Virtual Reality of the Post-Modern World (Examples from Contemporary Russian Literature)

Abstract

The aim of the article presented here is to define virtual reality in a post-modern world in which revolutionary technological transformations are taking place before our eyes. Thus, we are witnessing the implementation into our existence of new entities created in the first instance by the sciences including information technology, biotechnology, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. The latter fields of knowledge have become our research object, with examples drawn from selected works of contemporary Russian literature. It turns out that transhumanism in Russia has its prehistory, for example, the cosmism of Nikolai Fyodorov, and is intensively developing in the present day, for example, the organisation, the Russian Transhumanist Movement. In terms of fiction related to the desire to transform homo sapiens into homo superior, Andrei Platonov, Yevgeny Zamiatin, Mikhail Bulgakov highlight this trend. In contemporary times, the themes of transhumanism, immortalism, cryonics, and artificial intelligence have been taken up by Tatyana Tolstaya, Olga Slavnikova, Victor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, among others. On the pages of their novels, they present how utopia understood as a pipe dream is transformed into utopia – an experiment. The rapid development of civilization forces us to have moral doubts: “unfrozen” after a few hundred years, man may not adapt in a new environment. Artificial intelligence threatens to transform human beings into their replicas, cyborgs, taking over people’s jobs and threatening unemployment. This in turn contradicts the idea of eternal life, raising questions about whether replicas of humans will be endowed with consciousness and emotions, or whether humans transformed from creatures to creators will still remain human.