Was he talking about sex when he said men had to be like lions and wolves? “Yes. It’s common knowledge that if man has sex with a woman she’s happy, and she’s not going to be happy if you don’t have sex with her. And what is crazy now with the #MeToo movement is man is now scared to flirt with women.”
Does he have sex like a lion/ wolf? He blushes again, and almost whispers his answer. “No, I believe in single love and I don’t believe in sex as mechanical. It’s spiritual.” Polunin, who used to go out with the Russian dancer Natalia Osipova, is currently single.
Well, that’s good, I say. We’ve cleared up one thing: it’s all about male energy rather than homophobia. He pauses. “For me it is not natural to watch it.” Watch what? “If two men kiss, I’m like [he makes a noise as if his stomach is churning] because it is not natural to me.” Just when you think you’re getting a grip on Polunin, he blindsides you. Even now, it’s hard to know for sure whether he means it.
He admits there is one thing he did say purely for effect. “When I said about fat people. I never saw people as fat or skinny. It’s something a friend of mine says, and I found it funny. As soon as I did this thing about fat people, people were like: ‘Right, this is enough.’ It crossed the line. ‘This is violence against people!’”
It didn’t matter to him that everybody was walking out on him – he was having too good a time. “Even my friends were saying: ‘I’m going to stop working with you.’ Everybody had left by then. Big companies, big agencies, film agencies, advertising company. I had to return all the money.” How much? “Not crazy – about £100,000. Still, it was good I wasn’t sued.”
Then on 20 February, three months to the day after the start of his Instagram carnage, Polunin came crashing down. It was another out-of-body experience. “It was like I could almost see time. I was flying, flying, flying, and then it was like, boom! I was like, fuck, the energy’s gone. And I instantly deleted everything on my Instagram. I started to realise how stupid everything was.”
He remembered how it had all started with his ambition to unite the world in love. “I wanted to talk about stopping all the wars, stopping all the negativity we have. But what I was doing was pissing people off and putting people against each other.”
Does he regret what happened? He looks at me as if I’ve lost the plot. Of course not, he says – he never regrets anything. His manager Tokareva talks about what happened to him as a form of breakdown. But Polunin pooh-poohs that. No, he says, it was a revelation, an epiphany. “I thought it was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever been through. I learned how society worked, who is loyal to me, who is not. What is important to me, what is not.” His Instagram apocalypse has liberated him, he says. “I feel the freest person since then. I see other people sleepwalking, and I’m totally awake looking at everybody and have regained the joy.”
I’ve been with him for three hours. Throughout, he has been charming and attentive – even if some of his views have been outrageous. As I leave, I ask him about the tattoo on his stomach. “Ah, that’s a kolovrat. In Germany, they say I’m a fascist for having it. But the ancient Slavik swastika is one of the nicest symbols if you carry it well. If you do destructive things, like Hitler did, it destroys you. I really want to change this horrible thing about this beautiful light symbol.” I tell him he is fighting a losing battle on that front. He laughs, but Polunin being Polunin, it has probably just made him even more determined to popularise the swastika.
