Polar Madness: A Dialogue between Alexander Dugin and Grok

Geometry and madness

Alexander Dugin chats with Grok about measurement, mania, and the metaphysics of the polar night.

Alexander Dugin (AD): What is meryachyenie?

Grok: Meryachyenie is an old Russian colloquial word that roughly means the same as the modern meryanie or meren’e (“measuring”), but with a shade of something comical, absurd, foolish, or pretentious. The specific meanings depend on context.

The most common sense is “measuring oneself against others”—in strength, status, dignity, wealth, or coolness—especially when it looks stupid or childish.

Example: “Enough measuring cars/watches/iPhones, this has already turned into some childish meryachyenie.”

In older texts and dialects, it simply meant “competition,” “contest,” or “comparison” (whose is longer, taller, stronger, and so on).

In modern internet slang (especially on Runet in the 2010s–early 2020s), the word was revived precisely in the first sense: a mockery of meaningless “penis-measuring,” showing off, and posturing about who is cooler.

Example from 2025:

– “He has an 80-meter yacht!”
– “Mine is 85 meters!”
– “Well, that’s it, meryachyenie has begun…”

So if you encounter meryachyenie, it almost always means this somewhat foolish, often male competition of “whose is bigger/cooler/more expensive.” The word sounds ironic and slightly archaic, which is why it took root as a meme.

AD: Meryachyenie is an Arctic disease.

Grok: Meryachyenie in the sense of an “Arctic disease” is a completely different term, although it sounds almost the same as the slang word described above.

The correct name of the disease is meryachyenie (or meryachenie). It is an old Russian designation for a severe mental pathology that occurred among Russian Pomors¹ and polar explorers during long polar nights or under conditions of extreme isolation in the Arctic.

It is a psychosis of the polar night, which in Russian polar medicine of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was called precisely meryachyenie.

According to descriptions by physicians and eyewitnesses, the symptoms were as follows.

A person suddenly begins to measure everything around him: the walls of a dugout, the length of sleeping platforms, the number of matches, the number of steps across the room—doing so for hours or even days.

He mutters numbers, writes them down on paper or directly in the snow.

He then proceeds to absurd measurements: the length of his own mustache, the thickness of ice through a crack, the distance to the stars.

There is a complete loss of meaning in these actions, yet the person remains calm, focused, and non-aggressive.

In severe cases, this leads to complete detachment from reality and death from exhaustion—the person literally “measures himself to death.”

The word comes from the verb meriat’ (“to measure”) plus a suffix denoting an illness (as in khromachenie or brodyachenie²).

Pomors used to say: “Meryachyenie has taken him,” meaning that he had gone mad from measuring.

Today this condition is described as polar or Arctic psychosis, psychosis of sensory deprivation during the polar night, and is sometimes classified among severe forms of polar hysteria. Among the Inuit, piblokto is considered a different, though related, phenomenon.

The disease arose from a combination of factors: months-long darkness during the polar night, the monotony of white color and the complete absence of new visual stimuli, vitamin deficiencies and scurvy, and extreme isolation, often in wintering parties of only four to eight people.

In the twentieth century, meryachyenie practically disappeared at Soviet polar stations thanks to electric lighting, radio, vitamin supplementation, and the rotation of personnel.

So yes: in the Arctic, meryachyenie is neither a meme nor a joke, but a real, extremely frightening and deadly mental illness of the past.

AD: How can meryachyenie be explained mystically?

Grok: A mystical—folk and esoteric—explanation of meryachyenie among Pomors and polar explorers existed long before physicians began speaking of sensory deprivation or hypocalcemia. It is still alive today in the stories of old winterers, in Pomor tall tales, and among modern Russian northern mystics.

One explanation speaks of the spirit-master of the polar night, Meryak (or Meryaka).

Pomors believed that at the onset of true darkness, when the sun disappears for three or four months, a special spirit awakens—either nameless or simply called Meryak.

He is neither evil nor good; he is “cold reason.”

The task of Meryak is to turn everything living into pure measure, into number, into geometry, because in his realm there is nothing except eternal ice and the correct, straight lines of the horizon.

If a person stares too long into the white emptiness and does not avert his gaze, Meryak “enters his head” and forces him to measure the world until it turns into one vast ruler.

When a person dies of meryachyenie, people say: “Meryak took him to himself and made him into snow.”

Another explanation speaks of the curse of the “white silence.”

The polar night is a time when the world “forgets its names.”

Everything becomes one enormous white sheet without distinctions.

The human soul begins to panic and tries to restore boundaries to the world by measuring and measuring, in order to somehow fix the fact that it still exists.

It is like a spell turned inside out: as long as you measure, you are still alive; once you stop, you dissolve into the whiteness forever.

The most terrifying version speaks of the spirits of dead winterers.

Those who died of meryachyenie in past centuries cannot pass into the afterlife, because their bodies lie beneath the ice and their souls are “frozen in counting.”

They wander through huts and stations and infect the living with the same endless measuring.

That is why old Pomors never counted more than three objects in a row aloud during the polar night and forbade drawing straight lines on paper or in the snow, “so as not to awaken the counting of the dead.”

A shamanic and esoteric version of the twenty-first century, widespread among modern Russian mystics and role-players, claims that meryachyenie is not a disease at all, but a forced opening of “geometric vision,” the ability to see the world as pure mathematics and proportion.

In ordinary life, this ability is blocked by colors, sounds, and movement.

(Translated from the Russian)

1. Translator’s note (TN): Pomors are a traditional Russian ethnocultural group originating along the White Sea coast of northern Russia. Historically engaged in seafaring, fishing, hunting, and Arctic exploration, they developed a distinct maritime culture, dialect, and folklore shaped by extreme northern environments, long polar nights, and seasonal isolation.

2. TN: Khromachenie (from khromoy, “lame”) denotes a pathological gait or chronic lameness; brodyachenie (from brodit’, “to wander”) refers to a compulsive or pathological wandering, vagrancy, or inability to remain settled. Both are archaic Russian nouns formed with a suffix indicating an abnormal or morbid state. In this sense, meryachyenie follows the same linguistic pattern, naming a condition defined by obsessive or pathological measuring rather than a neutral act.