A Guide to Sergey Kalmykov
Almaty, KZ, 2022
A Guide to Sergey Kalmykov is the first English-language volume in the series Book of Thousand Volumes—a canonical edition of Sergey Kalmykov’s texts, published in translation as part of ORTA’s project dedicated to articulating the literary axis of his practice. The book was specially produced for the opening of the Kazakhstan National Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.
Kalmykov practiced what he defined as genius: a deliberate program of living as a modest professional genius and producing works intended to endure for centuries. During his lifetime, he remained largely unrecognized, never held a solo exhibition, and died in a psychiatric hospital. Today, his paintings are held in the State Museum of Arts of Kazakhstan and in museum and private collections worldwide, while more than ten thousand pages of his manuscripts are preserved in the State Archive of Kazakhstan.
Compiled by Alexandra Morozova, the volume brings together Kalmykov’s theoretical writings on practical genius, speculative and science-fiction texts, and his foundational Eight Laws of Composition, offering an entry point into his system of perceiving and composing reality—later articulated by ORTA as the New Genius.
