THE SUPPOSED INSANITY OF A CANDIDATE FOR ABSOLUTE IMMORTALITY

(Notes on S. Kalmykov and the foundation of his life)

Text by Alexander Brener for the catalogue for the Kazakhstan's pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale—The first New Genius Book "Sacred expositions of the Great and Immortal Lai-Pi-Chu-Plee-Lapa", 2022

“If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

What is written below is but a weak reflection on the grandiose sunstroke the author of these lines had received as a child when he first saw the artist Kalmykov. Standing on a small square in front of the Theatre of Youth in Almaty, there was that skinny, shaky man in a jester’s outfit, moving in a sort of dance in front of an easel on which a piece of cardboard was mounted, sporting a pile of dots. The crowd was staring at this madman – just as a crowd in Ancient Rome must have gazed upon Heliogabalus’s barbaric sacrifices. But to the dazed and delighted boy, the spectacle was nothing less than an involuntary conception of some spirit – or perhaps the human spirit itself. At this point, I must quote Artaud, who wrote in his Heliogabalus:

However, in the human body what represents the reality of this breath is not pulmonary respiration – which would be to this breath what the sun in its physical aspect is to the reproductive principle – but this sort of vital hunger, changing, opaque, whose currents sweep across the nerves, and battle with the intelligent principles of the brain.

Yes, that's exactly right: the “breath” of which he speaks is spirit; SPIRIT IS A VITAL HUNGER, WHOSE CURRENTS SWEEP ACROSS THE NERVES, AND BATTLE WITH THE INTELLIGENT PRINCIPLES OF THE BRAIN. There is no better way to put it. It was spirit that rampaged in Sergey Kalmykov’s body, guiding him through life. Every now and then, this same spirit visited a boy in Almaty – and these were the best moments of his life.

But never mind that boy.

Instead, let’s ask ourselves: who was Sergey Kalmykov in the eyes of the ordinary people who encountered him in the streets of Almaty in early 1960s?

Quite clearly, to most, he was simply a madman, a lunatic. To those who had heard of him, he was a crazy artist – in most cases, with a strong emphasis on “crazy”.

And indeed: wearing his emerald green but unclean velvet jacket with an Indian-style fringe on the sleeves and his “medieval” bell-adorned beret, carrying that canvas bag over his shoulder, his face sharp and haggard, his motions jerky like a broken puppet’s, Kalmykov could not help appearing to the locals as raving mad. Or perhaps as a holy fool, of a decorative variety. The rumours said: he had lost his mind, though he had been a talented artist before. Once, he had been a theatre decorator. Now, he was insane.

But what did the word “insane” mean to those passers-by, who had read neither Freud nor Foucault? Sure it meant being thrown out of human society and normal existence. It meant that the artist was behaving strangely, wildly, unpredictably. He was seen mumbling something incomprehensible, waving his arms in those long sleeves, grimacing, jumping; he was dirty, uncombed, dressed up in ridiculous clothes... In the eyes of the Almaty public, Kalmykov had undergone a tragic and irreversible transformation: from a healthy reasonable human being, he had turned to a mentally ill ragged outcast.

The everyday view suggests: along with sanity, you lose humanity. You became an untouchable. Most people in the street shunned Kalmykov; some feared him, some pitied him, some played tricks on him.

But for Kalmykov himself, of course, it was just the opposite. It was not he who had changed and become different; rather, the world around him had been transformed beyond recognition. People, landscapes, things were freed from the patina of normalization, revealing their true – miraculous, disturbing, delightful – essence. This magical change was not a single event but a continuing and lasting revelation that thrilled and enchanted him. The artist Kalmykov wanted to match this metamorphosis of the world, to be one with it. That is why he dressed and behaved in such a way: it was neither fancy nor provocation but an attempt to fit in with the transformed reality around him. Besides, it was also his way of protecting himself from the state and its scoundrels.

It goes without saying that society and its authorities – informers, psychiatrists, policemen – could not tolerate such behaviour. The Soviet society tried to convince the artist that his view of the world was false, distorted, and sick. It claimed that he needed treatment, and so it forcibly treated him with all its tried and tested means: ostracism, poverty, non-recognition, punitive psychiatry, chemical agents, everyday control, and medical supervision. But the artist proved amazingly resilient and inventive: rather than submitting, he continued living in his own way – creating, imagining, inventing, never accepting the labels imposed on him: “paranoia”, “schizophrenia”, “manic-depressive psychosis”, and the like. He despised these words. Instead, he developed his own proud artistic vocabulary that resisted the official terminology. He called himself a “world genius”, a “candidate for absolute immortality”, a “lord of space”, an “universal inventor”. He compared himself to Leonardo and Michelangelo. He called himself “the unsurpassed comedian”. He believed that art would protect him from the assaults of society. Weak, poor, lonely, suffering – he fought the system, striving to remain himself and... he succeeded. He really did.

