The Dilettante (*who dreamt of an Angel)

One day. Or the entire world of a scandalous avant-gardist. A lost artist — a multitalented genius or a dilettante? Enemy of André Breton, yet a close friend of Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Proust, Nobel Prize laureate André Gide, Pablo Picasso, and Erik Satie — JEAN COCTEAU.

His father’s suicide, Catholicism and surrealism, boxing and ballet, opium addiction, a journey around the world, and creative endeavors in poetry, prose, film, theater, circus, music, and everything else... It unfolds like an interdisciplinary dream, embodied in the artist’s paintings, poems, novels "Opium" and "The White Paper", the play "The Human Voice", and films "The Blood of a Poet" and "The Testament of Orpheus".

Perhaps, like the author, you will ask what a contemporary artist should be, what we should be and are, and what this dilettantism is all about.