More on Maxim Kantor

[Ya Sam]

The author of that Textbook of Drawing that can't find an English publisher

"Painter and author Maxim Kantor is an extraordinary man. Usually the 
masters of nonverbal art tend to be, well, nonverbal. Artists writing 
treatises seem to have vanished with the Renaissance. Earlier this year, 
however, Kantor surprised both the artistic and literary communities by 
publishing a novel titled "The Drawing Textbook" (Uchebnik Risovaniya). And 
what a novel! At 1,400 large-format pages spread over two volumes, it is one 
of the longest fiction books written recently, and, volume-wise, it rivals 
such classic epics of Russian literature as Tolstoy's "War and Peace" or 
Sholokhov's "And Quiet Flows the Don." And it wasn't just the size of the 
book that invited such comparisons. Many critics said Kantor had revived the 
tradition of the Russian socio-philosophical novel, and others, most notably 
Dmitry Bykov and Grigory Revzin, heralded "Textbook" as a new "great Russian 
novel," a feat that seemed impossible after "The Master and Margarita" and 
"Doctor Zhivago."


Perhaps it wasn't all that unexpected. Several years ago, Kantor published 
"The Wasteland" (Pustyr), a series of seven philosophical letters and 70 
etchings. The letters, addressed to a nameless "beloved" who can be 
tentatively construed as the embodiment of Western civilization, were 
eloquent, elaborate and, indeed, philosophical; in a nutshell, they 
contained the seeds of his future novel. This was already a surprising 
project for a man better known as a visual artist, but at least the texts 
were juxtaposed with graphical works, which is rather common in modern art, 
though typically in smaller portions. "....

http://www.context.themoscowtimes.com/story/172637/

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