Nikolai Zharinov invites guests to discuss the image of the person of the future at a Literary Club meeting at the National Centre RUSSIA

A meeting of the Literary Club "What to Read?", dedicated to the image of the person of the future in the works of Ivan Yefremov, will be held at the National Centre RUSSIA on 20 August at 19:00. Heroism as a way of life, vast worlds and technological responsibility — the visionary author offers a fundamentally different view of the future from the bleak post-apocalyptic scenarios of contemporary science fiction. Writer Nikolai Zharinov invites guests to take a fresh look at Yefremov's books and explore why his works still provoke debate and how his vision of the future evolved.

Participants will embark on a journey through the writer's worlds — from the ancient ideal of harmony in "Thais of Athens" to the cosmic horizons of "Andromeda Nebula" and "The Bull's Hour". The discussion will focus on how Yefremov imagined the person of the distant future: as an ideal figure without weaknesses or as a living character capable of making mistakes and changing. The meeting will be hosted by Nikolai Zharinov, a philologist, cultural scholar, writer, journalist and populariser of literature and art.

"I invite you to discuss the work of one of the most important Soviet writers, Ivan Yefremov. He is one of the most multifaceted authors. His popularity really began with a utopian novel, and later Yefremov presented some truly disturbing dystopias, such as 'The Bull's Hour'. He also wrote remarkable historical novels," Nikolai Zharinov says.

A separate section will be devoted to the "ethics of the noosphere": heroism as a way of life, responsibility towards humanity and the technologies it creates, and the place of machines in the world of the future. Experts will discuss Yefremov's anticipation of global information networks and "memory machines", comparing them with modern neural networks: where the line lies between a tool and a threat to human agency, and whether artificial intelligence can become the very "instrument of the noosphere" the writer envisioned.

The meeting will also feature an interactive quiz, "Yefremov's Prediction or 21st-Century Reality?", in which guests will be invited to guess which ideas and technologies came from his books and which are already part of today's scientific agenda. The event will conclude with a Q&A session with the speakers.

The discussion will feature:

— Yevgeny Sazonov — Editor-in-Chief of the Komsomolskaya Pravda media holding, writer, photographer and documentary filmmaker, and author of a book about pioneers of the Far East, including Ivan Yefremov;

— Nikolai Smirnov — historian, writer and co-author of the book "Ivan Yefremov" from the "Lives of Remarkable People" series;

— Sergei Volobuyev — Deputy Director General of ICS Consulting, Senior Research Fellow at the D. S. Likhachev Heritage Institute and member of the Council of Star Navigation of the "Andromeda Nebula" media universe project.

Registration is required to attend the event.