Thus, we are considering a rare phenomenon here: an artist who believes in himself and in his wild star, in his destiny, in his place at the feasting table of his forebears – despite all worldly adversities and the paralyzing pressure of society. This is the kind of heroism of which Antonin Artaud speaks so poignantly in his essay “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society”. Artaud challenged the common notion of Van Gogh’s madness, claiming that the painter actually exhibited extreme rationality, a kind of clairvoyance that allowed him to “look far ahead, beyond the immediate and visible reality of facts, into the infinite and threatening distance”. According to Artaud, “it is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.” Precisely! It was for these discoveries, for these “unbearable truths” that society condemned Van Gogh to the torments of punitive psychiatry and total rejection.

Now, what can we say about the Almaty artist in the light of Artaud’s magnificent words?

Kalmykov was Van Gogh’s spiritual brother. He, too, tried to live not in society but in the spiritual cosmos. He, too, sought union with higher, invisible forces. He, too, was absorbed by one thing only – his ascetic creative quest, a quest incompatible with a society that sets out to tame and violate personhood. As Gustav Landauer put it, “the true path leads not outwards but inwards. One who has comprehended the essence of a flower has comprehended the universe.” Even better, let us quote Kalmykov himself. In his diary, he wrote: “No, I am not insane. I see special worlds. The secrets of living nature have been revealed to me. I can hear the grass grow. I live among the astonished stars of the universe.”

The astonished stars of the universe! In the mental hospital on Kablukov Street, they force-fed the man who lived among those stars haloperidol and сhlorpromazine, and dripped albucid into his eyes.

“Reality must be interpreted as myth”, Kalmykov wrote in his diary.

This is almost exactly what Artaud identifies as the essence of Van Gogh’s art: “Gauguin, it seems to me, considered it the artist's duty to search for a symbol, a myth, to exalt ordinary life to the level of myth – whereas Van Gogh was convinced that myth could be distinguished in the most mundane everyday life.” He proceeds to summarize the basis of Van Gogh's artistic myth:

Pure linear painting had been driving me mad for a long time when I encountered van Gogh, who painted neither line nor forms but things of inert nature as if in the throes of convulsions.

And inert.

As if under the terrible staggering blow of that force of inertia which the whole world talks about cryptically and which has never been so obscure as it is now that the whole earth and all of life have combined to elucidate it.

Now, it is with a bludgeon stroke, truly with a bludgeon stroke, that van Gogh never ceases striking all forms of nature and all objects.

What is the creator of the Theatre of Cruelty talking about here?

About the origin of things, it seems. About their emergence from the primordial chaos, from chthonic depths, from the struggles of light and darkness. This is nothing less than a theogony: the origin of the world and its divine powers. Van Gogh retained the memory of the theogony, Artaud suggests, which is why his paintings are not landscapes, portraits or still lives but living testimonies of the clash between matter and spirit – with the latter winning.

This is how he sees Van Gogh’s artistic myth-making. The search for a myth becomes the necessary antidote against a mercantile and repressive society that degrades life and its poetry. This, Artaud believes, was understood by all the best modern artists – from Odilon Redon and William Turner to Henry Rousseau. But above all, by Van Gogh. He looked deeply into the sunflower, into the chair, into the cypress, into a simple room, to discover in them the traces of an ancient myth: primordial, astral, volcanic, titanic. Only such a myth opens access to the truth: to the night sky and the heart of the flower, to the voices of the ancestors and the games of the gods, to the convulsions of living flesh and the music of the cosmos.

Moreover: the true artist himself wants to become part of the myth, to live within its secrecy, at the source of existence, outside accursed time, outside this monstrous world history which cannot but give birth to horrors.

If you follow Artaud’s logic, Kalmykov, too, was such a seeker of truth.

Unlike Van Gogh, though, Kalmykov was unable to concentrate on the simplest (and most divine) things. Instead, he wandered and got lost in the gardens and palaces, in the backyards and wastelands of his mythical Almaty Elysium. Though he lived in the same city year after year, he was a nomad by spirit, obsessed by visions of an oasis. He kept seeking it among the corrupt and evil sands, in ghostly clouds over this sinful Earth, in demonic ruins and thickets... He also dreamt of drawing a single winding, delightful, super-sensible line leading right to the stars; he dreamt of building a plywood tower to the planet Mars. He never saw the sun of Provence and the spinning of the southern night sky – but he’d certainly have been delighted by these words of Artaud’s:

And what is an authentic madman?

A man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honour.

This Van Goghian honour – despised by psychiatrists and all of society – was the foundation of life for the Almaty genius: the honour of a being who chose the secret, dusky, and perilous path of flight from society. He rejected the dull contemporary world in favour of the most poetic status, even if those around him called it “madness”: simply being human on the planet Earth. He preferred the company of Leonardo, Edgar Allan Poe, and Pushkin to that of Kazakh artists whose aim was to survive (and to thrive, as far as possible under Soviet conditions). Kalmykov understood very early on that all great things are found in the world of the dead and all bad things in the society of the living. That is why in his diaries and in his art he conversed with the divine dead, with mythical monsters and erotic ghosts while laughing at the living fools and scoundrels.

Where’s the madness in that?

This artist was not a madman but a sage. A sage who decided to leave the world behind.

