Grandpa used to pick me up from school and we walked home to Smolenskaya. When we arrived, he immediately started making lunch and would loudly announce every dish: “First course!” he proclaimed, confidently putting a bowl of soup in front of me. Then came the loud “Second course!”—a plate of pea porridge with butter, Grandpa’s favourite dish. His mother, Zinaida Petrovna, my great-grandmother, lunched with us and always asked him to cut her a “tiiiiny piece of bread,” and after she had refused several pieces he cut, he would lose patience and hand her the tiniest crumb. That always made me laugh!

Grandpa did everything briskly, energetically, cheerfully. He didn’t like to fuss around for long, but there was always something mischievous in his manner. Behind his thunderous exclamations came a loud laugh. Grandpa was a great joker.

After lunch, he would let me spend time with him in his workshop—a place absolutely magical for me. Canvases and frames stacked up to the ceiling, a vinyl turntable, records, tapes, notebooks, pens, pencils, chisels, planes, bits of wood—the room was filled with enchantment, mystery, the sense of inventing something extraordinary.

Grandpa was always creating, tinkering, building. Many times I sat on the floor of the workshop, watching him paint, or else repair some device, fine-tune a piece of audio equipment, or even build his own speakers. He would explain to me that his homemade speakers didn’t have three, but four drivers, and that this gave the sound greater depth.

Later, Grandpa would take me into the big room and put on records—The Bremen Town Musicians, Buratino, classical music, as well as singer-songwriters, Soviet and French.

Music filled the house constantly: Grandpa listened to his favourite pieces, but he also recorded programs from Radio Orpheus onto cassette tapes. Each cassette he carefully labeled, placed on the shelves, and catalogued in a big notebook that he kept with great care.

This period of my childhood is inseparably tied to Grandpa, to his magical world. Later, when I was already a student and dropped by his apartment on Smolenskaya, he would ask me about my life and always pose a difficult, slightly embarrassing question: had I found my calling in this life? Now I think that, for him, this was the central question of his own life: free searching, choosing one’s own way. He graduated from Bauman University (an engineering school), but refused to take the government-assigned job and instead joined the Moscow circles of the Sixtiers, painted, and worked as a children’s book illustrator. Grandpa always liked to do things his own way.

And I like to believe I inherited from him that same desire not to do things “the proper way,” but to be playful, mischievous. I love remembering him—his presence, his laughter, our talks about art and about traveling in the Russian North, a journey that, sadly, I never managed to make with him. But studying his works, uncovering new periods and motifs, has become my way of accompanying him on that spiritual journey through Russia—or perhaps, more broadly, on a journey of seeking and discovering one’s own style and spirit.

When I failed to give a clear answer to what my vocation was, he would tell me about art, about his own search. At the time, I wasn’t very good at listening to him. It seemed to me that he kept repeating his mantra about the “line of beauty.” Grandpa would say that in his works, he was searching for that line. Like a wave, its curves echoed the shape of the latin S. In his paintings, it traced the outlines of faces, the bends of trees, the contours of houses and churches.

He drew inspiration from icons, from the Russian North, from leaning wooden houses, from a road stretching far into the distance, from shifting light, silhouettes, dawns and sunsets. His works are filled with these images, filled with music.

I think now I see the line of beauty that Grandpa spoke of—the breath of the wave that brings life to everything around it.

Be that as it may, this intuition was further nurtured by our confirmation bias, that was a discovery that our landlord is into ham radio. At night, walking past his windows and thanks to interior lighting we had a glimpse into some of his observable life. Just this one time, on our way back from a divine grocery shopping experience – which we had just once and that sufficed for the whole 3 nights we spent in this city – we saw him through the window, his back to us, sitting on a long desk, surrounded by radio looking devices and gadgets, headphones and antennas.

Expectedly, this gave our imagination an amazing scope. After this revelatory inspiration, we immediately decided in our minds for this man to have an unexpected hobby. Late in the evening he would sit in front of the radio station tuning into the waves of the other aficionados around the world, and exchanging signals with them.

It’s not hard to guess why he would be attracted to this subculture. The whole city is covered with extravagant radio antennas, looking like old crooked trees with wicked branches trying to grasp something. Maybe for this city antennas mean a holy thing, maybe they deliberately protect this mechanism that might look so outdated. Maybe they enjoy the ideas of exchanging signals, ideas of being connected and the mystery of the whole thing.

