Neoliberalism’s World Order

Neoliberalism’s World Order

Adam Tooze DISSENT MAGAZINE

Since its inception, neoliberalism has sought not to demolish the state, but to create an international order strong enough to override democracy in the service of private property. 

Pascal Lamy, former director-general of the World Trade Organization, leads a meeting of WTO ministers, July 2008 (© WTO / Flickr) 

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

by Quinn Slobodian

Harvard University Press, 2018, 400 pp.

Neoliberalism has many histories. Milton Friedman, the Chicago school, Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan’s market revolution, IMF structural adjustment, and shock-therapy transition programs for the post-Communist states are all fixtures in the narrative of the neoliberal turn. If we wind the clock back to the aftermath of the Second World War, we can see precursors in the ordoliberalism of West Germany and the Mont Pèlerin gathering of 1947. If asked to name a founding moment, one might point to the Colloque Walter Lippmann of August 1938 in Paris. Those with a particular interest in the history of economic thought might go one step further back to the “socialist calculation debate” launched by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in 1920, in which he articulated a fundamental critique of the logical possibility of socialist central planning.

All this is familiar to scholars. Globalists, from Wellesley historian Quinn Slobodian, is important because it provides a new frame for the history of this movement. For Slobodian, the earliest and most authentic brand of neoliberalism was from the outset defined by its preoccupation with the question of world economic integration and disintegration. In the 1970s, neoliberalism’s proponents would help unleash the wave of globalization that has swept the world. But, as Slobodian shows, their advocacy for free trade and the liberalization of capital movement goes back to neoliberalism’s founding moments in the wake of the First World War. The movement was born as a passionately conservative reaction to a post-imperial moment—not in the 1950s and ’60s but amidst the ruins of the Habsburg empire. Torn apart by self-determination, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy in 1918 was not just the failure of a complex multinational polity. In the eyes of von Mises and his ideological allies, it threw into question the order of private property. It was the First World War and the Great Depression that birthed democratic nation-states, which no longer merely shielded private property but claimed control over a national economy conceived of as a resource to be supervised by the state. Private property that had once been secured by a remote but even-handed imperial sovereign was now at the mercy of national democracy.

Faced with this shocking transformation, neoliberals set out not to demolish the state but to create an international order strong enough to contain the dangerous forces of democracy and encase the private economy in its own autonomous sphere. Before they gathered at Mont Pèlerin, von Mises hosted the original meetings of the neoliberals in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, where he and his colleagues called for the rolling back of Austrian socialism. They did not think that fascism offered a long-term solution, but, given the threat of revolution, they welcomed Mussolini and the Blackshirts. As von Mises remarked in 1927, fascism “has, for the moment, saved European civilization.” Even in the late 1930s, Wilhelm Röpke, another leading neoliberal, would unabashedly declare that his desire for a strong state made him more “fascist” than many of his readers understood. We should not take this as a light-hearted quip.

The neoliberals were lobbyists for capital. But they were never only that. Working alongside von Mises, the young Friedrich Hayek and Gottfried Haberler were employed in empirical economic research. And it was the networks of interwar business-cycle research that drew key figures from Vienna to Geneva, then home to the League of Nations. The Swiss idyll is the site for much of the rest of Slobodian’s narrative, giving its name to the brand of globalist neoliberalism he labels the “Geneva school.” In the 1930s the League of Nations was a gathering place for economic expertise from across the world. But as Slobodian shows, what marked the Geneva school of neoliberalism was a collective intellectual crisis. In the face of the Great Depression, they not only came to doubt the predictive power of business-cycle research, they came to see the very act of enumerating and counting “the economy” as itself a threat to the order of private property. It was when you conceived of the economy as an object, whether for purposes of scientific investigation or policy intervention, that you opened the door to redistributive, democratic economic policy. Following their own edicts, after crushing the labor movement, the next line of defense of private property was therefore to declare the economy unknowable. For the Austrian neoliberals, this called for reinvention. They stopped doing economics and remade themselves as theorists of law and society.

Evidently, this put them profoundly at odds with the technocratic spirit of the midcentury moment. The most famous expression of this alienation was Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), which takes up surprisingly little space in Slobodian’s account. In part, this is no doubt due to the focus of Hayek’s attack on European totalitarianism and the Beveridge plan for Britain’s postwar welfare state. Slobodian’s Geneva School neoliberals, by contrast, focused their attention on global political economy. In the aftermath of the Second World War, they struggled to defend capital mobility against the restrictions of Bretton Woods. In the 1960s they inveighed against the postcolonial order, rallied to Apartheid, and did their best to undercut the visions of a fairer and more regulated New International Economic Order pushed by the global South. The idea of a government-regulated system of exchange dominated by commodity producers was anathema to neoliberalism.

Slobodian gives us not only a new history of neoliberalism but a far more diverse image of global policy debates after 1945. Even in the heyday of Keynesianism and developmentalist policies, the neoliberals were never silenced. Neoliberalism was always part of the conversation, though it was not the secret blueprint of twentieth-century history. As Slobodian observes, from the 1930s, many neoliberal ideas were deliberately utopian. They weren’t aiming to change policy, at least not right away. Their interventions were polemics designed to break open the debate.

Ludwig von Mises and Gottfried Haberler were among those to attend a 1936 conference on business cycle research in Vienna 

It was in the 1980s that the neoliberals’ long march through the institutions of global economic governance finally carried the day. In this Slobodian agrees with the more familiar narrative. But rather than concentrating on national programs of monetarism, privatization, and union-busting, Slobodian focuses on the transnational dimension: the EU and the WTO. The protagonists of his story are people you have never heard of, second-generation students of the original Austro-German founders, trained as lawyers, not economists—men like Ernst-Joachim Mestmäker and Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, who shaped the agenda in Brussels and helped to steer global trade policy.

It is a measure of the success of this fascinating, innovative history that it forces the question: after Slobodian’s reinterpretation, where does the critique of neoliberalism stand?

First and foremost, Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy. What he has exposed, furthermore, is their deep commitment to empire as a restraint on the nation state. Notably, in the case of Wilhelm Röpke, this was reinforced by deep-seated anti-black racism. Throughout the 1960s Röpke was active on behalf of South Africa and Rhodesia in defense of what he saw as the last bastions of white civilization in the developing world. As late as the 1980s, members of the Mont Pèlerin Society argued that the white minority in South Africa could best be defended by weighting the voting system by the proportion of taxes paid. If this was liberalism it was not so much neo- as paleo-.

If racial hierarchy was one of the foundations of neoliberalism’s imagined global order, the other key constraint on the nation-state was the free flow of the factors of production. This is what made the restoration of capital mobility in the 1980s such a triumph. Following in the footsteps of the legal scholar and historian Samuel Moyn, one might remark that it was not by accident that the advent of radical capital mobility coincided with the advent of universal human rights. Both curtailed the sovereignty of nation states. Slobodian traces that intellectual and political association back to the 1940s, when Geneva school economists formulated the argument that an essential pillar of liberal freedom was the right of the wealthy to move their money across borders unimpeded by national government regulation. What they demanded, Slobodian quips, was the human right to capital flight.

That irony curdles somewhat when we recall the historical context. After 1933, the human right to capital flight was no neoliberal joke. Money was the binding constraint both on the ability of German and Austrian Jews to leave the Third Reich and on their being accepted by potential countries of refuge. It may be typical of neoliberal hyperbole that defenders of capital mobility accused the U.S. government of resorting to “Gestapo” methods in tracking down the wealth of “enemy aliens.” But it was no coincidence that Reinhard Heydrich, future head of the Gestapo and the architect of the Holocaust, made his leap to prominence in the Nazi regime in 1936 as head of the foreign-exchange investigation division of Hermann Göring’s Four Year Plan. The neoliberals are onto something in insisting on the interconnections between the movements of money and people. Certainly restricting the former is a sure way to restrict the latter, especially in a world of national welfare where the right to entry depends on proving that you need neither social assistance nor a job.

