PARIS (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- He has infuriated just about everyone.

Russian authorities threw him in jail for setting fire to the door of the secret police headquarters in Moscow. France, which gave him asylum three years ago, also jailed him, also over a fire, and is now investigating his connection with two new criminal cases, one relating to a New Year’s Eve brawl in a chic Paris apartment, the other over his release of a sex tape of a French politician.

He is on such bad terms with his longtime partner, the mother of his two daughters, that they have not spoken in months, despite their having come to France together to start a new life.

By his own lights, however, Pyotr A. Pavlensky has never achieved quite so much. “The job of the artist is to be a bone in everyone’s throat,” the Russian performance artist said in an interview Monday in Paris. On that score, he has certainly triumphed.

Hailed by avant-garde art aficionados as an exceptional, if highly eccentric, talent, the 35-year-old Russian artist — who now considers himself French “because I live in France” — has never been popular with the powers that be.

Prosecutors in Russia and France have painted him as menace to society, while others have mocked him as a lunatic, especially since he sat naked in Red Square in 2013 and nailed his scrotum into the cobblestones. In an earlier “artistic action,” he cut off part of his right earlobe with a chef’s knife while sitting naked on the wall of a notorious Russian psychiatric institute.

“My aim has always been to be inconvenient and uncomfortable for everyone,” he said.

But Pavlensky has shocked even himself with his latest “action,” or at least the reaction to it.

He said never expected French authorities to come down on him “so hard and so fast” when, this month, he posted online an explicit video featuring Benjamin Griveaux, an ally of President Emmanuel Macron who at the time was a candidate in the French capital’s mayoral election.

Griveaux’s supporters suggested the affair could be part of a Russian destabilization campaign, but there is no evidence of this, and Pavlensky ridiculed the idea: “Am I a Russian agent? No, obviously.”

The release of the video, which Pavlensky described as the first act of a new artistic series called “Porno-Politika,” forced the married politician to drop out of the race and left the Russian artist facing preliminary charges for violation of privacy and publishing sexual images without consent.

His home and that of his French girlfriend — who earlier had an affair with Griveaux, and from whom the artist said he stole the video — were searched by the police, and the couple are now barred from communicating.

“They have declared war on our love,” Pavlensky said, explaining that all governments, whether French or Russian, “are instruments of repression. The mechanics of power are the same everywhere; only the techniques are different.”

This view has made him an unlikely darling of Russia’s state propaganda machine, which for years denounced him as a mad vandal, when it deigned to mention him at all, but which has now seized on his travails in France as proof that Russia is no less free than the West.

On Sunday, state television’s flagship news program, Vesti Nedeli, broadcast a long report on Pavlensky’s current troubles. It showed the artist denouncing the “monstrous hypocrisy” of France’s governing elite and celebrating his success in “exposing the true face” of Macron’s government.

Speculating that Pavlensky may have a trove of other sex tapes, Dmitri Kiselyov, the bombastic presenter of the show, sneered that “the French elite will have to throw such a dangerous man in jail out of self-preservation. And then maybe even strip the troublemaker of his asylum in France.”

That would certainly delight Moscow, which has long bridled at Western criticism of its human rights record and would undoubtedly use the expulsion of Pavlensky from France to show that it is not only Russia that limits freedom of speech and expression.

“The French, despite their tolerance and friendliness, have their limits, too,” Nataliya Eliseyeva, a political scientist, told the evening news last week on Rossiya-24, another state television channel. “Pavlensky has crossed the line here.”

Pavlensky said he could not care less how his troubles in France were being reported back home in Russia and had no regrets about making statements that have given comfort to state news outlets, which revel in exposing Western hypocrisy.

“I spit on what the Russian media, the French media, the American media say,” he said. “Media always say what is convenient for them to say. They always use any situation to their own advantage.”

Unbending and pugnacious in his artistic actions, Pavlensky is surprisingly gentle in person, though his sunken cheeks and shaved head, scarred from the fight on New Year’s Eve, give him an intimidating air. He apologized profusely for having to ask for money to pay for a cab home. He has no job and is broke. His Paris lawyer, Juan Branco, whose other clients include members of the Yellow Vest protest movement, is helping him pro bono.

Pavlensky has also been heartened by the reaction of ordinary French people who stop him on the street to express support. “I’m very happy about this,” he said.

Born into a conformist and relatively comfortable Soviet family in Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, Pavlensky, an only child, said he first realized the danger of vesting faith in state power when his father, a loyal servant of the established order, drank himself to death at 49 after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. “It was a slow-motion suicide,” he said, recalling how his father, a geologist who had spent his entire career in a state research institute, never recovered from the Soviet collapse.

“He had placed all his trust and hope in the state,” Pavlensky said. His mother, a retired nurse, still lives in St. Petersburg.

His parents, while conformist in their views, encouraged him to pursue his interest in art, he said, and supported his decision to enroll in the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, a prestigious art school in St. Petersburg. Increasingly interested in politics, he dropped out of the academy in his final year after deciding that getting a diploma would brand him a “servant of the system.”

A major influence at this time, he said, was Pussy Riot, a feminist punk rock protest group, two of whose members were sent to jail in 2012 for “inciting religious hatred” after staging a protest inside Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow.

That action and the heavy-handed response of the authorities, Pavlensky said, convinced him of the need for “political art” aimed at shocking people into questioning the system, its rules and ideology. “Art should always raise doubts about power, not serve it,” he said.

So inspired, he joined another artist, Oksana Shalygina, his now-estranged partner, in establishing Political Propaganda publishing house, an online platform dedicated to exploring and promoting the use of contemporary art as a tool of political awakening. He staged his first public “action” in July 2012, appearing at a cathedral in St. Petersburg with his mouth sewn shut in protest at the arrest of Pussy Riot members. The police sent him for a psychiatric examination, but he was declared sane and released.

His first action in Moscow followed the following year, when, in November 2013, he appeared naked in Red Square and, in a statement, explained that “a naked artist, looking at his testicles nailed to the cobblestones, is a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of Russian society.” He was briefly detained and then released.

His most famous action — and the first to land him in jail — took place outside Lubyanka, a forbidding stone building in the center of Moscow that served as the headquarters of the KGB in the Soviet era and now houses the leadership of its successor agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. He doused the door with gasoline and then set it on fire.

He was quickly arrested, sent to a psychiatric ward and held for seven months before he was tried. Convicted on vandalism charges, he was let off with a fine, which he refused to pay. He left Russia for France with his partner and daughters in 2017 after a Russian actress accused the couple of sexual assault, an accusation they strongly denied.

Pavlensky repeated his fire act after arriving in Paris, setting alight windows at the entrance to the Banque de France, the French national bank, which he said had established itself as an enemy of the people by providing money to fund the bloody repression of the Paris Commune in 1871.

For this, he spent 11 months in a French prison, much of it in solitary confinement.

Now again facing possible jail time, Pavlensky said he could not understand why Griveaux, the former mayoral candidate — who has raged against “vile attacks” on his personal life — was so upset. He encouraged the disgraced politician to take heart from the example of Cicciolina, a former Hungarian Italian pornographic film star “who had a very successful political career” after appearing in numerous X-rated movies.

Asked if he might perhaps be a bit crazy, the artist said: “Absolutely not. But we all live on the border between sanity and insanity.”

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