Besides Artaud, there is another author who can shed some light on Kalmykov and his fate. This is Julian Jaynes, an American psychologist with a highly developed philosophical vein. The main concept of his only book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), is that ancient humans did not possess consciousness in the modern sense of the word but lived according to entirely different principles of thinking. He argues that the actions of our ancestors were dictated by auditory hallucinations emanating from the right cerebral hemisphere and transmitted to the left one. This is what prompted humans to do whatever they did back then, he argues.

Hence Jaynes's main term: “the bicameral mind”. According to his concept, auditory hallucinations of the right hemisphere were perceived by the ancients as “voices of gods” telling one what to do when making an important decision. They seemed like commands coming down from above – from the domain of the gods, the spirits, and the dead. The life and happiness of the living depended on fulfilling these commands. Thus the voices of gods became the power which helped our ancestors to orient themselves in the wilderness of prehistory which is only familiar to us from myths and the artifacts of “primitive” peoples and cultures.

To Jaynes, consciousness is a later phenomenon. At some point, the model “I vs. others” entered the thinking space, conditioning the further development of human society. Consciousness results from abstract thinking, from complex linguistic activity; it develops in a loop with symbolic universes and the formation of society. Ancient humans knew nothing of that sort, Jaynes argues. They obeyed their spirits and gods who told them explicitly how to act. “Bicameral” life was determined by habits – and in unforeseen circumstances, by “voices of gods”. Moreover, our ancestors had a poorly developed sense of linear time and were unable to comprehend the past and project the future.

To support his concept, the phenomenally erudite Jaynes turned to various fields of knowledge: neurophysiology and anthropology, ancient mythology and psychopathology, ancient history, fine art, and poetry. He demonstrated how bicameral thinking could have inextricably linked reality and myth, reality and magic. He made a convincing claim that they only separated with the appearance of philosophy in the middle of the first millennium B.C., after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

According to Jaynes, bicameral people had about the same mental disposition that is characteristic of so-called schizophrenics. These latter often hear imperious voices – like those of the gods that determined the actions of shamans, biblical prophets and creators of archaic poetry.

In his book, Jaynes devotes a whole chapter to the Homeric epic. He believed that the voices of the gods in the Iliad were not a poetic device at all but a perceived reality for the people of that time, auditory hallucinations that prompted them to certain decisions and deeds. Jaynes believes that the Odyssey was actually created a few centuries later, which is why it reveals a very different way of thinking. Odysseus, who undergoes many (mis)adventures in the course of his wanderings, also hears voices of the gods but relies more and more on his own ingenuity and enterprise. Thus, the Odyssey is a testament to the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Jaynes finds a similar development in the Old Testament: from the bicameral prophets who carried the Word of God – to Ecclesiastes with his merciless reflections, his contemplation of human futility. Oracles, wandering poets, prophets, and storytellers: all of them heard voices of gods who helped them resurrect dark pasts and foresee glorious futures.

According to Jaynes, the breakdown of bicameralism occurred when this kind of thinking could no longer ensure the survival of ancient peoples. It happened rather unexpectedly, in the Mediterranean, when a series of geological cataclysms struck Western civilizations. After volcanic eruptions accompanied by partial flooding of land, the survivors had to flee, and the voices of gods were drowned out by the cries of despair amidst the internecine war and chaos. New mental properties were needed: cunning, the ability to deceive, self-reflexivity, dodginess, hostility to outsiders, and a passion for rivalry.

Jaynes regards this as a culmination of a development that had begun before the geological catastrophes: trade, population growth, and writing had all contributed to the crisis of the bicameral mind.

Jaynes devotes whole sections of his book to what he sees as shards of bicameralism in modern societies: schizophrenia, psychic mediums, automatic writing, hypnosis, and glossolalia.

His concept remains controversial among psychologists and psychiatrists. But a number of remarkable authors (Deleuze, Guattari, Peter Kingsley, Julien Coupe) were fascinated by the idea of bicameralism and actively discussed it.

So what if we apply Jaynes’s hypothesis to the life of the Almaty artist? We shall see that many things become clear. Kalmykov's notes explain that he listened to the voices of his personal guides and spirits – much like ancient shamans, magicians, chanters, and diviners. What were those voices? Was the voice of his genius among them? Of a guardian angel? Of a certain divine spirit? Perhaps of Apollo, the patron of the arts? Of some ancient master artist? Or maybe of Mnemosyne – of Memory herself? Was it the voice of Jacques Fourrault, a character in one of his paintings? Was he listening to the voices of the dead – of his parents, his old friends, or the painter he regarded as his teacher – Petrov-Vodkin? Or perhaps Vasily Kandinsky, with whom he had an imaginary argument? Or was he listening to Lunar Jazz, which he often described in his diaries? Were his ears perturbed by the singing of the sirens on one of those ships he painted? Was he haunted by the hum of distant suns? Whatever they were, there were voices, calls and whispers echoing in his mind, restless and stirring... They were guiding him – “the last vanguardist of the first call” – helping him on the path of life every time he bitterly needed help. Kalmykov‘s diaries give space to the voices of the invisible patrons and defenders who sang and conjured their magic, empowering him. “You are mighty”, they said, “you are a genius, you are steadfast, you will endure, you will not die in vain, you will triumph, you will bear everything, you will not vanish from the face of the Earth, you will become famous!”