It was these entanglements of unfreedom that the Road to Serfdom dissected so effectively, which brings us to the ticklish question of its author. By the 1990s it can hardly be denied that neoliberalism was the dominant mode of policy in the EU, OECD, GATT, and WTO. But what kind of neoliberalism was it, and what has Hayek got to do with it? Slobodian works hard in his concluding chapter on the GATT and the WTO in the 1980s and 1990s to bring us back to the central Hayekian theme of the impossibility of representing the world economy as a whole. In the case of key personnel at the WTO, he can show direct neoliberal lineage. As a matter of intellectual biography this make sense. But as Slobodian knows only too well, there is an obvious counterargument to any claim that such organizations represent Hayekianism in action—Hayek’s profound skepticism toward anything that smacks of conventional economic policy, growthmanship, or, indeed, the very idea of the economy as such. This does not stop practical neoliberals from doing their stuff, any more than his disciples are bound to either the letter or the spirit of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment. Much of the political success of neoliberalism depends on the willingness of its practitioners to discard key ideas of its purist thinkers. What remains in real, “actually existing” neoliberalism is precisely its relentless emphasis on growth and competitiveness as the measure of all things.

The result as far as Hayek is concerned is profoundly ironic. After 1989 he was feted as the godfather of the global capitalist revival. No doubt, as a lifelong anti-Communist, he took satisfaction at the end of the Soviet regime. But for Hayek, the Cold War had never been more than a “silly competition” in which both sides took a crude quantitative measure of the economy as their benchmark of success and offered their citizens essentially the same promises. Turbo capitalism of the Friedmanite-Reagnite variety was, for Hayek, “every bit as dangerous” as anything Keynes ever proposed.

In a world framed by what, according to Slobodian, ought to be considered a contradiction in terms—neoliberal growthmanship—how should the left respond?

The overwhelming stress on the priority of “the economy” and its imperatives leads many on the left to adopt a position that mirrors Hayek’s. Following thinkers like Karl Polanyi, they criticize the way that “the economy” has assumed an almost godlike authority. Nor is it by accident that the libertarian left shares Hayek’s distaste for top-down economic policy, what the political scientist James Scott has dubbed “seeing like a state.” As the neoliberals realized in the 1930s, the nation-state and the national economy are twins. If this remains somewhat veiled in the histories of countries like France and the United Kingdom, the conjoined emergence of state power and the developmental imperative was stamped on the face of the postcolonial world.

Such critiques can be radically illuminating by exposing the foundations of key concepts of modernity. But where do they lead? For Hayek this was not a question. The entire point was to silence policy debate. By focusing on broad questions of the economic constitution, rather than the details of economic processes, neoliberals sought to outlaw prying questions about how things actually worked. It was when you started asking for statistics and assembling spreadsheets that you took the first dangerous step toward politicizing “the economy.” In its critique of neoliberalism, the left has challenged this depoliticization. But by failing to enquire into the actual workings of the system, the left has accepted Hayek’s injunction that economic policy debate confine itself to the most abstract and general level. Indeed, the intellectual preoccupation with the critique of neoliberalism is itself symptomatic. We concentrate on elucidating the intellectual logic and history of ideologies and modes of government, rather than investigating processes of accumulation, production, and distribution. We are thus playing the neoliberals at their own game.

Given neoliberalism’s association with globalization, it might be tempting to see reclaiming the national economy as a way out of this trap. This is the impulse that lies behind “Lexit,” which, at its best, is a call for a return to the ambitious, left-wing social democracy of the 1970s. Given that this was the moment that provoked the neoliberals into their most vicious counterattack, one can see the attraction. The question is whether it is a real possibility. After all, the global South in the 1970s proposed not a series of go-it-alone national solutions, but a New International Economic Order. And in that moment, the global South could call on the energy of the first flush of postcolonial politics. The passions that have been unleashed in the United Kingdom and the United States since 2016 are of a more rancid vintage.

As long as it remains at the level of abstract gestures toward “taking back control,” the impulse of resistance mirrors what it opposes. We are still not engaging with the actual mechanisms of power and production. To move beyond Hayek, what we need to revive is not simply the idea of economic sovereignty, whether on a national or transnational scale, but his true enemies: the impulse to know, the will to intervene, the freedom to choose not privately but as a political body. An anti-Hayekian history of neoliberalism would be one that refuses neoliberalism’s deliberately elevated level of discourse and addresses itself instead to what neoliberalism’s airy talk of orders and constitutions seeks to obscure: namely, the engines both large and small through which social and economic reality is constantly made and remade, its tools of power and knowledge ranging from cost-of-living indicators to carbon budgets, diesel emission tests and school evaluations. It is here that we meet real, actually existing neoliberalism—and may perhaps hope to counter it.

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Adam Tooze is Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, where he also directs the European Institute. His book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World will appear in August 2018.


Liberalism in the 20th century was a rebellion against the raw capitalism and brute force racism of the 19th century. Neoliberalism is a rebellion against the hard and fast egalitarianism of liberalism
David Fairbanks Reno 7/27/2018

A Theory of Trump Kompromat

A Theory of Trump Kompromat

Why the President is so nice to Putin, even when Putin might not want him to be.

Adam Davidson  The New Yorker

The former C.I.A. operative Jack Devine watched Donald Trump’s performance standing next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, and his first thought was, “There is no way Trump is a Russian agent.” The proof, he told me, was right in front of us. If Trump were truly serving as a Russian intelligence asset, there would have been an obvious move for him to make during his joint press conference with Putin. He would have publicly lambasted the Russian leader, unleashing as theatrical a denunciation as possible. He would have told Putin that he may have been able to get away with a lot of nonsense under Barack Obama, but all that would end now: America has a strong President and there will be no more meddling. Instead, Trump gave up his single best chance to permanently put to rest any suspicion that he is working to promote Russian interests.

During a three-decade career in intelligence, Devine ran the C.I.A.’s effort to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, and then served as the No. 2 (and, briefly, acting head) of its clandestine service. Along the way, he tangled with, and carefully studied, Russian intelligence officers. He was involved in two major hunts for American intelligence operatives who were secretly working for the K.G.B.: Devine was the supervisor of Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who pleaded guilty, in 1994, to spying for Moscow, and he oversaw the investigation of Robert Hanssen, the F.B.I. counterintelligence officer who confessed, in 2001, to being a double agent. Hanssen, for instance, was like Trump, narcissistic, with a broad set of grievances about the many ways that his special qualities were not being recognized. But, unlike Trump, he harbored those grievances quietly and found satisfaction in secretly upending the system in which he operated. Trump shows no signs that he can be gratified by secret triumphs. He seems to need everyone, everywhere, to see whatever it is that he thinks deserves praise. His need for public attention is a trait that would likely cause most spies to avoid working with Trump.

There is no need to assume that Trump was a formal agent of Russian intelligence to make sense of Trump’s solicitousness toward Putin. Keith Darden, an international-relations professor at American University, has studied the Russian use of kompromat—compromising material—and told me that he thinks it is likely that the President believes the Russians have something on him. “He’s never said a bad word about Putin,” Darden said. “He’s exercised a degree of self-control with respect to Russia that he doesn’t with anything else.” Darden said that this is evidence that Trump isn’t uniformly reckless in his words: “He is capable of being strategic. He knows there are limits, there are bounds on what he can say and do with respect to Russia.”

Because the word kompromat is new to most Americans, and has been introduced in the context of a President whose behavior confuses many of us, it is natural to assume that it must be a big, rare, scary thing, used in extraordinary circumstances to force compliance and achieve grand aims. But, Darden explained to me, kompromat is routinely used throughout the former Soviet Union to curry favor, improve negotiated outcomes, and sway opinion. Intelligence services, businesspeople, and political figures everywhere exploit gossip and damaging information. However, Darden argues, kompromat has a uniquely powerful role in the former Soviet Union, where the practice is so pervasive, he coined the term “blackmail state” to describe the way of governance.

