The symbol of the aesthetically valuable space represents a spiral in its impulsive rhythm (zigzag) expanding upwards as a crater. The aspiring movement upwards as value. But this is not the absolute value of the vertical and the horizontal of the Cross. The plastic of the sculptural body, directed upwards, and moving in its inclined motion which underscores the overcoming, is being screwed into the growing and expanding space of the imagined crater-cosmos. The symbol of the aspiration of temporal and transient for eternal and perfect. The details are subordinate to the motion of the principal plastic mass in the ascending anfractuosity of space – the main aesthetic value of the composition.

This image – to what state of the soul does it mostly bear witness? – It is a soul that is not rooted in the Spirit, a restless soul (movement), a soul which is prone to violence towards its own self and towards others (overcoming), a feeling of longing for elevation (ascending), in the permanently nervous tension (anfractuosity of space), but it is a soul that is also holistic and harmonious in its own way (main plastic mass – the body of the sculpture) ("John the Baptist", 1977, "Steps", 1978, "Cathedral", 1978, "Concert of Sviatoslav Richter", 1979, "Ferapontovo", 1979, "Opening", 1979, "Ascension", 1980, "Eternal Path", 1980, "In Memoriam of Andrei Rublev", 1982, "Transfiguration", 1983, "Cosmos", 1985, "Dream", 1986, "Wave", 1994).

There gradually grows the feeling of the need for the presence in the composition of a center of an individualistic beginning from which the crater-space emanates. This center may be located at any point of that space, but the center always creates the space and always dominates it. The individualistic beginning needs an ethical and aesthetic harmony before anything else, and it is that which is harmony's sine qua non ("Memory", 1988, "PIETA", 1990, "Eternal Path", 1995, the memorial plaques to Vladimir Favorsky and poet thinker Daniil Andreyev, and the model monument to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1997).

The lofty content of the icon-image becomes ever more clearly enunciated. The spiritual distance between the front and the realistic portrait is the distance between the way of life of an icon-painting monk and that of a secular painter. The mental realization of that distance has supplied me with an understanding of the limits of my own creative work. It has helped me to concentrate quietly upon individual's accessible levels in art – the realistic portrait, the nature study, the drawing. That coincided with the restitution of value to facts of ordinary life. That restitution did not involve, however, any abdication from the former acquisitions and took place in the hope of synthesis. (A series of nature studies, drawings, and portraits in 1985–1995, and later).

The model monument to Vladimir Solovyov presupposes a symbolization of spiritual vision, which vision fills the personality of the thinker as well as the social idea that is connected with him and with his creative work. The divine light that has found reflection in the doctrines of Vladimir Solovyov – and which has put a certain imprint upon his image – is symbolized in the portrait picture which is a kind of a part of the cross and remains in compositional connection with the architectural space of the monument that is opened outwards. The plasticity (="the transiency, or transitory character") is limited with the ontological vertical of the cross.

But what about the place, after all? (Rhetoric is an instrument of learning about oneself). Well, works of visual art have to be seen.

Valery Yevdokimov
("Magic Mountain" Magazine. Moscow, 1995, #3)