Evgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin (Евгений Всеволодович Головин, 1938-2010) was a Moscow poet, translator, and esoteric writer and a central figure of the Yuzhinsky circle, the underground mystical and literary salon that gathered around the writer Yury Mamleev in the 1960s. After Mamleev emigrated in 1974, Golovin became the circle’s leading figure, styling himself its “Black Reichsführer,” and promoted interest in alchemy, Western occultism, and the Traditionalist school of René Guénon and Julius Evola.

Golovin is significant for the history of Russian nationalist ideology because the young Aleksandr Dugin joined the circle around 1980, and Golovin introduced him to Guénon, Evola, and related thought. That milieu fed the eclectic Traditionalist, Eurasianist, and occult elements of Dugin’s later work.

Sources

• Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Clover, Charles. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. Yale University Press, 2016.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.