Kompromat can be a single, glaring example of wrongdoing, recorded by someone close to the Kremlin and then used to control the bad actor. It can be proof of an embarrassing sex act. Darden believes it is unlikely that sexual kompromat would be effective on Trump. Allegations of sexual harassment, extramarital affairs, and the payment of hush money to hide indiscretions have failed to significantly diminish the enthusiasm of Trump’s core supporters. But another common form of kompromat—proof of financial crimes—could be more politically and personally damaging.

Trump has made a lot of money doing deals with businesspeople from the former Soviet Union, and at least some of these deals bear many of the warning signs of money laundering and other financial crimes. Deals in Toronto, Panama, New York, and Miami involved money from sources in the former Soviet Union who hid their identities through shell companies and exhibited other indications of money laundering. In the years before he became a political figure, Trump acted with impunity, conducting minimal corporate due diligence and working with people whom few other American businesspeople would consider fit partners. During that period, he may have felt protected by the fact that U.S. law-enforcement officials rarely investigate or prosecute Americans who engage in financial crimes overseas. Such cases are also maddeningly difficult to prove, and the F.B.I. has no subpoena power in other countries. If, however, someone had evidence that proved financial crimes and shared it with, say, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, other American law-enforcement officials, or the press, it could significantly damage Trump’s business, his family, and his Presidency.

Alena Ledeneva, a professor of politics at University College London and an expert on Russia’s political and business practices, describes kompromat as being more than a single powerful figure weaponizing damning evidence to blackmail a target. She explained that to make sense of kompromat it is essential to understand the weakness of formal legal institutions in Russia and other former Soviet states. Ledeneva argued that wealth and power are distributed through networks of political figures and businesspeople who follow unspoken rules, in an informal hierarchy that she calls sistema, or system. Sistema has a few clear rules—do not defy Putin being the most obvious one—and a toolkit for controlling potentially errant members. It is primarily a system of ambiguity. Each person in sistema wonders where he stands and monitors the relative positions of friends and rivals.

Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the leading political thinkers in Russia, is known to be an adviser to Putin and well connected to the power structure. In a 2016 article in Foreign Affairs, he endorsed Ledeneva’s sistema framework. Many observers imagine Putin to be some all-powerful genius, Pavlovsky wrote, but he “has never managed to build a bureaucratically successful authoritarian state. Instead, he has merely crafted his own version of sistema, a complex practice of decision-making and power management that has long defined Russian politics and society and that will outlast Putin himself. Putin has mastered sistema, but he has not replaced it with ‘Putinism’ or a ‘Putin system.’ Someday, Putin will go. But sistema will stay.”

Ledeneva said that the key to understanding Trump’s interaction with sistema is to look at the people with whom he did business. “Trump never dealt with anybody close to the Kremlin, close to Putin,” she said. “Or even many Russians.” Trump’s business deals, she told me, were with tertiary figures. Sistema is rooted in local, often familial, trust, so it is common to see networks rooted in ethnic or national identity. My own reporting has shown that Trump has worked with many ethnic Turks from Central Asia, such as the Mammadov family, in Azerbaijan; Tevfik Arif, in New York; and Aras and Emin Agalarov, in Moscow. Trump also worked with large numbers of émigrés from the former Soviet Union.

If there truly is damaging kompromat on Trump, it could well be in the hands of Trump’s business partners, or even in those of their rivals. Trump’s Georgian partners, for example, have been in direct conflict with other local business networks over a host of crucial deals involving major telecommunications projects in the country. His Azerbaijani partners were tightly linked to Iranians who were also senior officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The work of Ledeneva and Darden suggests that Trump’s partners and their rivals would likely have gathered any incriminating information they could find on him, knowing that it might one day provide some sort of business leverage—even with no thought that he could someday become the most powerful person on Earth.

Ledeneva is skeptical that Putin, years ago, ordered an effort to collect kompromat on Trump. Instead, it is possible that there is kompromat in the hands of several different business groups in the former Soviet Union. Each would have bits and pieces of damaging information and might have found subtle (or not so subtle) ways to communicate that fact to both Trump and Putin. Putin would likely have gathered some of that material, but he would have known that he couldn’t get everything.

Ledeneva told me that each actor in sistema faces near-constant uncertainty about his status, aware that others could well destroy him. Each actor also knows how to use kompromat to destroy rivals but fears that using such material might provoke an explosive response. While each person in sistema feels near-constant uncertainty, the over-all sistema is remarkably robust. Kompromat is most powerful when it isn’t used, and when its targets aren’t quite clear about how much destructive information there is out there. If everyone sees potential land mines everywhere, it dramatically increases the price for anybody stepping out of line.

The scenario that, to my mind, makes the most sense of the given facts and requires the fewest fantastical leaps is that, a decade or so ago, Trump, naïve, covetous, and struggling for cash, may have laundered money for a business partner from the former Soviet Union or engaged in some other financial crime. This placed him, unawares, squarely within sistema, where he remained, conducting business with other members of a handful of overlapping Central Asian networks. Had he never sought the Presidency, he may never have had to come to terms with these decisions. But now he is much like everyone else in sistema. He fears there is kompromat out there—maybe a lot of it—but he doesn’t know precisely what it is, who has it, or what might set them off.

Trump and many of his defenders have declared his businesses, including those in the former Soviet Union, to be off-limits to the Mueller investigation. They argue that the special counsel should focus only on the possibility of explicit acts of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This neatly avoids the reality of sistema. As Pavlovsky wrote, “Under Putin, sistema has become a method for making deals among businesses, powerful players, and the people. Business has not taken over the state, nor vice versa; the two have merged in a union of total and seamless corruption.”

Ledeneva explained to me that, in sistema, when faced with uncertainty, every member knows that the best move is to maintain whatever alliances he has, and to avoid grand steps that could antagonize powerful figures; in such times, the most one can hope for is simply to survive.

Adam Davidson is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Russia GRU

Russia GRU indicted by US in Russia Probe

Andrew Kramer NY Times

MOSCOW — The Russian intelligence officers indicted on Friday by the United States special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, served in a branch of the Russian military formerly known as the G.R.U., which has been linked in recent years to a number of increasingly bold, even reckless operations abroad.

The organization is Russia’s largest military intelligence agency and is one of several groups authorized to spy for the Russian government, alongside successor agencies to the K.G.B.

Though the G.R.U. has been the target of sanctions by the United States government numerous times, including in connection with hacking in the 2016 presidential election, the indictments filed by Mr. Mueller’s office are the first criminal charges leveled against Russian government officials for election meddling.

A previous indictment the financier and employees of a nominally private internet troll farm based in St. Petersburg.

Though still commonly referred to as the G.R.U., or Main Intelligence Directorate, the agency in 2010 changed its name to the Main Directorate, or G.U. As before, it is subordinate to the Russian military command.

From the shooting down of a civilian airliner over Ukraine to operations in Syria and the United States electoral hacking, the organization’s recent history has been entangled with some of Russia’s most contentious actions, analysts and security researchers say.

The indictment unsealed on Friday singled out two signals intelligence -units focused on computer espionage — one based near Gorky Park in central Moscow and the other in an outlying district near a shopping mall.

“These units conducted large-scale cyber operations to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” according to the indictment.

One officer identified in the indictment, Viktor B. Netyksho, the leader of a unit that hacked the Democratic National Committee, has the same name as an individual who for years studied computer science and published an academic thesis and at least one scientific paper.

The 2003 thesis was presented to an academy affiliated with the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, that studies cryptography. It related to a field of mathematics known as nonlinear, or Boolean, equations.

United States intelligence agencies had already concluded “with high confidence” that the G.R.U. created an online persona called Guccifer 2.0 and a website, DCLeaks.com, to release emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John D. Podesta, before the 2016 presidential election.

The G.R.U. chief, Igor V. Korobov, and three of his deputies were the first Russian officials to face sanctions by the Obama administration in December 2016, for interfering in the elections. In March, the Treasury Department announced new sanctions against the G.R.U. and Mr. Korobov.