Perhaps Kalmykov associated these guiding, milky, starry voices with Orpheus and his lyre, whose image persists in his works: THE FIRST AND GREATEST SINGER, whose severed head continued to sing! Then again, the artist was haunted by a seductive, dangerous, unstoppable maiden – the foremother Lilith. These primordial images fascinated and galvanized him. At a time of fierce political pressure, amidst harsh ideological control, in the depths of Soviet disciplinary society, this self-defining, anarchic, unsociable artist found his own line of flight, his own vector of marginal existence, a path which allowed him to breathe, dream, and create. It was a credit to his voices – or, more precisely, to his deep artistic memory. In Almaty – this festive and mundane, great and provincial city with its sunshine and its shade, apple trees and foothills, bazaars and celebrations – Kalmykov managed to preserve himself thanks to the mask and posture of a lonely eccentric, of the local madman. Wasn’t that what his voices and visions taught him? He listened to them and contemplated them; he recreated them on pieces of carton and sheets of paper. For him, unlike for contemporary artists, there were no projects, no calculations, no budgets, no curators. Instead, there were voices and visions.

In essence, Kalmykov lived by three rules formulated by another artist – one who lived at the opposite end of the Earth and who was very different but in some ways also very close to him: Agnes Martin.

Here are her wonderful commandments:

Never have children.
Do not live the middle-class life.
Never do anything that will take away from your work.

This is precisely how Kalmykov lived!

An ascetic.

A holy fool.

A sociopath.

He lived on bread and milk alone. Who had taught him that?

Van Gogh perhaps?

Who advised him to build a bed from bundles of old newspapers?

Maybe Gérard de Nerval?

Or was Jesus himself, a friend of the deprived and the poor in spirit?

The four self-identifications of Truman Capote also come to mind, as distant as he is from Sergey Kalmykov: “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m a homosexual. I’m a genius”.

Kalmykov would surely join at least one of these self-definitions. It’s easy enough to guess which.

But if we the issue is not really insanity, if speaking of a clinical case, of mental illness, of psychosis, of phobia or mania misses the point – then what is the issue? How can one understand the phenomenon of Kalmykov without constantly returning to his anecdotal “follies” and “abnormalities”?

Well now. I would say that the issue here is a special form of life, one exemplified and affirmed by Sergei Kalmykov and his work. Here, creation coincides with life and can only be understood in conjunction with it. This is why it is worthwhile to try and understand the scraps of information that can be extracted from the notes of the Almaty master, as well as from the gossip and tales that accompanied his earthly existence. Relentlessly repeated online, in art magazines, and exhibition brochures, this material may have become tiresome but this does not make it any less significant. As Giorgio Agamben once said, there is a good use of gossip that should be separated from its bad repetition.

Here, for instance, is something important: it follows from Kalmykov's notes that, living in Petrograd in the early 1920s, he had a love affair which left a deep wound in him and may well have determined his fate as a lonely artist, ascetic and chaste. It was a passion for a woman who did not reciprocate. Kalmykov wrote: “Lydia is gone forever! She left behind the smell of a stirred-up pond, which I can still feel in my nostrils!”

We know that unrequited love often generates what people call madness. This was well known in ancient times, too – the great monuments of poetry testify to it. Orpheus, whose singing attracted not only animals but even trees and stones, experienced a period of madness when Eurydice, his beloved, left for the world of shadows. Antique authors compared unrequited passion to a potent poison capable of disturbing both the body and the mind.

The rejected lover finds himself in an unbearable position: his purest and highest impulse is lost in vain, he is denied love – that is, the fullness of being he is seeking. Such a collapse can lead to suicide or lifelong melancholy.

However, the experience of unrequited love also holds another possibility: overcoming the romantic affliction and gaining new, hitherto unknown, spiritual strength. Out of broken love is born another, unseen passion: the desire for eternity. Yes, one might call it madness: an attempt to live beyond the laws and restrictions of society, in accordance with divine, cosmic energies. Kalmykov's art reveals this striving for eternity, for timelessness. Longing for everlasting youth, he dabbed his hair with oil paint, hoping to protect it from greying. He rejected any “normal” human relations, preferring communion with ideal images, with archetypes. He believed that aliens watching from the stars could distinguish him in his extravagant costume in the grey crowd of other earthlings. In later years, whenever he was forced to talk to people, he defended himself with an avalanche of words in which the thread of communication was lost: he did his best to avoid vulgar, boring, mercantile human speech. It was not words he wanted but the Pythagorean music of the spheres.

Here is a little story. It was told to me by Boris Luchansky, a wonderful Almaty artist and eyewitness of the following incident:

Kalmykov, in his usual modus vivendi of the restless demiurge, is dancing in front of his easel at the entrance to Gorky Park. On the easel, there is a warped sheet of cardboard with a sketch of a nude statue. The artist takes aim with his brush, rushes to the easel and draws the desired line. A small group of observers has already gathered around the scene. Kalmykov is enjoying their attention.

