Aleksandr Prokhanov and Post-Soviet Esotericism

Aleksandr Prokhanov (born 1938) is a prize-winning novelist and also, as editor of the weekly newspaper Zavtra, a leading figure in Russian ‘imperial patriotism’. Ever since 1991, when he signed (and reputedly wrote) the manifesto for the failed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev, he has been an influential voice in Russian political culture―helping to turn the ‘irreconcilable opposition’ of the 1990s towards Empire, grappling with whether to endorse Vladimir Putin as a savior or expose him as a fraud, and promulgating a bewildering series of ‘conspiracy theories’ in which Russian and international affairs are explained in the most extravagant terms. He has also been a remarkably prolific writer; and the best of his novels are real works of literature, at once muckraking and lyrical, interweaving Moscow scandal so tightly with the mystical yearnings of ‘cosmism’ that the reader can hardly prize them apart. The same themes flow backwards and forwards between Prokhanov’s fiction and his non-fiction. World conspiracies, space exploration, the resurrection of the dead, Stalin as a supernatural redeemer―these and other preoccupations recur again and again, in his leading articles as well as in his novels.

This book, the first on Prokhanov, offers an account of his writing and of the ‘red-brown’ esotericism he expounds. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with modern Russian literature or politics, and also to students of ‘conspiracy theories’, esoteric belief systems, or the conspiracy novel.