The initial sanctions under the Obama administration also targeted a deputy commander of the G.R.U., Sergei A. Gizunov. Not mentioned at the time was Mr. Gizunov’s ties to a group within the G.R.U., Unit 26165, that the Friday indictment described as pivotal in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

Mr. Gizunov was a former commander of this unit, according to a 2009 report in a government newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, that announced Mr. Gizunov had won a state prize in science.

On Friday, Michael McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Russia, wrote on Twitter: “I’m very impressed that Mueller was able to name the 12 GRU officers in the new indictment. Demonstrates the incredible capabilities of our intelligence community.”

The United States Congress has also had its sights on Russian military intelligence. In August 2017, it expanded the Obama administration sanctions to target two additional military intelligence officers in a sanctions bill.

The agency, according to a Treasury Department statement, has been “directly involved in interfering in the 2016 U.S. election through cyber-enabled activities,” as well as a 2017 NotPetya cyber attack, which caused billions of dollars in losses across Europe, Asia and the United States, disrupted global shipping and trade, and knocked several major hospitals offline.

Inside Russia, one of the two units cited in Friday’s indictment, Unit 26165, had a reputation as an elite group. In 2016, Vzglyad, an online news portal, described members of the unit as being “able to decipher any code within three minutes and re-encrypt it without breaking away from writing a doctoral dissertation on quantum physics.”

The European Union sanctioned a key Russian identified as a G.R.U. officer in relation to Russia’s military incursion in eastern Ukraine under the guise of patriotic volunteers. Igor V. Girkin, under the nickname Igor Strelkov, or Igor the Shooter, led the seizure of the Ukrainian town of Slovyansk in 2014.

Bellingcat, a group conducting open source research on the Ukrainian conflict, has identified the Russian military officer who shot down Malaysia Airline flight 17 in 2014 as a member of the G.R.U.

Earlier this year, the United States imposed sanctions against the G.R.U. for violating the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act, which prohibits entities from providing equipment or technology that can be used in manufacturing weapons of mass destruction or ballistic missile systems. This is likely for operations in Syria, where G.R.U. commandos, or Spetsnaz, have been instrumental in the fight against the Islamic State and played a critical role in regaining cities like Aleppo and Palmyra for the Assad government.

Like the Spetsnaz, the military’s signals intelligence units have a storied history stretching deep into the Cold War.

A Russian history book, “Security Systems of the U.S.S.R.,” published in 2013, identified the origins of Unit 26165 in the Cold War, when it was established as a signals decrypting office for the Soviet military. The unit, according to this history, was based in the same building identified in the indictments released on Friday as its base today, in central Moscow.

Mr. Gizunov’s name also surfaced as a central figure in a recent dispute between military intelligence and the main successor agency to the K.G.B., the F.S.B. It is an old rivalry that re-appeared during the electoral hack, Crowd Strike, the cyber security company hired by the Democratic Party, has suggested. Crowd Strike reported that both military intelligence and the F.S.B. hacked the DNC servers, possibly without knowledge of the others’ actions.

A year later, in 2017, Mr. Gizunov, the former director of Unit 26165, used military intelligence agents to unravel a F.S.B. cyber operation that had focused on Ukraine and domestic issues, Russian media have reported. The military agents reportedly disclosed links between a cybercrime ring known as Shaltai-Boltai, or Humpty Dumpty, and the F.S.B.’s cyber unit, the Center for Information Security.

Follow Andrew E. Kramer on Twitter: @AndrewKramerNYT

Michael Schwirtz, Sophia Kishkovsky and Lincoln Pigman contributed reporting.

Before Air-Conditioning

Arthur MillerJune 22, 1998 New Yorker Issue

Exactly what year it was I can no longer recall—proba

bly 1927 or ’28—there was an extraordinarily hot September, which hung on even after school had started and we were back from our Rockaway Beach bungalow. Every window in New York was open, and on the streets venders manning little carts chopped ice and sprinkled colored sugar over mounds of it for a couple of pennies. We kids would jump onto the back steps of the slow-moving, horse-drawn ice wagons and steal a chip or two; the ice smelled vaguely of manure but cooled palm and tongue.

People on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear.

Even through the nights, the pall of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake. I can recall only white people spread out on the grass; Harlem began above 116th Street then.

Later on, in the Depression thirties, the summers seemed even hotter. Out West, it was the time of the red sun and the dust storms, when whole desiccated farms blew away and sent the Okies, whom Steinbeck immortalized, out on their desperate treks toward the Pacific. My father had a small coat factory on Thirty-ninth Street then, with about a dozen men working sewing machines. Just to watch them handling thick woollen winter coats in that heat was, for me, a torture. The cutters were on piecework, paid by the number of seams they finished, so their lunch break was short—fifteen or twenty minutes. They brought their own food: bunches of radishes, a tomato perhaps, cucumbers, and a jar of thick sour cream, which went into a bowl they kept under the machines. A small loaf of pumpernickel also materialized, which they tore apart and used as a spoon to scoop up the cream and vegetables.

The men sweated a lot in those lofts, and I remember one worker who had a peculiar way of dripping. He was a tiny fellow, who disdained scissors, and, at the end of a seam, always bit off the thread instead of cutting it, so that inch-long strands stuck to his lower lip, and by the end of the day he had a multicolored beard His sweat poured onto those thread ends and dripped down onto the cloth, which he was constantly blotting with a rag.

Given the heat, people smelled, of course, but some smelled a lot worse than others. One cutter in my father’s shop was a horse in this respect, and my father, who normally had no sense of smell—no one understood why—claimed that he could smell this man and would address him only from a distance. In order to make as much money as possible, this fellow would start work at half past five in the morning and continue until midnight. He owned Bronx apartment houses and land in Florida and Jersey, and seemed half mad with greed. He had a powerful physique, a very straight spine, a tangle of hair, and a black shadow on his cheeks. He snorted like a horse as he pushed the cutting machine, following his patterns through some eighteen layers of winter-coat material. One late afternoon, he blinked his eyes hard against the burning sweat as he held down the material with his left hand and pressed the vertical, razor-sharp reciprocating blade with his right. The blade sliced through his index finger at the second joint. Angrily refusing to go to the hospital, he ran tap water over the stump, wrapped his hand in a towel, and went right on cutting, snorting, and stinking. When the blood began to show through the towel’s bunched layers, my father pulled the plug on the machine and ordered him to the hospital. But he was back at work the next morning, and worked right through the day and into the evening, as usual, piling up his apartment houses.

There were still elevated trains then, along Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues, and many of the cars were wooden, with windows that opened. Broadway had open trolleys with no side walls, in which you at least caught the breeze, hot though it was, so that desperate people, unable to endure their apartments, would simply pay a nickel and ride around aimlessly for a couple of hours to cool off. As for Coney Island on weekends, block after block of beach was so jammed with people that it was barely possible to find a space to sit or to put down your book or your hot dog.

My first direct contact with an air-conditioner came only in the sixties, when I was living in the Chelsea Hotel. The so-called management sent up a machine on casters which rather aimlessly cooled and sometimes heated the air, relying, as it did, on pitchers of water that one had to pour into it. On the initial filling, it would spray water all over the room, so one had to face it toward the bathroom rather than the bed.

A South African gentleman once told me that New York in August was hotter than any place he knew in Africa, yet people here dressed for a northern city. He had wanted to wear shorts but feared that he would be arrested for indecent exposure.

High heat created irrational solutions: linen suits that collapsed into deep wrinkles when one bent an arm or a knee, and men’s straw hats as stiff as matzohs, which, like some kind of hard yellow flower, bloomed annually all over the city on a certain sacred date—June 1st or so. Those hats dug deep pink creases around men’s foreheads, and the wrinkled suits, which were supposedly cooler, had to be pulled down and up and sidewise to make room for the body within.