And then a string of beads tears on the neck of a spectator, an attractive young woman. Apparently, she was fiddling with her jewellery while looking at the artist.

The beads bounce on the asphalt, rolling in all directions. Kalmykov reacts instantly: he stops his artistic performance, gets down on all fours, and begins to collect the beads.

Then he rises – smiling, triumphant. In his clenched fist, he holds a handful of beads.

He beams at the woman and says:

“I won't give those to you. They are now my talisman.”

General confusion ensues.

Kalmykov would surely have liked a line preserved from one of the ancient Orphic hymns, “eating beans is the same as eating your parents' heads!”

Amok! Amok!

They say he refused food brought to him by his neighbours, who were concerned about his emaciation.

They say that his favourite food were sushki – small crunchy Russian bread rings – soaked in milk.

Foucault argued that madness always contains fragmented meaning, “sens […] fracassé.”

Is this formula suitable for Kalmykov?

The answer is obvious: for him, all the ready-made meanings have been broken into tiny fragments.

He lived at a time when meanings were collapsing and new ideologies erected in their place.

Besides, his artistic intuition told him: all ready-made meanings and values lie.

Therefore, he had to glue the pieces of meaning back together in order to extract his own, new meaning.

Traces of this work are evident in his every sketch, in every little picture.

Some of his pieces consist of nothing but stitches, scars, folds, grooves, and kinks – traces of meaning being stitched together.

The result of this effort is a jagged, wispy, raw, agonizing, faint, flickering, fading meaning that can be reduced to this formula: THE NEED TO SAVE IMAGINATION.

He felt: the purpose of government, the state, and society was to destroy, suppress, and violate free forms of life on Earth.

After annihilating them, power seeks to neutralize all imagination capable of contemplating free forms of life.

That's why you have to save your imagination; you have to live it.

And he did.

In his notes, Kalmykov says that back as a boy he had discovered two masters who became his guiding stars for life.

These two were Francisco Goya and Aubrey Beardsley.

The infallibility of this choice is striking: Goya with his all-destroying gaze into the abysses of the human fall and Beardsley with his escapist eroticism are Kalmykov's undoubted teachers, his educators.

Goya showed that human madness is not an aberration but a ubiquitous phenomenon: children inherit the madness of their parents; transferred from generation to generation, this madness is called “civilization”. His “Los Caprichos” and “The Disasters of War” illustrate the darkness and bestiality of civilization. The “Black Paintings” which he created at the Deaf Man's Villa are visions of humanity’s collective madness.

As for Beardsley: he, like Kalmykov, realized early on that one can really live only in the imagination – in a fairy tale, in a reverie, in fantasy, in fiction. For him, the symbol of true life was the wilted rose that he wore in the buttonhole of his jacket. He said that it came alive by the power of his imagination.

Strikingly, Kalmykov’s paintings, too, resemble the withered, wilted flowers of an imagination that is now flaring up, now fading... These flowers can evoke both joy and longing.

The dying Beardsley is supposed to have said: When miracles become delirium, reason turns to madness.

Kalmykov believed in miracles, so he held on to the edge of madness.

At the very time when Kalmykov was living as a beggar at the outskirts of Almaty (late 1950s – early 1960s), his antipode – the fabulous surrealist Salvador Dali – was reaping laurels of fame and fortune at the other end of the Earth, in the world capital New York. Insane, brilliant, uncontrollable, critical, and paranoid: such was the image Dalí created for himself, and it was obligingly repeated by the media and all sorts of experts after him. Dali, the PR specialist with his splendid market strategies and brilliant social relations: it is hard to imagine anything more distant from Kalmykov with his isolation, poverty, and disconnection. Nevertheless, there is a kind of polar entanglement between the two artists. Not only the affective theatricality of Dali's persona and behaviour but also some motifs and images in his art are strikingly reminiscent of the Almaty hermit.

For example, both enthusiasts of bizarre outfits and extravagant gestures loved to depict long- and thin-legged hallucinatory elephants, androgynous beauties, deserted fantastic landscapes, and exotic scenes. A sacred-seeming bowl of fruit is a leitmotif for both. And, of course, both were not only visual artists but also great writers! We can speak of an almost telepathic connection between these two artists who claimed to communicate with spirits, ancestors, and the cosmos. The decisive difference between them is their method: Dali follows the course of representational painting, transferring its operations into the sphere of the unconscious, while Kalmykov works at the neurophysiological level, drawing traces of his wandering in chaos right onto the surface of paper, canvas, or cardboard. He keeps mixing the corporeal with the psychic, the emotional with the spiritual, so that material dissolves into ephemerality, still lives become still deaths, and the line turns into a chaos of brushstrokes.

And one more difference: Dali continuously communicates with his viewers, giving them riddles and offering clues, surprising, exciting and intriguing them. Kalmykov, on the other hand, offers nothing and tempts no one but simply cuts off communication, offering his viewers (if the painting happens to have any) to contemplate ominous, restless, blissful, dark, floating, and evaporating visions.

