“In his 1917 booklet Petuh Revolyucii [The Rooster of the Revolution], Svyatogor advances the poetic and intellectual movement of volcanism, calling for the planetary-scale practice of “the highest culture,” bent on “creating a new landscape and a new sky [sozdat’ novyi rel’ef zemli i novoe nebo].””
“Nature in its entirety, including the atmosphere, is to be reshaped by the power of fire that, breaking out from the molten core of the planet, renews the aging upper crusts of the earth”
“Although he does not explicitly refer to the phoenix, but rather to the rooster who signals the dawn of a new day, Svyatogor alludes to a solar bird (akin to the mythic zharptitsa) completing from above the work that volcanism initiates from below”
“The chronology of a phoenix’s life, whether referring to the history of humanity or natural history, is a revolutionary timeline, both in the sense of abrupt changes and cataclysms—rather than incremental evolutionary development—and in the sense of a rotation, in which the end is followed by a new beginning”
“Similar to the idea of a permanent revolution, human participation in cosmic life involves the desire and the capacity to exist in and with fire, to lead what ancient Greeks called purobios, seeing that the cosmos is this very everlasting fire, pur aeizōon, kindling and extinguishing “in measures,” as Heraclitus has it”
“In contrast to the myth of the phoenix, where fire reduces the aged body to ash and offers a glimpse of a higher life, biocosmism demands the seemingly impossible: living on in the fiery medium”
“That is why Svyatogor craves speaking in “a fiery tongue [govorit’ ognennym yazykom], which, emerging out of the depths of spirit, licks the blue of the atmosphere, burns the moons, cuts the tails of comets, and threatens the final frontiers of the world.””
“The property relations upended by the Russian Revolution cannot help but affect the revolution in spirit that he detects in a mature biocosmism. What is the sense of “my” body and “my” mind in a communist society that is neither national nor international but interplanetary?”
“In his poetry and prose alike, Svyatogor creates a short circuit, bypassing the humanist notion of the human, between the bestialism of biocosmic existence and the technological achievements that make it practically possible”
“Svyatogor’s implicit phoenix combines in itself cosmic and psychic dimensions, a little like the ensouled creature, zōon empsuchon, in Plato’s Timaeus, albeit a creature, in whom biological life (zōē) passes over into individual and social existence (bios)”
“For Svyatogor, as also for the rest of the cosmists, the impersonal immortality congruent with matter is insufficient; the very relation between spirit and matter would have to be transfigured in the achievement of an immortal but “dynamic” individuality, alongside “an absolutely new cosmos.””