The city in summer floated in a daze that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting “Hot enough for ya? Ha-ha!” It was like the final joke before the meltdown of the world in a pool of sweat. ♦

Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Otherworldly Fiction

The writer’s unusual discipline has come close to driving her crazy. The results have been both refined and depraved.

Ariel Levy The New Yorker

There was an unearthly quality to the atmosphere inside the Frieze New York art fair, like the air in a plane—still but pressurized, with an unsettling hum—when the fiction writer Ottessa Moshfegh visited to speak about her work one afternoon in May. “I hate this fair already,” she said when she walked in, handing her ticket to a very tall, very pale man dressed entirely in black lace. Almost immediately, she was lost in the labyrinth of works for sale: Takashi Murakami’s lurid blond plastic milkmaids with long legs and erect nipples; the words “any messages?” spelled out in neon tubing. It was like an enactment of the world inhabited by the protagonist of Moshfegh’s forthcoming novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” who works at a gallery in Chelsea, amid objects like a quarter-million-dollar “pair of toy monkeys made using human pubic hair,” with camera penises poking out from their fur. “Did I do this?” Moshfegh said, only half kidding. She sometimes gets the sense that she has the power to conjure reality through her writing.

Though the details of Moshfegh’s books vary wildly, her work always seems to originate from a place that is not quite earth, where people breathe some other kind of air. Her novella “McGlue” is narrated by a drunken nineteenth-century sailor, with a cracked head, who isn’t sure if he has murdered a man he loves. “Eileen” is the story of a glum prison secretary, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, who is disgusted by her gin-sodden father and by her own sexuality (the “small, hard mounds” of her breasts, the “complex and nonsensical folds” of her genitals). Moshfegh’s characters tend to be amoral, frank, bleakly funny, very smart, and perverse in their motivations, in ways that destabilize the reader’s assumptions about what is ugly, what is desirable, what is permissible, and what is real. In her collection of short stories, “Homesick for Another World,” a little girl is convinced that a hole will open up in the earth and take her straight to paradise, if only she murders the right person. These characters share with their creator an intense sense of alienation, which she wrote about in a faux letter to Donald Trump: “Since age five, all of life has been like a farce, an absurd performance of a reality based on meaningless drivel, or a devastating experience of trauma and fatigue, deep with meaning, which has led me into such self-serious ness that I often wonder if I am completely insane. Can you relate at all?”

In the sprawling Frieze complex, Moshfegh found the tented room where she was meant to speak and got settled on a little stage in front of a few dozen people. She told them about the case of cat-scratch fever that she contracted in 2007, when she was working as an assistant and living in Bed-Stuy. A street cat leaped into her arms one night; when she brought him home and tried to wash the fleas off, he clawed her face. Hence “the illness that forced me out of New York City—which was a fucking godsend,” Moshfegh said. “Living in New York as a writer felt really claustrophobic; it seemed like everybody I knew had a similar ambition, and it was to be the standout literary voice of your generation, which I think is an insane ambition to begin with.” Moshfegh, who is thirty-seven, and looks like a skinny, Persian Anne Bancroft, was wearing black jeans and boots, an olive-green shirt, and a gold necklace that resembled an abstract spoon. Her peers back then believed, “Whatever it is that you’re going to do, you can’t just fit into the mold—you have to break the mold, blow people’s minds, do it perfectly, and then not care,” she continued. “Because if you care you’re not cool, and if you’re not cool you’re shit.”

Except for the not-caring part, Moshfegh had just offered a pretty accurate description of what she has accomplished. Her breakthrough novel, “Eileen,” won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Scott Rudin bought the film rights. The Timessaid, of Moshfegh, “You feel she can do anything.” The Los Angeles Times declared her “unlike any other author (male, female, Iranian, American, etc.).” Part of what readers found so startling about the book was its female antihero, who is everything women are not supposed to be: “ugly, disgusting, unfit for the world,” as Eileen describes herself, but also angry, self-pitying, resentful. At the prison for wayward boys where she works, a girl comes in one day to confront her rapist, and Eileen snubs her. “I don’t know why I was so cold to her,” she muses. “I suppose I may have been envious. No one had ever tried to rape me, after all.”

Moshfegh created “Eileen” by being, according to the formula she had articulated, the antithesis of cool; she cares so deeply about her writing that it has come close to driving her crazy. For a long time, she was convinced that producing her best work required a monkish commitment to abstemiousness and isolation. “My life got really, really narrow,” she told me. “It’s not like I didn’t have adventurous experiences—my life had been interesting—but I was, like, No, no, no: not that. Just this. I was psychically tortured.”

In response to a question at Frieze on how she stays motivated, Moshfegh told a story about an ex-boyfriend. “He told me in the middle of an argument that being an artist was something that weak people indulge in, and I made him leave, because I guess what I feel is the opposite of that,” she said. “I think art is the thing that fixes culture, moment by moment. I don’t really feel a reason to exist unless I feel my life has a purpose, which is creating. So I feel—I’m not going to call it pressure—I feel I have a karmic role to play.” In her fictional letter to Trump, Moshfegh wrote, “Do you feel you’ve been chosen by God for a special task to accomplish here on Earth? I do.”

The blocks around Moshfegh’s apartment, just east of L.A.’s Little Armenia, are bedraggled: laundry hangs on a chain-link fence; the yards are yellow patches of dead grass on dust; water drips from an old air-conditioner in a window covered with tinfoil. But Moshfegh’s building, a two-story cluster of nineteen-twenties apartments, sits behind a gate, connected to the street by a walkway lined with roses and spindly purple skyflower. “I like it here,” she said in her living room, a clean, quiet space, which she had furnished with a burgundy couch, a Danish modern coffee table with a porcupine sculpture on top, and books lined up on the floor. She wore sandals and had her hair in a braid; all the windows were open, and the air smelled like rain. “It feels like a retreat.”

The unkempt neighborhood outside recalls the sort of place where many of her characters live. An alcoholic teacher in Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself” begins her tale, “My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings.” McGlue is forever “in the mud, drunk and tired and unwatched.” It is likewise the kind of setting where one might expect to find the characters of one of Moshfegh’s influences, Charles Bukowski, the late author of “All the Assholes in the World and Mine,” among dozens of other books, whom Time once called the “laureate of American lowlife.” Moshfegh told me that when she encountered his writing, in grad school, “I was, like, Oh, I can write about that, too.” The underbelly of human behavior and emotion could be literature, if it was approached with sufficient precision and passion. In “Eileen,” the narrator recounts the working of her bowels with relish: “With the laxatives, my movements were torrential, oceanic, as though all of my insides had melted and were now gushing out, a sludge that stank distinctly of chemicals and which, when it was all out, I half expected to breach the rim of the toilet bowl. In those cases I stood up to flush, dizzy and sweaty and cold, then lay down while the world seemed to revolve around me. Those were good times.” Moshfegh once told Vice, which published some of her early work, “My writing lets people scrape up against their own depravity, but at the same time it’s very refined . . . it’s like seeing Kate Moss take a shit.”

Moshfegh had positioned a small desk by the front window of her apartment, and on it she’d stuck a Post-it note, which read “Work hard the rest is a mystery.” She is not the sort of fiction writer who conducts methodical research and then labors to produce a faithful simulacrum of a time or a place. Moshfegh’s source material is her own imagination. “I think I could perfectly conjure 1910, the way it smelled and looked, but I can’t tell you the major world events that happened,” she said. The outside world is a place from which to snatch inspiration, details, feelings. “I just want to see the edge of the building, and then I want to go build it myself. That’s how I feel when I meet somebody: I just want this much.” She has lived in many places in her adult life, but she has isolated herself in almost all of them.

