Ordo Ab Chao
A Grand Game of the Mind
You trained in mathematics at Moscow State University. There is a widespread assumption that the mathematical mind and the contemplative mind are opposites. Yet you went on to translate the Brahma Sutra into Russian—a text of radical metaphysical abstraction born of deep introspection—and found your way to the Nicholas Roerich Museum.
Was there, for you, a hidden kinship between these disciplines? Did mathematics—with its pursuit of pure logic and its rigorous construction of possible worlds—prepare you for Advaita Vedanta’s vision of a unified substrate beneath all phenomena?
Dmitry Popov:
Mathematics attracted me from childhood as a grand game of the mind governed by absolute logic. It fascinated me immensely.
As for the contrast between mathematical and contemplative approaches, there is truth in it. But I have never understood why one must choose between them, rather than use both opposites as complementary methods.
On the one hand, mathematics demands the strictest logic. On the other, it is not confined to the ordinary reality of our world. In mathematics, everything that can be logically constructed from elementary assumptions—axioms—possesses its own kind of reality.
Thus, parallel lines may never meet, or they may meet at an infinitely distant point. Mathematics moves easily among transcendental numbers, infinitely large and infinitely small quantities, endlessly branching processes, and spaces of many dimensions.
I was especially drawn to analytic geometry and topology. Their worlds contain innumerable forms, spaces, and dimensions. I also loved mathematical logic, which sometimes turns thought itself into its own object of play.
Let us also remember that contemplation has not been entirely absent from mathematics. In mathematical logic, for example, one finds intuitionism, where such questions come very close.
For that reason, mathematics merged quite naturally in my mind with Vedanta and Yoga during my university years. The result of that union has remained with me throughout my life.
More broadly, I believe—and practical experience has confirmed it—that in youth people are often not yet ready to choose their definitive path. A serious education in one of the fundamental sciences, such as mathematics, can offer an excellent foundation while keeping many future paths open.
Harmony, Synthesis & The Non-Dual Gaze
The Banner of Peace, created by Nicholas Roerich in 1930, became the emblem of the Roerich Pact, the first international treaty dedicated to the protection of cultural heritage. Courtesy of the Nicholas Roerich Museum ©
In your 2019 interview for the Russian Art Gallery Journal, you described Roerich’s art as “epic realism” and his worldview as a “synthesis of the spiritual culture of humankind.” You also noted that his career unfolded outside the turbulent mainstream of twentieth-century art.
In 2023, Revue Révolution published a dossier on the disappearance of the polymath. We traced the decline of integrative intelligence from antiquity through the Renaissance and into the modern era, where figures like Roerich became exceptions rather than norms.
What, in your view, nourished Roerich’s polymathy? Was it the ferment of the Russian Silver Age, his own introspective temperament, or something else?
Dmitry Popov:
I believe your intuition about the Russian Silver Age is entirely correct.
In Russia during the first quarter of the twentieth century—and later in the Russian diaspora throughout much of the century—we encounter a striking cultural phenomenon: an exceptionally broad and universal vision of the world, a holistic and often mystical perception of life, and a desire to synthesize the most diverse traditions of humanity.
This impulse found expression above all in poetry, the visual arts, and philosophy. Many of these figures sought parallel realization in science, literature, essay writing, philosophy, and art.
A number of them drew deeply from the legacy of Helena Blavatsky, who attempted to bring into a single current of thought the wisdom of India and Tibet, Jewish Kabbalah, the insights of the Hellenistic Neoplatonists, and elements of European mysticism and esotericism.
They were also inspired by her call for a synthesis of natural science, religion, and philosophy. To this, they boldly added poetry and the visual arts.
Roerich became perhaps the most brilliant and successful expression of this tendency.
Here I would also like to mention a figure still little known in the West: Daniil Andreev, son of the writer Leonid Andreev, a close friend of Roerich. [3]
This last poet of the Silver Age, while enduring harsh prison conditions for his dissent, conceived an immense spiritual vision: the Rose of the World, a future universal religion embracing the traditions of the past and grounded in a deeper trans-myth of humanity.
For years he composed this work inwardly, holding it in memory. After his release, near the end of his life, he succeeded in writing it down. The book survives, offering many readers profound inner insights.
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