The present collected volume is the first work to address the posthuman in Russian and Soviet culture in a wide historical lens, ranging from the immediate legacy of the Bolshevik revolution to late-Soviet design and literature of the twenty-first century. Both editors have scholarly backgrounds in Russian and Slavic modernisms, and they bring to this work their expertise in twentieth century Continental philosophy and post-anthropocentric theory. Each of the twelve articles included addresses the posthuman in a slightly different mode, thereby offering a diversity of perspectives on the broader, ongoing debate of “what is the posthuman”? At times, the volume has trouble finding its focus; at other times, its theoretical framework is rooted in a European philosophical vocabulary that does not always adequately capture the idiosyncratic etymologies of Russian-Soviet intellectual history. Nevertheless, The Human Reimagined is an important step in an uncharted direction in Russian Studies and sets the groundwork for future research in this future-looking field.

The editors’ introduction establishes the volume's theoretical framework by considering posthumanism within four main contexts: (1) the emergence of Cartesian humanism (whereby posthumanism is a rejection of the main tenant of humanism, namely the idea that reason is what sets human beings apart from nonhuman animals); (2) the Continental philosophy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben; (3) Francis Fukuyama's 1992 theory of “the end of history”; and, finally, but most importantly (4) the range of responses by Russian artists, writers, and poets to the accelerated technological development of their age, not just in the twenty-first, but at the turn of the twentieth century and throughout the Soviet period, when technological innovation often went hand-in-hand with philosophical reflection on the nature and future of humankind. The editors focus primarily on those well-known genres and schools of thought that are especially attuned to post-human ideals: in particular, Cosmism, science fiction, and the work of early Soviet writers and industrialists who dreamed of augmenting human productivity (and even human biology) through technological innovation. While the introduction offers readers a variety of ways to conceive of the posthuman, probably the most compelling definition comes from feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti. She argues that to be posthuman “does not mean to be indifferent to the humans, or to be de-humanized,” but that it instead “implies a new way of combining ethical values with the well-being of an enlarged sense of community, which includes one's territorial and environmental inter-connections” (14).

When we consider points 1–3 (from above) in the context of the fourth, they take on a series of new meanings, and we are left wondering just how well western and/or European posthuman “markers” apply to Russia-produced texts. First, we must recognize that humanism took a radically different shape in Russia than it did in Europe, in the wake of René Descartes and later Immanuel Kant. Second is the fact that Continental philosophy and even feminist theory played a comparatively minor role in Soviet philosophy of the twentieth century, even though these traditions account for much of the literature on the posthuman. This volume does not address those Soviet philosophers of the Continental tradition who considered the possibility (or impossibility) of transhumanism from behind the Iron Curtain, including Valerii Podoroga, Vasilii Nalimov, Merab Mamardashvili, Georgii Shchedrovitskii, and Mikhail Epstein. Third, Fukuyama's idea of the “end of history” no longer holds up when we remove it from the context of liberal democracy and western free-market capitalism, and especially when we transpose those same ideas into the key of Soviet ideocracy, where philosophical claims about history served as the building blocks for state ideology. In other words, western theory and European Continental philosophy have a great deal to say about the problem of the posthuman, but very little of that maps neatly onto the realities of posthumanism as the idea developed in Russian-Soviet history.

The volume is at its strongest in its individual contributions, and especially when it treats the question of the posthuman in the literary realm: in late-Soviet science fiction (Elana Gomel and Colleen McQuillen), contemporary fiction (Jacob Emery and Katerina Lakhmitko), and poetry (Keti Chukhrov, Jonathan Brooks Platt, and Kristina Toland). Two contributions stand out as particularly unexpected, and therefore especially welcome: Diana Kurkovsky West's work on human-machine integration in late-Soviet design and Trevor Wilson's analysis of the intersections of sexuality, queerness, and zoological taboos in contemporary culture, focusing on the work of Viktor Pelevin and Slava Mogutin.

The Human Reimagined is one step toward addressing the complex legacies of humanism and posthumanism in Russia and the post-Soviet space. Future work in this direction will hopefully take up the following questions: what role does irrationality play in this debate? After all, irrationality is not coded as anti-humanism in the Russian context, but rather comprises both the content and the method of some of Russia's most celebrated literary and philosophical masters. Moreover, what do Russia's philosophers themselves have to say about posthumanism and transhumanism? In addition, how can we make sense of the trend of apocalyptic fiction in contemporary Russian prose? On the whole, this body of work (Dmitrii Glukhovskii, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Ol΄ga Slavnikova, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatiana Tolstaia, and many others) does not posit an end to humanism in the post-apocalyptic realm but, on the contrary, strips human life down to its most basic human elements by reimagining it within post-apocalyptic space. Finally, how does posthumanism connect with ideas like sustainability, animal rights, universal design, and other ethical concerns that require the expansion of human intersectionality into realms outside the anthropological?