Yet another famous contemporary was much closer to Kalmykov than Dali. I’m speaking of Paul Klee – one of the most ethical masters of modern times and simultaneously a great metaphysician of the invisible. The philosopher Valery Podoroga made an excellent comment on Klee’s art:

In his work, the canvas is not a reflection, not a mirror of the already existing and the given, but something quite different: a surface where all similarities are denied while differences in the qualities of the appearing energy (of light, graphic, colour, composition, etc.) are affirmed. The work is a type of energy running through the inert surface of the canvas with various degrees of intensity and leaving its marks on it. Klee’s canvases are like cosmic X-ray films: they do not represent “living pictures”; they are neither doubles of the real nor “windows into the world”; the new space they reveal exists independently of optical, tactile, sonorous, and other spaces, it lies beyond, it is pre-figurative, fragmentary, and interrupted. The term “space” itself does not seem right here: Klee does not create what we call “pictorial space”. His graphic art shows us bodies in motion (or rather, their richly varied manifestations, their traces), which cannot be spatialized, translated into the visible. These forces constitute an inseparable whole with matter. When we follow Klee in speaking of “energies”, “forces”, “motions”, we are describing modes of existence of matter itself (including pictorial matter).

This remarkable analysis by Podoroga is equally applicable to Kalmykov's art, as is his following observation:

The motif of the hand appears. Where does it come from? From a point that is indefinite itself but that defines everything – from a point of chaos – and this is where the artists remains, at this point, in his natural element. The first stroke, the first traces of “black energy on white” show the position of the artist’s hand in relation to the invisible forces passing through it. What is depicted here is not a “thing” or a “figure” but a momentary trace of cosmic forces in motion, of forces that are by definition beyond the earthly limitations. The colour White is the Cosmos, the colour Black is the Earth. From these decisive signifiers, Klee’s metaphysics of nature evolves.

Podoroga believes that Klee's space is dominated by “the idea of the line”:

This line is ecstatical – at every point of its movement, there are forces that are stronger than any attempt to stop it. … [it is] self-sufficient, random, uneven; it resists being read according to the traditional perceptual dichotomies: right – left, top – bottom, figure – background, depth – surface, etc.

According to his argument, this line’s sources lie in medieval ornaments, in the Gothic of the Northern Renaissance:

If we consider those lion-human figures, those human and animal faces, those leaves in northern medieval ornamental painting, are they not strange for the very same reason? They are neither human nor animal; the line has blurred, erased all their organic qualities, abbreviated them to a gesture, a grimace, as if to say “the true coexistence of human and animal cannot be measured by an organic representation independent of the transcendent forces equally immanent to the movement of both animals and humans – that is, of the type of motion that makes life itself so violent, cruel and strange.”

According to Podoroga, this ecstatic abstract line

sharply shifts the path of sight, accustoming the eye to see not a “thing” but rather the very force that gives the eye “sight”; this force does not need to be supported by the anatomical and material authenticity of the displayed object, it has nothing to compare itself with – for the eye that it creates is immanent to it, and there is nothing paradoxical about it. It is not the eye that sees, controls, and generates the visible, that makes it be; rather, it is itself the product of the abstract line, it is its perceptual organ; or even more precisely, it is not the eye itself that sees, but a particular affective type of corporeality, whose name is hysteria.

This brilliant analysis, based on research by Wölfflin and Worringer, corresponds very closely to the magical pleasure that arises from contemplating not only Klee’s but also Kalmykov's work. Podoroga's concluding statement about hysteria (and its expression in the line) describes Kalmykov’s paintings and his entire existence almost perfectly – with one significant “but”. Whereas Klee’s artistic hysteria relentlessly seeks support in musical harmony (envisioned as establishing a connection to the world of the unborn and the dead, to divine forces and the natural cosmos), Kalmykov’s hysterical outbursts are coloured by that painful demonic dissonance which has long been called acedia. I define acedia here as a form of spasmodic sensuality when the human soul falls away from divine grace and wanders in search of itself and its salvation. Acedia is the Noonday Demon, the desire of the spirit for non-existence, a sense that human life is intolerable. It was probably acedia that pushed Kalmykov to all his public performances – hectically dancing in front of his easel, theatrically dressing up and proclaiming himself a “cosmic genius”. He was endlessly tormented by his isolation; he felt neglected and abandoned. He suffered as only a comedian can suffer, hiding the tragic face of the outcast beneath the clown’s mask. And all around him, not realizing what was really going on, the mob was laughing.

If you are truly human, if you live in the womb of a nihilistic civilization, and if you are honest with yourself, then acedia is inevitable.

There is much more to be said about the shared ground between Klee and Kalmykov, these two witnesses of hidden worlds. Both of them preferred a chamber format – sketchy paintings, miniatures – as befits those who wish to visualize the invisible. Both came from the world of art nouveau (Jugendstil): the surrealists and Walter Benjamin were quite right in calling it the last great European style based on utopia. Both Klee and Kalmykov were “synthetic” artists, rejecting any uniform modernist method and focusing on identifying a particular vision (Marcel Duchamp correctly noted that Klee never repeated himself in any of his pieces). Both were tireless in their experimentation with the alchemical matter of invisible realities. Both lived first and foremost an inner life and were remarkably prolific creators.

