Erin Brown

And in fact, Peterson, his acolyte, wrote down a bunch of his ideas and sent them to none other than Fyodor Dostoevsky.

who really latched on to them and became obsessed with them.

In fact, you can really see some of these ideas in The Brothers Karamazov.

So one of the great questions of The Brothers Karamazov is, you know, who does not desire the death of his father?

And all throughout this, you see Fyodorov's ideas kind of percolating up and bubbling into it.

So he was really influential among the kind of literary set.

He also met and had kind of a frosty, a little bit of a prickly relationship with Liev Tolstoy as well.

Tolstoy greatly admired Fyodorov, but was not about to buy into his ascetic lifestyle.

Even when he was pretending to kind of go back to the land as a peasant serf, he still wore silk undershirts.

So he was not about to get on Fyodorov's train of sleeping on a trunk with newspapers as a blanket.

Yeah, not entirely.

So his ideas were building, but obviously with the entrance of the Soviet era, there were...

There were a lot of revolutionary ideas, and there were a small group of kind of an offshoot, sort of second and third generation of Fyodorov acolytes who, you know, really grabbed onto the language of the time and declared, you know, death as ugly and inadmissible and these sorts of things.

But under Stalin, a lot of the great thinkers of the Russian Empire were sent to labor camps or killed, and that included a lot of the early cosmists.

But...

What was interesting is that some of his acolytes had been the initial kind of people who had thought about what it might look like to travel into space.

So even as early as 1903, he had kind of an acolyte who was drawing rocket boosters and airlocks.

And eventually his ideas came back rapidly.

kind of roaring back in the 60s as the Soviet Union entered the space race.

And so he is considered sort of the grandfather of these ideas that push people to consider, like, could we get to the cosmos?