Since graduating from Barnard, in 2002, Moshfegh has moved every few years, which helps explain why her home is as spare as a grad student’s. She went first to Wuhan, China, where she taught English, worked at a punk bar, and lived in hundred-year-old cement group housing. “The walls were red—like really Communist red—and it was all grimy,” she said. “Maybe somebody would think it was ugly, but I thought it was really cool.” She had gone to China with a boyfriend, but they broke up in the middle of the trip. “It was a hundred and twenty degrees every day, and I had lost all my connections, and I felt like I was just wasting my life, dying. At some point, I stumbled on a picture of a dead person on the Internet, and I had an adrenaline rush. It made me feel that life was deeply valuable, and also there was an excitement about seeing something so private—sort of death porn.” She started Googling images of dead people every day. “I just got into the habit. It gave me energy.”

Moshfegh returned to New York City and, at the age of twenty-four, swore off romance. “I did not want to share, and I did not want to get attached, and I didn’t want to have to be responsible for anybody but myself,” she said. “Mostly, I wanted to focus on my work.” She got a job at the Overlook Press, and then another as an assistant to Jean Stein, a former editor at The Paris Review, who hosted literary salons in her penthouse, where Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer once got into a fistfight. They became close friends, and Stein encouraged her writing. But Moshfegh began experiencing strange symptoms. “It started off as intense exhaustion and disorientation. I would get on the subway and get off and I didn’t remember where I was going,” she said. “I would have phone calls with Jean and immediately forget what she had told me. And then I started having numbness in my hands, a twitch in my face, really bad headaches. I would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, my body clenching.” It took months before she was given a diagnosis of cat-scratch fever. “I could not think straight for a year.”

Hoping to escape the city, Moshfegh applied to the M.F.A. program at Brown, and was accepted. Her time there was productive, she said, but mostly because her scholarship allowed her to write without the distraction of a job. “You have a lot of people who aren’t good at writing yet telling you what to change about the way that you’re writing,” she said. “It’s a lot of mediocrity feeding on itself. So you better be radical, and you better hate everyone. Not that I did personally, but that I had to if I was going to protect the thing in me that I knew I wanted to grow.”

She had been focussed on short stories, but one day she came upon something in the library that shifted her course. “I read an article in a periodical from 1851, in Boston or Salem. It was just the name ‘McGlue’ as the title—already, I was, like, Yes, please. All it said was: ‘Mr. McGlue has been acquitted of the murder of Mr. Johnson in Zanzibar due to having been blackout drunk at the time of the murder and having sustained grave injury to the head from jumping off a train several months earlier.’ And that was it. That was the whole book. It was just handed to me.” What followed was an almost mystical experience of channelling—easy intellectually but difficult emotionally, because Moshfegh was never entirely sure that the spirit of McGlue wanted his story told. “I thought that maybe he was angry at me for betraying him,” she said. “It would give me the chills, and I would cry. There was some kind of resonance, like in a dream.” “McGlue” was selected as the winner of the Fence Modern Prize and published by Fence Books, in 2014.

McGlue is unreliable, intoxicated, and trapped—as are the narrators of Moshfegh’s other two novels. Eileen guzzles vermouth and feels enslaved by her abusive, alcoholic father; she spends much of the novel fantasizing about escaping from her frigid New England home town. The unnamed protagonist of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” locks herself in her apartment and stays asleep as much as possible, with the help of Ambien, Benadryl, Nembutal, Xanax, and a fictional drug called Infermiterol. “A character facing discomfort or a problem is always going to try and feel differently,” Moshfegh said. “And substance and self-abuse and that kind of stuff always seems like ‘Well, that’s the first thing you would try.’ ” Drinking as an escape never worked for her, though. “I just knew that I was wasting my time and dumbing myself down to be in the company of dumb people because I was lonely,” she said. She turned instead to greater discipline.

After finishing at Brown, Moshfegh moved to Los Angeles, hoping to experience the freeing displacement of the West Coast. She went to Oakland next, after she was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. There she suffered. “I was losing it,” she said. “I wasn’t eating enough. I’d wake up at, like, five in the morning and have a banana, a cup of coffee, and then go to the boxing gym for three hours. I was working on ‘Eileen’ and the collection, and I was having zero fun, and it really started to take a toll on my psyche. It was a time when I was, like, I’m doing this. I’m tough. I’m tough. I’m tough.”

“She had become this kind of weapon,” Bill Clegg, who became Moshfegh’s agent after he read “McGlue,” said. “She seemed not to need anyone or anything. I understood that she had gone under and isolated herself completely in that book.” When it was finished, it was difficult to sell. “There was a lot of hand-wringing,” Clegg said. “People wanting something that was easier, and really being turned off by Eileen, like, ‘I really just don’t like her.’ ”

Eileen lives in a filthy house. She barely eats, but constantly drinks. (At one point, she falls asleep in her car, and wakes up next to a frozen pile of vomit.) She is so horrified by her genitals that she keeps them “swaddled like a baby in a diaper in thick cotton underpants and my mother’s old strangulating girdle.” Her sexuality is a source of shame and revulsion: “I wore lipstick not to be fashionable, but because my bare lips were the same color as my nipples.” But she burns with lust. She fantasizes obsessively about a prison guard named Randy, and watches transfixed as one of the boy prisoners masturbates in solitary confinement.

Despite all the praise that the book received when it was published, in 2015, Moshfegh is still upset by the intensity of people’s reaction to her character’s physicality. “They wanted me to somehow explain to them how I had the audacity to write a disgusting female character,” she said angrily. “It shocked me how much people wanted to talk about that.” Moshfegh intended readers to experience her protagonist as more self-loathing than repellent. “There was nothing really so wrong or terrible about my appearance,” Eileen says in the novel, when, as an old woman, she is looking back over her story. “I was young and fine, average, I guess. But at the time I thought I was the worst.”

“Denying her sexuality and swaddling her genitals—it is weird,” Moshfegh said. “But I guess I just feel like that is sort of what the message has been to me, or how I’ve interpreted messages: that my sexuality is actually really dangerous and disgusting.” Moshfegh developed severe scoliosis when she was nine, and, just as she started puberty, had to wear a brace for twenty-three hours of the day. “It was called the Boston brace,” she said. “It’s a hard plastic shell—thick—that goes around your entire torso and straps closed with industrial Velcro. I wore it for three years.” Like so many of her characters, she was imprisoned. “The message I was getting was: Your body is growing in a radically wrong direction.” Worst of all, the brace didn’t really work. Moshfegh showed me a recent X-ray of her spine that made me gasp: it curved like a snake.

One hot afternoon, Moshfegh was driving on Route 60 outside Chino, smoking out the window of her battered white BMW convertible, which she’d bought at a used-car lot a few months ago. She is an excellent driver—as precise behind the wheel as she is graceful when she walks, the result of years of physical therapy to compensate for her scoliosis. In conversation, she is definitive, clear, authoritative: in a theoretical discussion about playing a part in a totalitarian regime, she told me that she feared she’d be “uncomfortably high up.” She once told an interviewer, “I’m the most self-assured person I’ve ever met, very arrogant at times, sure. I can’t make a wrong move. I know what I’m doing.” When Moshfegh assesses her talent, she sounds less like a braggart than like a guileless child, announcing what she perceives to be inarguably accurate. “I have heard men much more frequently characterize their own work as superior,” Clegg told me. “I haven’t had that experience with women in the same way—perhaps because society has rewarded men for such assertions and women not so much.”

Moshfegh thinks that biology gives men and women a fundamentally different consciousness. “Men are more logic-centered,” she theorized. “They don’t have the same flexibility of thought, because they don’t have their mind transformed without their consent every month. And women have to see things in different dimensions.” She took a sip of Gatorade as she whizzed past an eighteen-wheeler. “The female genitalia—it’s so primordial, in a certain way,” she continued. “And I feel like, for us to get along and have codes of behavior, we can’t constantly be acknowledging that primordialness. We have adapted to a superficial environment, but I don’t know if the vagina has.”

Moshfegh never identifies herself as a feminist: it would require too much allegiance to a group. “It’s hard when people want to compare me to other women writers,” she said. “It’s like they’re only searching their mind database for women. Flannery O’Connor—I’m happy that they’re making that association, because she’s tops. But I don’t really feel like her. Someone once compared something I wrote to Nabokov, and I thought that was a huge compliment. I didn’t mind that.”