But there is a significant difference between them, too: Klee was alight with luminous energy; in Kalmykov’s work, on the other hand, we invariably see a kind of rust, a solar eclipse, a sinister wilting, a flickering moon, a desert mirage, a demonic darkness. Even the depths of Klee’s imaginary waters, the very bowels of his Earth are beaming, flashing, blinking and phosphorescing, like fairy fireflies, like living beams, like guiding candles, holy lamps, and magic torches. In short, his work is full of energy and light. His humour, too, illuminates all – even the saddest, the most sepulchral and chimerical things. Klee's worlds are essentially Apollonian, full of starts and sunshine. He is one of the last joyful Orphics on this frozen planet of monsters and fools, corrupted by power and capital: an Orphic who firmly believes in the possibility of another life – that is, in salvation.

Kalmykov is not like that. He, too, is a fragment of the Orphic brotherhood offering praise to the Cosmos – but he is hopelessly lost; for him, the apocalypse has already happened. He keeps thinking of the Orphean lyre but not as an instrument of deliverance but rather as an unreadable hieroglyph. He is no longer able to draw a line between spiritual connection to sacred forebears and a mere hallucination. His dreams of unity are not embodied in energy but remain in him like a mocking ghost, a phantom unable to transform into luminous matter. Kalmykov is too deeply sunk into a world of illusions, of chimeras, of mirages. “The Man with the Order of the Fly” is not just one of his most famous works but the dry residue of his creative frenzy.

Still, he has much in common with Klee. Like Klee, he could say “When I close my eyes, I see a caricature”. And that caricature is a source of childlike pleasure.

Tolstoy once wrote in his journal:

I walked in the village, and looked into the windows. Everywhere there was poverty and ignorance. And I thought of the former slavery. Formerly, the cause was to be seen, the chain which held them was to be seen; but now it is not a chain – in Europe they are hairs, but they are just as many as those which held Gulliver. With us the ropes are still to be seen, well – let us say the twine; and there are hairs, but they hold so tightly that the giant-people cannot move.

There is one salvation: not to lie down, not to fall asleep. The deception is so strong and so adroit that you often see that those very people which it sucks and ruins defend the vampires with passion and attack those who are against them... We have a tsar.

Kalmykov found a way out of this horror: he lived not in Europe and not in Russia, not in the USSR and not even in Almaty but in the dark forests and the moonlit glades of his imagination. Tolstoy had his own Bright Glade – this is what Yasnaya Polyana, the name of his home, means – but he left it in the end. Apparently, even that beautiful glade had its own twine and hairs, and the Gulliver of Russian literature decided to live with the birds in the sky instead…

Kalmykov had no Yasnaya Polyana but a tiny room in a communal flat in Almaty and a meager pension. Still, like Tolstoy, he wanted to fly, to live in the sky, between Heaven and Earth. Or even in outer space.

“His biography”, Mayakovsky said of Khlebnikov, "is an example to poets and a reproach to the deal-makers of poetry”.

Well then, Kalmykov’s biography – or rather, his way of life – is an example to artists who don't share the contemporary view of art as business.

Sergey Kalmykov lived in Almaty as an outcast, but his presence was truly life-giving to those fellow Almatynians who did not want to put up with Soviet drabness and officialese. He was like Tarkovsky’s films or Brodsky’s poems! Or perhaps another comparison is even more fitting: he was like the Grimms’ fairy tales. Everybody knew about him, everybody remembered him, and there were even a few people who really believed him to be a genius and a magician. Of course, you must yourself be a child at heart to believe that.

As for the local artistic environment, in spite of the keen interest shown in Kalmykov during his lifetime and especially after his death, he did not leave behind any local followers. Indeed, how could he? Visionaries have no heirs; all they can have are apologists and imitators. The Soviet art establishment was opposed to Kalmykov’s art, and other unofficial local artists (Rustam Khalfin, Boris Luchansky, Vladimir Nalimov, Gleb Nikolayev) followed their own paths, focusing on the legacy of Western and Russian modernism, as well as on what was happening in the Moscow underground. As regards the post-Soviet period – artists in Kazakhstan (as well as in Russia) were guided by a desire to join the international art system with its factory of discourses, aiming for public success and professional recognition in the market, criticism, and curatorship apparatus.

Nevertheless, Kalmykov's restless spirit is still hovering over the Almaty artists as a reminder of something secret and disturbing: the incorruptibility and otherworldliness of creation. Kalmykov’s visionary spirit transformed everything around him: the poplars and elms, the hot summer asphalt, the Green Bazaar and the square in front of the Government House, the city fountains and the snowy mountains in the distance, the taste of ice cream and French rolls in the street, the amusement rides in Gorky Park, the local port wine Agdam, and the soda stands... One could even say that if there was no Kalmykov in Almaty, Almaty itself – the unique poetic image of this motley city – would not have existed. Not only the writer Yury Dombrovsky spoke intelligently and tenderly of Kalmykov; all the known and unknown Almaty artists understood his importance.

