Sergey Makhotin’s book For Some Chalk draws your attention immediately. It stands out because of its size and color; it is nice to look at, you would want to hold it, to skim it and even to try to look out of the window, depicted on its cover. Behind that window, there is not just a city in the evening, but a whole world — green as the grass, blue as the night sky, red as alarm. The color fully inundates the pages swallowing the space completely, as if not even leaving any place for the text. And the poems have to dissolve in this color. And fill it with sounds.
These are two very different people, Sergey Makhotin, the poet, and Katya Tolstaya, the artist. However, the world created by them is their mutual world. In this world there are happiness and pain, surprise and sadness, all that is close and understandable to every person irrespectively of his or her age. It is during childhood that this commonality of the world becomes close and understandable most of all.
Everyone who goes or has ever gone to school almost certainly remembers the feeling of the person who is sent to bring some chalk in the middle of the lesson. It is a feeling of incredible, head-spinning freedom. Sergey Makhotin and Katya Tolstaya have turned out to be extraordinarily free people. They were making a book seemingly for themselves, but, apparently, it is for everyone.