Authors

Discussion

In his famous essay on Surrealism, Walter Benjamin recalls a “disturbing” encounter with Buddhists during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1927. Most rooms in the hotel – the doors “always left ajar” – were occupied by Tibetan lamas who came to Moscow for a Buddhist congress. My paper takes Benjamin’s aesthetic “shock” as a starting point to retrace Buddhist motifs in Yuri Mamleev (1931-2015). In the 1960-70s, Buddhism became a major influence on Soviet unofficial culture. Hippies, dissidents and dropouts flocked to Siberia and Central Asia in search of enlightenment. Among them Mamleev, the founder of “metaphysical realism” and a leading figure in Moscow’s “schizoid” underground. Upon his return from exile, in the 1990s, Mamleev taught Indian philosophy at Moscow State University; there, he became an important mediator of Buddhism in post-Soviet Russia. My paper critically analyses Mamleev’s interpretation of Buddhism in Sud’ba bytiia (The Fate of Being; 1997). Inspired by Benjamin’s open doors, I focus on the dialectic between openness and closure, revelation and hermeticism. Mamleev’s vision will be situated in the broader discursive space of “Soviet Buddhism.” Finally, I argue that Mamleev’s metaphysical conception of Russia  – a revelatory “abyss” beyond “East” and “West” – is infused with esoteric, neo-conservative and Eurasianist ideas.