From April 2017 to March 2020, my program New Geniuses of the First Rank was broadcast on Kazakhstan’s Radio Classic. Today we present all episodes of this program, and on this occasion I have allowed myself a brief reflection on what this program is and who the New Geniuses of the First Rank are.

The title “New Geniuses of the First Rank,” coined by Alexandra Morozova, co-founder of our Center for Universal Arts ORTA, originates from the texts of the outstanding Almaty artist Sergey Kalmykov (1891–1967), who in his diaries, manifestos, and novels referred to himself, among other things, as a “Genius of the First Rank of the Earth, the cosmos, and its surroundings.” Here lies the first shared quality of all the figures featured in New Geniuses of the First Rank (for simplicity, I will refer to them simply as New Geniuses).

All New Geniuses play. They have chosen the strategy of playing with this world—not joking about it, not mocking it, not manipulating it, not ironizing it, but playing. Kalmykov played at being a historical figure, a classical universal genius—both scientist and artist, a Leonardo da Vinci. John Cage played at being a pioneer composer creating a new kind of music. Marcel Duchamp played at being an artist misunderstood by his contemporaries, one who outpaced his time. Marina Abramović plays at being a saint, renouncing her body throughout her life, sacrificing it. Even Romeo Castellucci plays at being a visionary artist, playing the theatre of Antonin Artaud. This play can also be called life-creation—that is, the artist’s striving to transform their entire life, their whole being, into a unified myth, an artistic text, into a performed scenario of life, which is created simultaneously with works of art and reflected in them. This is what Schelling spoke of: “Every great poet is called upon to transform the part of the world revealed to him into a whole, and from this material to create his own mythology.” This play has paradoxical properties.

Play is difficult. Because play transforms everydayness. Everydayness is the environment that surrounds us, a dimension in which everything is subordinated to the dictates of functionality—physiological, psychological, social, religious. Everydayness is a rigid structure, a Deleuzian social machine that, like any machine or organism, exerts maximum effort to resist change, fearing that change might destroy it. And so it resists play.

It forbids adults to play; it reduces play to “entertainment,” to which an “hour” is allotted—whereas in truth, play is a “practice” that requires time: a very long time from the perspective of everydayness, a time of another order, a sacred time. Only children are permitted to play—those who, due to their limited legal agency and social autonomy, are incapable of significantly affecting everydayness.

By the time a person acquires independence, everydayness seduces them—already frightened and enticed by other frightened adults—with the promise not merely of “daily bread,” but of the most delicious daily bread, and for a day that will last more than a century. And so the “best years” are spent begging, pleading, laboring for this false god—everydayness—for tokens that grant access to this bread for a lifetime.

And then a person forgets what play is. And if they happen to remember, they discover that it has become incredibly difficult to play. Because play slips out from under the laws of everydayness; it escapes all pyramids of Maslow. It is anti-functional, and therefore alien to everydayness—and dangerous.

What else unites the New Geniuses, besides their playful relation to the world? Solitude. Philosopher Vladimir Bibikhin writes that the word “will” is first understood as striving toward a goal, and then as an open expanse that precedes even any striving. The New Geniuses have exerted their full will and moved toward places where no one has been before—and therefore no one knows whether it is good there or not. That is why their contemporaries cannot accept what the New Geniuses do as either good or bad—what is truly new has no criteria of evaluation yet.

The New Geniuses are eccentrics, outsiders, those who do not fit into existing frameworks—often not accepted, not approved by those very frameworks—and always, in solitude, striving into the cosmos of the truly new.