Yaroslavl Station looked seedy in the evening light. Rumpled men were buying cans of beer from the kiosks as pick-me-ups. Pop music blared out of a snack bar. But inside my designated carriage there was a reassuring Soviet calm. The attendant took my ticket and showed me to a spotless two-berth compartment.

Less than an hour out of Moscow, the suburbs gave way to deep countryside. The train rumbled through it for almost twenty-four hours, crawling through forests and nameless wooden settlements whose quaint exteriors belied the hardscrabble lives of the people who lived in them. It was the middle of August, and by midnight, there was still enough light to read by. I fell asleep in the early hours and slept until lunchtime. At six o’clock the next evening the train pulled into Arkhangelsk.

*

There was a flavour of Ronald Harbottle about him: his dingy flat with Caucasian rugs on the floor; the joyless balcony with stacked jars of cabbage and its view of the White Sea.

He was ninety years old, though he looked at least twenty years younger. When I attributed his longevity to his genetic endowment, he dismissed it with a flap of his hand. His shirt sleeves were neatly rolled up, revealing forearms as wiry and brown as tree roots.

‘Fairy tales for children! Mountain people have this reputation, but it’s entirely down to the clean water. Clean water is at the heart of everything. There are two kinds of culture: tea-drinking culture and brewing culture. Why? Water purification!’ He shook his finger at the ceiling. ‘The tragedy of Russia is that it is an Asiatic tea-drinking culture that believes it can drink alcohol!’

He was an exile from his beloved South, estranged from his son and no longer involved in the work that bore his name. He was not even allowed to examine his own research papers. They were still technically classified, along with all those other arcane Soviet studies that have no respectable western parallel: the psychics and remote viewers, the astroarchaeologists and the inheritors of Kozyrev’s woollier dealings with electromagnetism.

‘I was a disciple of Fedorov,’ he said. ‘At that time, no question seemed impossible. We asked, why must we die?’

I remember asking him in Russian if he would consider submitting to the Procedure himself. His reaction reminded me of the old joke about a competition where the first prize is, say, a week’s holiday in Skegness, and the second prize is two weeks’ holiday in Skegness. Two existences, he suggested, would be an appreciably worse deal than one. He was from a time and generation for whom existence was something to be survived.

My ne zhivem, my sushchestvuem – we don’t live, we exist – is a stoic lament so common in Russia as to verge on cliché.

Malevin said his first life had included forced exile from his homeland, the loss of his parents, the Second World War, eight years in the Gulag. Why should he expect the next one to be any better?

He told me that as a young scientist in the 1940s, his expertise lay in the biological origins of consciousness. In 1946, in a closed session of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Malevin had presented the paper which drew him to the attention of the most senior members of the scientific establishment.

‘It was a beautiful and intuitive idea,’ Malevin told me. ‘Consciousness is preceded and constructed by language itself.’

His vigour and optimism only faltered twice during our long conversation. The first time was when I mentioned the break-up of the Soviet Union. ‘A tragedy,’ he said, with the sudden gravity of someone recalling a bereavement. ‘A coup d’état. The gas and oil industry stepped on the throat of the people. They held the Soviet Union to ransom.’

Earlier, he had proudly showed me his party card and told me he still regarded himself as a Soviet citizen.

The second time was when I asked him if he thought it was possible for his ideas to work in practice.

He fell silent for a while, and sat scratching his forearm. I noticed for the first time that his eyes were different colours: one was blue and the other brown.

When he spoke, there was a note of wistfulness in his voice. ‘Undoubtedly. You may know that we attempted something of this kind ourselves.’

I said Vera had referred to it.

Malevin looked grave. He said the first, doomed and premature attempts to apply his ideas took place in a closed research centre near the Aral Sea.

‘It was too early,’ he said. ‘We weren’t ready. But by then it was already a political question.’ He said that he had argued in his first paper that for the Procedure to be viable, you needed a large quantity of material – he gave the rather arbitrary figure of a hundred thousand words as a minimum. But just as important, he told me, was its range. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together to emphasise the significance of tone and texture. ‘Subtleties,’ he said. ‘Details.’

This is why, he said, for all their apparent advantages – no ethical oversight to trouble the scientists, a virtually inexhaustible supply of donor bodies – the early experiments were doomed to failure. Even with every word of Stalin’s writings coded, the results were insufficiently robust to produce what he called ‘a functioning proxy complex’.

The experiment of 1951 created a prototype so monstrous that it earned Malevin ten years in the Gulag – rescinded under Khrushchev – and caused the programme to be mothballed indefinitely.

Malevin told me he knew the project was in trouble even before the crazed and truculent mankurt came round from anaesthesia. He said the impossibility of the scientists’ task stemmed from the fact that huge areas of human life are simply not represented in the dictator’s writings. They had coded the work in minute detail, but vast tracts of the proxy complex were blank, existential nullities, like the conscience of a psychopath.

As soon as the golem became conscious, it began to attack one of the scientists. Captain Gennadi Hubov, a hero of Stalingrad, was present at the first experiment. While the others stood watching in horror, Hubov calmly drew his gun and shot the golem dead. For this perceived crime, Hubov was himself executed. In his official report on the tests, Malevin blamed the failure on fatal shortcomings in the coding process. All work on the project ceased.

The arctic sun had dipped below the horizon. It was around midnight. Malevin took sips from a glass of warm milk to soothe a stomach ulcer.

I mentioned his mismatched eyes.

‘The doctors say it’s a birthmark,’ he said. ‘But my grandmother said I was blessed by God. Not for myself, unfortunately. But to bring good fortune to others.’

‘Is that why you chose science?’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’ Suddenly he looked tired, but I didn’t want our conversation to end. I asked him what had set him on this path, what was the inspiration – I used the English word – for his work?

He said that for as long as he could remember, he had been fascinated by repetition, by the way human beings tell the same stories about themselves over and over again.

In his first writings, he had posited that these retellings and recurrences are some of the ways that consciousness undertakes repairs on itself. The human personality as he imagined it was a highly embattled construct: assailed from without by an infinite array of sense-data, attacked from within by a collection of centripetal and contradictory drives and impulses. It constantly needs to groom and restore its sense of integrity. Repetition, he said, is a simple and non-invasive version of the Procedure.

For obvious reasons, neither Malevin nor anyone else in the old Soviet Union was ever allowed to write about the theological implications of his work, but Malevin told me that he believed that the individuated personality was already one step towards a kind of deadness. You couldn’t deny our physical separateness from one another, he said, but he felt there was a state before personality, when the pre-verbal sensorium is fully open to the world. The analogy he used was a camera body with no lens attached: light flooding into it. Of course, with nothing to focus the light, the experience is irrational, but, Malevin maintained, closer to the actual energetic state of reality. At this point, he said, the analogy breaks down: there’s no way our individuated consciousness can grasp the notion that the camera and the light are actually identical, or that we are a seamless part of the out-there. We can’t get there in words, because the job of words is to construct the fiction of our separate identity.