This is the first album dedicated to the works of Aleksei Kamensky to be published in Russia. Kamensky is one of the deepest lyricists of Russian non-conformism from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Kamensky’s work stems from a number of phenomena in the artistic life of his time; his work sounds like a poetic text. This artist speaks of an individual’s personal, intimate spaces, about simple, every-day things, and he sees in them the signs of eternity. His series of images are tables of the elements for the world that surrounds us, tuning forks for the beauty of living reality and for human life itself, which was, is and will be the main subject of art. Aleksei Kamensky was the son of the famous futurist poet Vasily Kamensky. This connection prompts a search for parallels between his work and the aesthetic and practices of the pre-revolutionary Russian avant-garde and suggests a means for seeing in creative works a meaning that is the cultural alternative to the state-bureaucratic system of art.

This book was published to mark Kamensky’s eightieth birthday.