The amateur radio culture could be the true precursor to different movements for the free and decentralised organisation of information and life in general, like the early internet pirate subculture or the web 3 trends nowadays. And it might be that the cult of radio antennas in Zagreb is somehow linked to the omnipresence of gothic, rock and hard metal vibes. Even the main cathedral is transformed into a huge antenna. The most important symbol of the city became a representation of radio culture.

It’s not only radio antennas but also the blood circulation system of Zagreb – the tram rails – that seem to cover the city like a spider’s web. Flowing in the city’s veins you see young people represent this gothic and metal culture with style. Hair, clothes, tattoos, all details are taken care of with a great deal of attention.

All that makes us feel that Zagreb lives in a rebel analog universe, powered by tram railways and radio waves. Unlike digital world that tries to convey all the infinite riches of reality in 1s and 0s, analog world has all the elegance and mysterious nature of a wave. All that creates space for crazy constructivist buildings, half abandoned towers, theatre academy club restaurants, antique bookshops and muddy parks with ducks and turtles.

I said to myself that If I would start writing something I would probably adopt a similar tone, as it feels so warm and inspiring, so simple and friendly.

I relate a lot to his sense of mysticism, which feels so real and present in the here and now. Some critics that I came across used such words as “fantastic” when talking about his work, but i feel it differently. To me it’s a subtle sense of mystery that is very grounded. It is not about something that is beyond, but it is about spiritual experience that is possible in the immediate reality.

So in the very first story from this collection, “Cream”, a young boy has a strange encounter with an old man, who asks him to imagine a circle with many centres and no circumference. You are not quite sure if the old man is real, but this is exactly how Murakami creates this sense of a mystical experience, he does not give you a key on how to interpret it and he uses a friendly and as-a-matter-of-fact tone.

I was mesmerised by this symbol of a circle with many centres but no circumference. It struck me as something so familiar and warm. Instantly, I remembered Tomas Mann’s Joseph from “Joseph and his brothers”, who felt about himself as the centre of the world, and yet neither would reproach him being insolent or snobbish, everyone was falling in love with him for his kindness. I’d say it is his awareness about him being the centre of the world that separated him from other characters.

I guess for me it is a symbol of our universe where every single part of it is the Centre and every single consciousness is the heart of all creation and there is no end to this sphere. Why should it be a sphere though and not a rectangle ? I actually want to write about it as well, but I will do it later.

I was thinking about all this while driving to the airport and noticed the Turkish flag, graciously floating in the see of traffic.

I am not entirely sure that this visual is well connected to this text, but I guess the Turkish flag is also the centre of the universe and time visibly slowed down around it as it should in proximity of a strong gravitational field.

Music: Lucy Gooch. “Stalagmites & Helectites”.

One good Russian philosopher, Berdyaev, has an interesting passage on our relation to sunlight. He says sun is a symbol of our separation from our initial (or potential) state of being, where we are ourselves the source of light. And this is why, he says, white nights in the North are so powerful and often offer this mystical experience – because everything is illuminated without the visible source of light and that reminds us, or gives a glimpse into the state when light is emanating from each thing, from the inside.

Observing shadows and silhouettes in twilight or deep fog can also be a mystical experience, where objects appear unfinished, constantly changing shape and their symbolism. Somehow the lack of light creates this playful uncertainty that is so reconciling and peaceful. Last time I experienced it in Venice where suddenly I found myself on the Murano island, in a part of the island that was completely desert and the fog was so deep that only silhouettes of buildings, of little bridges were emerging out of the white nothingness. You could only meet with your own self walking uncertainly in such a place.

The world of shadows has this soothing and reconciling effect, because it also has a symbolism that reminds us of a different state of being. It reminds us that we live in the world of illusions. We are the Plato’s cave men, prisoners who only see shadows of real things. Our world is covered by the veils of Maya where things are not what they seem. But why it is soothing and reconciling, one may ask. We have been always trying to find a way out of this prison, trying to lift the veil, unplug and wake up, as explored in many myths.

Living in the world of shadows can be a beautiful and reconciling experience because we just know that we cannot take anything too literally or seriously, or personally, that there is always more to things that it seems. It all comes to how we engage with this world and from this perspective anything can be art. When we engage with life creatively and shift our perceptions, that other state of being can indeed become our reality. We do not even need to wake up, it is all already here.

Music: