This is a bold and astonishing book. It pulls together two very different Russian philosophers, the humanist Vladimir Bibikhin and the Putin apologist Alexander Dugin, serious Heideggerians who apply the master's legacy on mortality, politics, and metaphysics to reboot a new Russia. A wake-up call for the Western ear too prone to hear only our own fading triumphalist debates.

Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USA

This book offers a provocative and unsettling meditation on what a “new beginning” in thought might mean today. Drawing on Heidegger's later vision of a thinking released from metaphysical closure, it brings into stark relief two radically different Russian appropriations of that legacy: Vladimir Bibikhin's gentle reverence for Being and transformative openness, and Alexander Dugin's volatile defense of cultural singularity through what he terms a “philosophy of chaos.” The dialogue-at times implicit, at times confrontational-between plenitude and void, nonviolence and aggression, resonates far beyond Russia's borders. What emerges is a deeply consequential challenge to the intellectual complacency of the West: that our assumptions about universality, reason, and order may themselves be historical accidents rather than philosophical necessities. One may recoil from Dugin's polemics or find solace in Bibikhin's calm, but neither can be dismissed. This book forces us to confront a world where thought itself should begin again-from nothing, or from everything.

Marina F. Bykova, Professor of Philosophy, North Carolina State University, USA

Love and Meng brilliantly take the reader through their original and compelling interpretation of Heidegger's revolutionary notion of openness, the violence and criminality against conventional thinking required to attend to it, and the diametrically opposed directions that two Russian thinkers take Heidegger's destruction of metaphysics on behalf of the other beginning: the philosophy of chaos of Aleksandr Dugin, Putin's philosopher, and Vladimir Bibikhin's emancipatory amekhania as joyful exuberance at life. In unfolding the reception of Heidegger by these recent and influential Russian thinkers, the authors place the reader at their crossroads, and ours.

Henry Pickford, Professor of German Studies, Duke University, USA