The sculptor Mikhail Makhov, for instance, undoubtedly experienced his influence – above all in his graphic work, where he tried to build “power structures”: enchanted fields containing human beings.

The artist Sergei Maslov reflected on Kalmykov’s experience a little later. He understood that marginality is a source of artistic vitality; besides, he had a predilection for the primitive and the odd, for holy fools and seeming barbarians. More importantly, Maslov attempted to discern, to feel, to grasp The Image, The Idea, The Grail that were decisive for Kalmykov, too: The Image, The Idea, The Grail of Mnemosyne, of Memory herself. Maslov was haunted by the recollection of something precious and unforgettable: a Maiden lost in the blue haze of oblivion. She’d revive his Psyche, his soul, and bring it to the ancient groves of Arcadia, where there is still freedom and pleasure. Maslov kept looking for his magic Maiden, kept finding her and losing her again; he joked, fooled around, and played with her. He pretended it was all a joke, identifying his Eurydice in Whitney Houston. He might have been Kalmykov's most frivolous and most ardent follower.

We must also mention another Almaty artist, utterly unknown as he was: Albert Faustov, an entirely marginal figure, and a painter of rare talent. He was close to Kalmykov by virtue of his ascetic lifestyle and his utter detachment from the world's hustle and bustle, this whole vanity fair. All his life, he kept painting one thing: the only Flower on Earth. Unlike Vladimir Yakovlev’s flower, eternally oscillating between life and death, it was his very own: Albert Faustov’s mortal but living flower sprouting through the deadly concrete of modern desolation.

Generally speaking, Kalmykov’s kindred spirits should be sought not among his fellow citizens and the tumult of his time but in the secret depths and corners of world history. He was like those anonymous people who murmured their revelations right into God’s ear and vanished. He was untimely, like all that is great. Still, if we want to consider his contemporaries, there is Jack Smith, the incomparable creator of “Flaming Creatures” (1963); there is Captain Beefheart, the creator of the musical theogony “Trout Mask Replica” (1969)... Due to the nature of their creativity and their personal character, these artists were unable to get along in the vain, rumbling, sensationalizing, brutally commercial cultural industry. They stayed away, in the shadows, in the mesmerizing margins. They were not businessmen but magicians. Or, in the language of respectable citizens, weirdos. A virus of poetic madness wandered in them, a virus of blissful childish disobedience. They were absorbed not in their careers, not in the business of art, but in the contemplation of a true, hidden reality.

In conclusion, a poet comes to mind whom Kalmykov might have encountered on the streets of Petrograd in the early 1920s: Konstantin Vaginov. Like Kalmykov, he was a lost Orphic, a holy pilgrim or a reckless traveller among eternal shadows, between darkest oblivion and a vague recollection of the essential. In his incomparable poems, Vaginov provides the approximate coordinates of this journey: somewhere in Leningrad-Petropolis, in Hades, under a “sinful sky with the star of Bethlehem”, “with Antioch in my finger”, “with a piece of Rome in my left foot”, “among the horns of the Urals”, “in a crowd of true troops”, “with a piece of Hellas”, “amid the alien days of Gethsemane”, “amid the ruins of Russia”, “in the night over the Finnish road”, “in the crackling of the grass, in the chatter of the city”, “on the marble spacious height”, “under the thunder of war”, “among the Libyan mountains”, “among the columns of a Baltic country”, “on the desolate parquet”, “in the dead train”, “on the cobbled swamp”, “among the gap-toothed houses”, “on pink archipelagos”, “at the sweet feet of Venetian statues”, “on the islands of Extinction”, “amidst the birches of Pavlov”, “in the garden of the Lord”, “amidst villages and towns”, “on the deck of the Flying Dutchman”...

I’m running so calm and so quiet,

I’m trotting all over the world.

It seems I’m obliged to examine –

to flow into – every last thing.

The shadows of wonderful people,

of people once dearly beloved,

are hurrying each to their graveside,

aflicker, aswirl, passing by.

A young man is left by his spirit,

while his aging body lives on,

a beautiful girl’s ocean-blue eyes

are foolishly following her.

Who is wandering within these verses, knowing no rest?

Psyche. Soul.

She is a poor pilgrim, a homeless wayfarer.

Kalmykov knew these excruciating, debilitating wanderings well.

But suddenly – in the middle of this ghostly path – there it is, the final miraculous revelation you’d been seeking all along:

A moonlit dawn, asleep, I went out walking,

and left my image sleeping on the Earth.

Above me, rustling leaves were overflowing

in a deserted park, in days of war.

My feet so light, where shall I make my way?

Why should I look through eyelids at these fields?

But from the fog, like music

a head appeared before me.

Its eyes were shining,

its white lips begging for a kiss,

its hair was wavy and so shiny

above the blackness of the absent shoulders.

The thought then burned my mind: “Has Art transformed

into a Eurydice, appearing to us,

a scattered Orpheus generation,

who only ever live at night?”