together in a single space of the myth of the final victory over death.

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Irene Masing-Delic is Professor Emerita, the Ohio State University. Her area of expertise is in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature. Her publications include Abolishing Death, Exotic Moscow under Western Eyes, and From Symbolism to Socialist Realism. Dr. Masing-Delic is the author of numerous articles on late nineteenth-century, symbolism, and early Soviet literature.

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