Nikolai Kalmakov. Bowlet J. E., Balybina Yu.V.

This book is the first monograph on the work of Nikolai Konstantinovich Kalmakov, a visitor artist, whose heritage remained oblivion for a long time. The painter, the sculptor, the artist of the theater and the book schedule, Kalmakov was a representative of the second generation of Russian Symbolists.

In his canvases, the artist turned to his favorite decadent topics - demonic and erotic fantasies - and captured bizarre and ghostly visions, using a rich arsenal of historical and mythological images. With his frank interpretation of the sex and death, especially in theatrical sketches and book graphics (a kind of “laboratory of aesthetic experiment”), this St. Petersburg dandy, “Angel of the abyss”, gave rise to numerous, sometimes intriguing, legends and rumors.

uncompromising and rebellious, Kalmakov left Russia a few months after the October Revolution to settle in France: he shared the bitter fate of many emigrants abandoned to someone else's country, which provided them with refuge, but did not fit and did not help in gaining glory.