Usually they say that a person who has a cancer and needs money for treatment used to be an ordinary man before developing his disease. “Just not long ago Mr.X was an ordinary guy, he played football, went boating with his fellows, played cards and courted girls". You can’t say this about Lesha. He has never been just an ordinary man. For example, when Lesha was a little boy he made up his mind that he should go to the loo with golden objects and he always looked for gold in his pot. When Lesha grew a bit older he decided that he would have a box with miniaturized celebrities: he made a box and miniaturized celebrities of all kinds would live in it.

When we became acquainted Lesha was 16 years old and he had a growing pile of sheets of paper containing various projects and ideas. They were all kinds of very different things: designs of clothes, advertising campaigns for imaginary brands, TV programmes or shows of surreal television. I remember there was a description of a show where the participants compete in the ability to pack themselves as compact as possible. People packed themselves into boxes of various forms, put some attendant objects around the hollows, etc. All the ideas were a product of his mind when he was about to sleep: while falling asleep Lesha begins to see images mixing in his head and often he is so impressed by them that he would wake up.

We became acquainted when Lesha wanted to shoot a film. We started discussing his ideas, they were strange and often it took me much time to understand his words. They were like a riddle or a puzzle. That’s why we began to talk a lot, it was completely aimless and it was wonderful… and it still remains the same. Lesha can be asking ridiculous questions for hours: «If you were an Englishwoman, how could you have ended up in Kemerovo?», "And would you like to be a Finn and eat blueberries all your life? "
— «All my life?» — «But would you feel that you are important and they need you?» You can talk about serious things, discuss business or complain about something and suddenly he would ask: «Whom would you sacrifice?» or «Could you spit at  Kharat’an?»; you are taken away from reality and the game begins.

Lesha has taught me a lot; for example, to watch the same films again and again. I was really amazed of how Lesha watched his favourite films dozens of times, of how he knew them in detail, every sound, every sequence; he can basically watch these films with his eyes closed. Once I tried to do the same, I became an enthusiastic and zealous supporter of this method. We wished to introduce this into clubs, to arrange seasonal display of the same films, non-stop, with the accentuation of the most intense moments. We almost introduced this method in the club Bilingua, but were halted by the legal matters imposed by the administration.

Lesha told us about his dreams, and I should say I’ve never experienced dreams like those in my life.  He described his dreams in letters, and I’ve kept some of them. For example, the following dream:
«It happened in some camp’s concert hall, it seems to be a camp in the Crimea. Everything was over. A Chinese girl of about 5 years old approached me. She asked me to buy her a calendar for this year. She took me by the hand and led to a kiosk. There were only calendars with star signs. And it was necessary to learn when that girl was born. Suddenly I understood that she only spoke Chinese and I couldn’t speak it. And I was a bit terrified because it was impossible to understand her from the very beginning».
Here is a funny dream:
«In my dream I see a park behind the house, an old woman in faded clothes rinsed her hands in a bucket and I tried to learn from my aunt that the word «Sran’» is in truth formed from the name «Susanna Saguen»».

Lesha’s letters are remarkable by themselves. Everything that they tell us originates from the inmost recesses of his inner world. Here is one of the old letters:

«I wanted to go to Africa and start writing an anthology of stories entitled „A Helping Hand“ but they have not responded yet. Here everything is very dry too – it seems that all the magazines were stiffly, cremaster turned out to be rotten, Maria- insipid. I can’t remember anything more yet».

Sometimes Lesha tells us about small things which he has observed. Any small detail or insignificant element can reach epic heights in his descriptions. The reality looks terrible and mysterious.

«I was in the Underground and through a doorway I could see two absolutely identical women. They were wearing clothes of the same style: identical skirts, boots, the way in which they carried their packages in their hands was the same, they could hardly put their hands round the stomach, they were sitting with their eyes closed, having bitten their lips. Obviously, they didn’t know each other and didn’t notice each other at all. They would never learn about the existence of each other, and it was a physical impossibility: they simply were not capable of paying attention to that. Both of them got off on Molodezhnaya»

«I was in the post office filling in some customs forms, the only post manager was running around the office. An old woman stood at the window peering mysteriously in the infinity of roads. A man entered the post office and asked whether he could use the Xerox. The post manager informed him, without moving her eyes away from the letters, that it didn’t work. The man moaned, complaining that they hadn’t repaired it yet and left. The old woman moved her eyes from the window to the wall and said: «It is necessary to lift Stalin from his tomb!». These words disturbed women in the queue, they started to move, but it lasted only for a second: soon absence of mind  established on their faces again. The old woman continued: «Nothing works! Nothing ever worked! There's no discipline! People never thought about sex so much, these hooligans should be ruled with an iron rod». Someone from the queue answered: «There was nothing to steal at that time». And the old woman returned to look out of the window as she was in the beginning.
The post manager was still running, the women were filling in something. I paid my attention to the advertisement at the entrance: it said that they urgently needed a cashier. There was something crazy about the employee’s movements, a feeling that arose from the speed of her actions and the full absence of emotions on her face. It was something similar to sleepwalking».

The dreams, stories were usually described in letters and were a private part of his lifestyle, something that nobody saw. I pull it out now simply to tell you who Lesha is. It would be difficult to do it in any other way. Lesha also sent pictures to me, as well as those leaflets with ideas from under the sofa. The pictures were a ritual every evening: before going to bed he would sit down and take a picture. Then, already in hospital, he could not think because of medicines, could not read, watch TV and could not even speak, he made collages and created some things. Here you can see them.