On New Year's Eve, people kept coming, to stay until the Metro reopened early in the morning—or to keep drinking and smoking and talking well into the next day and the day after. This was Moscow's bogema, the hard-partying, black-market-trading, intellectually edgy crowd. Some of them were writers or artists, and others claimed membership simply by living outside the official economy or by hosting good parties. Some of them would have read or heard of Orwell's 1984 or Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, and this added an extra note of recklessness to the mood. A very young aspiring actress arrived with an entourage of male admirers. One of them split off from the group as soon as they walked in. Instead of continuing to the kitchen, he sat down on an orphaned chair in the hallway. He looked like he was barely out of his teens. He asked the hostess for water.
Evgenia brought him a glass. He took a sip and asked, "Do you know when violets bloom on the lips?" She had no idea what that meant, and she loved it. She loved him for being able to say something that was so clearly beautiful and so utterly incomprehensible. He stayed the next day and the day after that, for three years, until she stopped loving him.2
His name was Alexander Dugin. He came from what they both thought of as the dullest type of Soviet family: his father, who was educated as an engineer, worked for the KGB in some secret but unglamorous capacity. His mother was a bureaucrat at the health ministry. His grandmother was a dean at the Higher Party School, an apparatchik factory that took up several city blocks just a few minutes from the apartment Evgenia and Dugin now shared. Their love was not the only emotion that united them: a shared hatred of the Soviet regime brought them even closer. In 1985, Dugin, whose imagination took more risks than Evgenia's, said that the Soviet Union was ending. This was after Gorbachev had declared perestroika. They had a son that year and named him Artur, in honor of Rimbaud.
Evgenia learned French and English from Dugin, who insisted that books must be read in the original. When they met, Dugin was twenty-two and had been expelled from a technical university, but he could already read in French, English, and German. Now it took him two weeks at a time to acquire a new European language. He learned by reading books, and Evgenia learned by reading with him, taking turns sounding out the sentences. As long as she loved him, she never tired of hearing words she could not understand. The first book she read in English with him was The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Evgenia continued to bring in the money, but both agreed that Dugin was the one who worked. He rose early, ate whatever he could
scavenge in the kitchen, and sat down at his desk to read for the next eighteen hours. The void he sought to fill by reading was vast. His focus was philosophy. He spent months explaining Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian to Evgenia; she loved the idea of embracing chaos—it seemed the perfect antidote to the stifling regimented boredom that surrounded them. Then Alexander told her that he had found a philosopher no one had ever heard of, one who had taken Nietzsche so much further. The philosopher's name was Heidegger.
The first translation of Heidegger's writing—just twenty pages of it —would not be published in Russian until 1986.3 Nor could Dugin, who had no affiliation with any Soviet institution and as a result no access to any but the smallest neighborhood libraries, find any of Heidegger's books in the original German. He finally procured a copy of Being and Time on microfilm. In the absence of a microfilm reader, he rigged up a diafilm projector—a Soviet technology for using thirty-five-millimeter film to show cartoons or short films at home using a hand-crank—to project the book onto the top of his desk. By the time he was done with Being and Time, Dugin needed glasses. He had also read the foundational text of his thinking and of the rest of his life.
ARUTYUNYAN
the phrase a Russian intellectual is probably most likely to use when talking about the early 1980s is bezvozdushnoye prostranstvo —"airless space." The era was stuffy like the Russian izba, a log cabin, when its windows are caulked for the winter: it keeps out the cold, but also the fresh air. The windows will not be opened even a crack until well into spring, and as time goes on, smells of people, food, and clothing mix into one mind-numbing undifferentiated smell of gigantic proportions. Something similar had happened to the Russian mind over two generations of Soviet rule. At the time of the October Revolution, the Russian intellectual elite had been both a part of and a partner to the European conversation about God, power, and human life. After fifty years of purges, arrests, and, most damaging,
unrelenting pressure on what had become an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas. Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning. Lenin had long ago dispensed with most of what Karl Marx had to say, enshrining a few of his selected ideas as uberlaw.
"As the time passed, Marx's successors revealed a tendency to present his teachings as a finite and all-inclusive concept of the world, and to regard themselves as responsible for the continuation of all of Marx's work, which they considered as being virtually complete," wrote Yugoslav Marxist dissident Milovan Djilas. "Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science."4
Marina Arutyunyan enrolled in Moscow State University's psychology department in 1973, when she was seventeen. The department was new, the subject and purpose of study were not entirely clear—what, after all, could and would a psychologist do in Soviet society?—but it drew young people like Arutyunyan: cerebral and romantic in comparable measure, and driven to learn the secrets of the human soul. Arutyunyan knew that "psyche" meant "soul."
For the first two years at the psychology department, Arutyunyan was in hell. Endless hours were devoted to a subject called Marxist- Leninist Philosophy. This was a clear case of propaganda masquerading as scholarship, and while the young Arutyunyan might not necessarily have phrased it this way, she cracked the propaganda code. She developed a simple matrix on which any philosophy could be placed and easily appraised. The matrix consisted of two axes on a cross. One ran from Materialism (good) to Idealism (bad) and the other from Dialectics (good) to Metaphysics (bad). The result was four quadrants. Philosophers who landed in the lower left quadrant, where Metaphysics met Idealism, were all bad. Kant was an example. Someone like Hegel—Dialectics meets Idealism—was better, but not all good. Philosophical perfection resided in the upper-right-hand corner of the graph, at the pinnacle of Dialectical Materialism.
Arutyunyan shared this matrix with several classmates, and now they had Marxist-Leninist Philosophy down.
History of the Party proved a much more difficult subject. "Look at yourself," the professor said to her derisively. He used a Russian word —taz—that could mean either "hips" or "basin." There was apparently something wrong with Arutyunyan's taz. She looked around, confused, wondering if she had somehow besoiled a laboratory basin in a History of the Party classroom. The professor, it turned out, was referring to her hips, which he deemed too narrow to produce quality Party progeny.