My Buddhist practice of meditation helped me to prepare mentally for the exams at Poligrafichesky Institute (life became so empty that I decided to give it a try) and to pass them with utmost serenity. During the preceding year I have taken drawing lessons from I.P.Z., a wonderful woman to whom I was introduced by I.I.A. If I know anything about how to draw now then it is only thanks to her. Although we never spoke about religion, she herself was another bright speck in my cotton wool landscape – her personality that of a typical intelligentsia was an antidote to the looming-in-again Soviet reality which made me feel numb and idiotic.
The Institute was not like the Art College or perhaps I changed – I had no one to talk to about my existential problems. Perhaps Perestroika dried out or my energy was slipping through the ever-present hole in my soul. I studied hard; the study was the most meaningful part of my life. We were taught to think and work according to the methods developed by Vladimir Favorsky (the book illustrator and designer, the founder of our Institute and friend of Fr Pavel Florensky); they suited my character and interests very well. The academics of the Institute gave me a lot, and not only regarding book design: the methods of Favorsky and his disciples are universal and I later applied them to my icon painting.
Other than study my life was meaningless. Buddhism was intellectually satisfying but cold in an impersonal way; I was gradually losing interest in it, turning instead towards theosophy. Its misty promise of a quick and personal mystical path attracted me but the rest repelled because my knowledge of Eastern religions enabled me to see the outrageous incoherence of the speculations of the authors (Blavatskaya with her Secret Doctrine, Gurdzhiev, etc). The books by Nicholas Roerich (a Russian artist, explorer of the East, occultist and probably Soviet spy) and his wife Elena (a hard-core, dark occultist) were a little more digestible but their burning hatred for Christianity repelled me even more. It is amazing that I, being alien to Christianity would become enraged every time I came across their attempts to misinterpret or abuse it. Nevertheless, I continued reading the occult books and even put some of what I learnt into practice. The atmosphere in the country was suitable: the TV was flooded with faces of “witch doctors”, “folk healers”, “clairvoyants”, “sorcerers”; some of them even attempted to “heal” the audience through the TV monitors. The ex-atheists and ex-communists now enthusiastically placed their jars of tap water before the TV screen so the “non-traditional healer” could “charge” it and they would be healed.
All this changed rather abruptly. Feeling even more empty than usual I attended the seminar of Shoko Asahara – the guru came to Moscow from Japan. I have never seen him before: he was very plump, even fat, dressed in pink clothes, sitting in the centre of the huge stadium and saying something into a microphone in corrupted Russian. I do not remember what he was saying – I became bored quickly and left. Outside the stadium I noticed the stall with brochures. I approached, looked and saw the depiction of the plump naked guru on the cross, with the crown of thorns on a brochures cover. Under the image was written “Now I proclaim myself the Christ”. That sight somehow enraged me, a non-Christian, to an unbelievable degree, and that is how everything guru- and Buddhism-related in my life was finished.
Or not. There was yet another, truly last attempt. There was a seminar again, the same guru, I was returning from late lectures with a few classmates – we sat in the almost empty metro train carriage and I was planning to get off in two stops to go to the same stadium. Suddenly a young drunk man walked in, positioned himself directly opposite me, above me, hanging on the horizontal metal pole like a ripe fruit. The train took off and he dropped upon me with all his drunken might. He managed to hit me on the head so badly that I thought I had a concussion. I was too nauseous to go to the stadium. When I walked into my flat the nausea disappeared.