Carolyn Kunin:"...Kalmakov may have been entitled "Death", but what is actually depicted? The scene is clearly submarine but the human curled up in the corner appears to be asleep, not dead - my guess is he is Sadko....p.s. The artist's knowledge of submarine fauna is extraordinary for its time - could Kalmakov have known the work of Ernst Haeckl (1834 - 1919)? I remember Haeckl came up in my attempt to trace the word lemans which appears in "Ada" - very convoluted, but I include an outline below.* The depiction of submarine vent/plant/animals is also extraordinary for 1913.[ ] From the archives ...from Fulmerford I got to [invented] Dr Lemuroff, and from there to lemur and Lemuria ...to Darwinian Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (who invented the idea of Lemuria) and from him to Blavatsky's Lemurians [related to occult ideas about Thule, btw] and finally back to "Ada" and what I called "those lemans" which now I can't remember for the life of me. Or was it a lake?"

Jansy Mello: Your alliterative games are great fun. I was reminded of two lines, one about "...Ada’s dark brown eyes [ ]What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word ‘deified’? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi?". The other, from TRLSK, related to the disease that killed both mother and son: "She died of heart-failure (Lehmann's disease) at the little town of Roquebrune, in the summer of 1909."*.

Like you, I also thought at first that there was only one head, emerging from a shell-like robe, but it seems there are two curled up humans in the painting. If "Death" is represented by the very flat eyeless dark angel, with hands like shadows forming two birdlike heads, the scene must depict some kind of story, as you surmised indicating Sadko (who?). One more fairy tale.

* Priscilla Meyer in "Life as Annotation: Sebastian Knight, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vladimir Nabokov" explains that "Sebastian becomes particularly susceptible to faery charms, as well as to Keats’ pale kings, Princes and pale warriors, once he is diagnosed with Lehmann’s disease. This medically non-existent heart disease appears to be named for Alfred Georg Ludvig Lehmann (1858-1921), a Danish psychologist at Copenhagen University who wrote a treatise on the occult, entitled Aberglaube und Zauberei (Superstition and Magic, 1908), in which he discusses magic, witchcraft, dreams, spiritualism and colored hearing. "