Pavel Filonov et Nikolaï Fiodorov : une rencontre entre le mécanique et l’organique

Pavel Filonov and Nikolaï Fëdorov : A Question in its Context It is commonly recognized that Pavel Filonov played one of the central roles in the “synthetic modernism” which included futurist and post-futurist avant-gardes. This statement, as well as the equally accepted parallel with Andrei Platonov, give us an opportunity to return to the ancient idea about a trend inside this movement which could be defined by a poetics of semantic and formal shift [ sdvig], by a complex neo-primitivist stance, and by a more or less obvious relation to the teachings of Nikolaï Fëdorov. Here, we try to show that an important meeting point of between Filonov’s and Fëdorov’s conceptions was their programmatic lack of distinction between the living and lifeless, inert matter, between organicism and mechanism. One result of this position was a kind of palingenetic utopia, a vision of a future humanity arriving at a higher, improved, and sublimated state of development, at its “universal dawn” in the Filonov’s words.