The heroine of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is similarly blunt about her assets. Unlike Eileen, she is “tall and thin and blond and pretty and young,” she says. “Even at my worst, I knew I still looked good.” But her looks are useless to her project, which is to sleep for a year, after which, she is sure, she’ll be reborn, healed, cleansed of her cynicism and indifference.

Although she is physically flawless, she is nonetheless an antihero. After she is fired from her job for napping in the supply closet, she defecates on the floor of the gallery. In relationships, she resists every stereotype of the female nurturer. From time to time, her best friend, Reva, whose mother is dying, comes by and disturbs her sleep:

She’d brag about all the fun things she was going to do over the weekend, complain that she’d gone off her most recent diet and had to do overtime at the gym to make up for it. And eventually, she’d cry about her mother. “I just can’t talk to her like I used to. I feel so sad. I feel so abandoned. I feel very, very alone.”

“We’re all alone, Reva,” I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer.

Reva is her only source of anything resembling intimacy. The nameless narrator has sex from time to time with an older guy, but it’s not exactly loving or even pleasurable: “I could count the number of times he’d gone down on me on one hand. When he’d tried, he had no idea what to do, but seemed overcome with his own generosity and passion, as though delaying getting his dick sucked was so obscene, so reckless, had required so much courage, he’d just blown his own mind.”

During her most intense period of solitary work, in California, Moshfegh committed herself to celibacy. Her sexuality “went away,” she told me. “I stopped menstruating. I was really determined: like this is a poison in my mind—lust—and seeing people as ‘What could that person be to me?’ It just seems so delusional. Looking for a boyfriend. Trying to look cute so that some guy’s gonna hit on me—not that that ever happened. Nobody ever hits on me, ever.”

Several years ago, a Vedic astrologer Moshfegh consults—“One of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, probably one of the top five”—told her that love was inescapable. This struck her as a kind of threat. “The exact thing that the astrologer told me was ‘This is coming for you,’ ” she said. “ ‘If you move into a cabin in the middle of the woods, someone will come knock on your door.’ ”

In November, 2016, just before she published “Homesick for Another World,” a novelist named Luke Goebel wrote to Moshfegh from his cabin in the desert near Palm Springs, asking to interview her. She agreed. “He texted me when he got out of the car, and I came and opened the gate,” she recalled. “I saw him with his dog, and my precise thought was Oh, shit—here it is. Then I kind of surrendered.”

Goebel’s interview with Moshfegh, published on the Web site Fanzine, reads, in part:

Are you a witch? Are you in a cult? Are you an alien?

I hate cults.

Are you an other-dimensional being?

Yes, I am.

Do you want to talk about that?

There’s not much to say. I’m only conscious of what’s going on in this human form.

The interview lasted for twenty-seven days. “We just ate and fucked and slept and talked and talked,” Moshfegh said. On the wall in her living room is a framed copy of the first draft of Goebel’s introduction to the interview, which he typed up at the end of that monthlong meeting. (“I don’t know why he had a typewriter in his truck,” she said.) It begins, “These are the reasons I am now in love with Ottessa Moshfegh: She is arguably the most rapidly expanding powerful voice in American letters and when she speaks of what she believes in, has spent her life working to perfect, a righteous transgressive sensitive force speaks through her which is divinity in rebellion.” As I read it, she gave a little snort. “I wish he still felt that way about me,” she said, and laughed. After their long interview, Goebel went home to Oregon for Christmas, and while he was there his grandparents gave him a very large diamond ring they had, which he used to propose to Moshfegh when they saw each other again.

She wrote about their romance in a piece for the Wall Street Journal: “My man is the most beautiful man on Earth. ‘So handsome I couldn’t look,’ someone said when his back was turned. But I can look. I love to look.”

She also wrote in that piece about a different kind of love. “My little brother, whom I communicate with only telepathically because he is incarcerated, calls three times, and each time I miss his call. ‘An inmate at . . . ’ the messages begin. I tell my man in the desert about him, how he is the brutalized monster inside of my heart, that my heart has broken after each overdose, each jag of being missing, each arrest, each near-death experience. My baby brother.”

Moshfegh’s brother, Darius, died this past November. In her kitchen is a photograph of him as a toddler, asleep, clutching his toys. “We slept in the same bed until it became ridiculous,” she said. “I think I kind of believed that he was for me, because I had asked my parents for a brother. We were very, very close.”

After the funeral, while she was in Newton with her family, she used Darius’s car one day to run errands. In “Eileen,” which is set in the icy darkness of a New England winter, she describes such a day: “By afternoon, the sun had disappeared and everything froze all over again, building a glaze on the snow so thick at night it could hold the weight of a full-grown man.” In her brother’s car, under a pile of papers, Moshfegh happened upon one of his half-smoked Newport menthols. She lifted it to her lips and lit it. She has been smoking menthols ever since.

Moshfegh’s father, Farhoud, has lived all over the world. He was born in Arak, Iran, where his father had grown up in the walled Jewish ghetto and started selling cloth in the bazaar at the age of nine. (He went on to become a wealthy businessman and one of the biggest landowners in the country.) Farhoud left for Munich when he was nineteen, to study the violin, and then spent several years playing in a chamber orchestra in Taiwan. From there he went to Belgium, to study at the Royal Conservatory with the violinist André Gertler. He married a fellow-pupil from Zagreb, Croatia, who returned with him to Tehran—his favorite place of all. They were there for less than a year when the Islamic Revolution broke out. “I got a call that the Committee wanted me to come in and explain some things,” he recalled. Jews and intellectuals were already being executed; a week later, he left. All of the Moshfeghs immigrated to the United States and started over. Farhoud and his wife, Dubravka, settled in Newton, Massachusetts, where they played in orchestras, taught at the New England Conservatory, and brought up three children: Ottessa, Darius, and Sarvenaz, the eldest. They separated more than a decade ago but never divorced.

In April, Farhoud, who is seventy-six, packed a U-Haul with a grand piano, two hundred violins, ten cellos, and some furniture and paintings, and moved across the country, to a town called Mountain Center, an hour from Luke Goebel’s place in the desert. Sarvenaz and her two children are moving in with him soon. Ottessa has inadvertently led her family on a westward migration.

The latest Moshfegh outpost is a tidy house, surrounded by a pasture dotted with slender redwoods. Farhoud, who has a beard and straggly gray hair, was dressed in a muted beige Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts when we visited on a recent afternoon. He was setting out a lunch of ghormeh sabzi, a Persian herb stew, which his sister had prepared and packed for him in empty yogurt containers when she visited recently from Las Vegas. He had cut some lilacs from the yard and put them on the table in a soup can. On the counter was a framed school picture of Darius.

Farhoud pointed out his new kitchen window at his neighbor’s house, in the distance. “This woman has seven horses and twelve goats,” he said. A mountain lion had eaten her dog.

“It’s weird to see all your stuff here,” Ottessa told him. In the living room was a giant painting of Paganini, wearing a look of alarming intensity. “It has a lot of depth,” she said. “I just feel like he might be trying to control my mind.”

“He was known to be very devilish when he played the violin,” Farhoud said. “His fingers were so flexible that he has written music that very few people can play. He died of syphilis.”

“Everybody died of syphilis,” his daughter replied.

Ottessa learned to read music before she could read words, and started playing piano when she was four. Throughout her childhood, she spent her Saturdays at the New England Conservatory. “I was supposed to practice four hours a day, especially if I was preparing for a competition or something. It was a constant responsibility and stress and goal,” she said. “I loved it, but it was also really painful, because, basically, you’re being presented with a work of ecstasy. Now you need to train yourself to play it fluently, and then maybe you can feel the ecstasy. But until you get there . . . ”

There was another painting on Farhoud’s wall of a clarinettist, which he bought at an antique store during a brief period when Ottessa studied clarinet as well as piano. “You were very good at it,” he recalled.

“I would have been very good on anything,” she said. “I don’t think I was especially good on the clarinet.”

“You were.”

“Well, if that’s true, then I had a really, really terrible teacher,” she said. “He is on my list—the list of men that should be snipped.”

Moshfegh studied music intently until her teens, when her allegiance slowly shifted to fiction. When she was fourteen, she wanted to go to a summer music program at Interlochen, in Michigan, but she missed the application deadline, so her mother signed her up for a creative-writing course there instead. “I was pretty tight-assed about being a pianist,” she recalled. “I remember being really pissed off.” She met her first mentor at Interlochen, a writer named Peter Markus, who taught poetry in Detroit public schools. “She was a student who didn’t need a teacher,” Markus told me. “I simply took her seriously.” Every day for the next three years, Moshfegh sent him her writing through the mail, and he returned it with his notes. “I can’t believe he did it,” she said. “I think my mom paid him a hundred bucks a month.” She stopped practicing piano when she decided not to go to music school. “But studying music and playing music, I think, was the foundation for the way that I look at writing,” she said. “Writing, to me, is more musical than I think it is literary a lot of the time—the way that a voice can sound and the way that it leads the reader in a sort of virtual reality, a journey through its own consciousness.”

If a voice is sufficiently compelling, the reader can forget the deranged circumstances that it is relating. The premise of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”—that a woman sincerely believes she will become a better person if only she can hibernate—is insane, but it is easy to be lulled by the sound of the narrator’s thoughts: “As summer dwindled, my sleep got thin and empty, like a room with white walls and tepid air-conditioning. If I dreamt at all, I dreamt that I was lying in bed.”

Farhoud showed us the back room, where dozens of boxes were stacked, still waiting to be unpacked. He opened one to pull out some of Sarvanez’s paintings—large abstracts, which he unfolded on the floor. Ottessa pointed to one, a big, dark canvas with a kind of flaming tower in the corner, that she used to have in her apartment. “I just didn’t realize it was about 9/11,” she said. “That’s so creepy—it was hanging on my wall for years.” Initially, Moshfegh thought that “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” which begins in June, 2000, would be primarily about September 11th. Moshfegh decided that Reva would work in the World Trade Center, and she researched the businesses that were housed there, up to a point. “I went so far as to contact Paul Bremer,” the terrorism expert who later administered the American occupation of Iraq. “He offered to talk to me, but I was too afraid.”

As sometimes happens to her, Moshfegh found life mirroring what she had written. “I was going through copy edits, reading the last page of Reva falling, when my friend called to tell me that Jean had jumped.” Jean Stein committed suicide in April, 2017, at the age of eighty-three, by jumping from her fifteenth-floor apartment on the Upper East Side. “My mom said Jean wanted people to know that she was strong—because the guts that must have taken, the height of her penthouse . . . ” Moshfegh told me that she thinks about Stein every day. “She was tough as shit.”

At night, the desert wind near Luke Goebel’s casita is so ferocious that it is hard to hear a voice. It sounds like the smashing of waves. “I call it the poor man’s ocean,” Goebel said one evening, when he got back from teaching his biweekly composition class at the University of California, Riverside. “It’s actually scary at times. It shakes the house.” Outside his windows the tamarisk trees looked like witches. Timothy Leary used to own a cabin nearby. Goebel’s neighbor is an iron sculptor named Chops. “But in here it looks like the home of a seventy-year-old woman,” Goebel said, accurately. He and Moshfegh had recently unloaded a shipping container of furniture from his grandparents, and now there were tasselled pillows, a Barcalounger, ceramic terriers on the coffee table, paintings of horse-drawn sleighs on the wall. “It’s such a ridiculous set—it’s a total sitcom,” Goebel said. “I think of it as an art piece.”

Like Moshfegh, Goebel lost his only brother, seven years ago. He wrote about that experience in his first novel, “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours.” The book, he told me, was “highly experimental, complicated. A lot of people can’t follow it—one out of ten, maybe.” Goebel has been working on his second novel for four years. “It’s a total bitch,” he said. “I had no idea how books worked when I met Tess—I just wrote how I wrote. I didn’t have the perspective to be, like, ‘How do you write a book that’s successful, that people actually want to read?’ I just wanted to do my own thing. Now I’m entertaining the question ‘What will a reader go for?’ ”

I pointed out that Moshfegh’s books are pretty weird. “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is a page-turner about a woman who is almost always asleep. Eileen’s greatest joy is a case of explosive diarrhea.

“I don’t think ‘Eileen’ is a no-brainer,” Goebel said. “But I think when you put it into the context of how artists are also names, and names are also fetishized things, and when you’re winning the Plimpton Prize, and you’ve got a book that works on a level of nostalgia with a strong female narrator and she’s defying some of the mystery-of-womanhood shit that has been unveiled in the last five to ten years, and it’s written dynamite—then, yeah, I think you have a recipe for success.”

“To be completely fair,” Moshfegh interjected, “Luke hasn’t read ‘Eileen.’ ”

“I’ve read the beginning,” he said.

“Is it O.K. if I take a cigarette break?”

He laughed. “So what you’d like to do is just lob a grenade into the room and then walk out for a cigarette?”

Goebel, who is thirty-seven, tall, bearded, with floppy golden-brown hair, was sitting on the countertop in the kitchen; he looked as if he were in a movie from the late sixties. Moshfegh admired him briefly—“He looks good everywhere,” she said—and then returned to the matter of why he’d never finished her book. “You know what I think the real reason is? There’s a mystery that he’s trying to find out in his own book, and he doesn’t want to see how I did it, because maybe it will influence how he does it. I’m always arguing that it’s not the mainstream drivel that he thinks it is, and then he’s like—”

“Um, I never said it was mainstream drivel,” Goebel countered. “But I do think it’s accessible to the masses. Can I come outside, too?”

They went and sat on the patio together, where you could see the veins of snow on the mountaintops glowing blue under the moon. The couple talked about reconciling their opposing approaches to writing and to living—Moshfegh’s rigidity and Goebel’s heedlessness. “I never thought I’d own a home,” Goebel said. “I didn’t really think I was going to be thirty-six, thirty-seven. I lived a very reckless life style. I met you at the moment that my chaos had failed me. My creative process had led me to a novel I couldn’t finish because I needed more structure: I needed to be part of the regular world and put down some roots.”

“I was dealing with how to exist stepping off the path,” Moshfegh said, blowing smoke into the wind. “Then I met you and it was, like, Oh, this is a really smart move: that path was actually just going to loop back. I’d been walking on a wire, and he was—”

“Falling off a wire,” Goebel finished for her. “I drove off a cliff a year and a half ago. Sober. Doing sixty. I should have died.”

“Do you feel like your life is not doing that anymore?” Moshfegh asked. “I’m just wondering—in the last year and a half, like, is this still part of that?”

“No, you have absconded with all of the upheaval,” Goebel said. “All the chaos that used to be out there is now in our dynamic, and out there is just the quiet dark.”

This cracked her up. “We keep each other tethered,” she said. In the car, I’d asked what she found most compelling about her fiancé, and Moshfegh had told me, “He’s very innocent. I mean, that has its own challenges for him, personally, to be so open. He’s somebody who wants to connect a lot, and I don’t think I could be in a relationship with someone who wasn’t that connective.” Without his prodding, Moshfegh could easily slip back into the part of herself that is like her latest protagonist, a woman who relinquishes all the distractions and comforts of the outside world in order to reach her goal.

“What are you thinking?” she asked Goebel, looking at him intently.

“What am I actually right now thinking?” he said. “I am thinking that you’re a genius. That your writing is genius. You’re a genius.”

“Wow,” Moshfegh said. “Thank you. That’s not what I thought you were thinking.” She was quiet for a few moments and then said, “Is it a lie?” ♦

Ariel Levy joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. She won a 2014 National Magazine Award for essays and criticism, and guest-edited “The Best American Essays 2015.” She is the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs.”