Ilya Kormiltsev

Ilya Kormiltsev was born in Sverdlovsk, he had a younger sibling Eugene Kormiltsev. Ilya graduated from an English-focused public school and entered the SPSU, however, after one year he transferred to the Ural State University. In 1981, he graduated from the Chemistry department.

Since 1981, he was a songwriter for Urfin Jus (Russian rock band), musicians Nastya Poleva and Egor Belkin, and several other rock groups. In 1983, Kormiltsev met Vyacheslav Butusov and Dmitry Umetsky from Nautilus Pompilius rock band. Songs, written for them by Kormiltsev, turned the group into the biggest stars of the Russian rock scene, their 1986 album Razluka (rock album) is considered one of the best of its time. In 1989, the band was awarded with the Lenin Komsomol Prize, but Kormiltsev rejected it.[1]

In 1995, Kormiltsev was baptized, he chose Natalya Trauberg to become his god-mother.[2]

Nautilus Pompilius was dissolved by Butusov in 1997, as stated, ‘due to exhaustion’. As recalled by friends and their circle, the breakup was painful for all members, later Kormiltsev never received his part of royalties.[1]

Kormiltsev started looking for new cultural forms and discovered hip-hop. Oleg Sakmarov confessed to be the one who introduced Kormiltsev to drugs. As recalled by Sakmarov, at some point ‘Ilya started dying his hair orange and went high to rave parties’, though before he only drank vodka and watched Italian cinema.[3] With Sakmarov, Kormiltsev created ‘Chuzhie’ (trans. Aliens) trip-hop project. They recorded one album that is still considered to be the best in the history of Russian electro music.[3][4][5]

In 1990, Kormiltsev emerged as a literary translator. He was fluent in English and French and translated books from these languages into his native Russian. In 1997, when Nautilus Pompilius broke up, Kormiltsev started working for the Inostrannaya Literatura (Russian magazine). He translated into Russian such writers as J. R. R. Tolkien, J. G. Ballard, Roald Dahl, Irvine Welsh, Gilbert Adair, Frédéric Beigbeder, William S. Burroughs, Richard Brautigan, Chuck Palahniuk, and many others.[6]

In 2000, he tried himself as a publisher and became a manager of the special series of contemporary foreign literature at the Inostranka Publishing House.[7][8]

In 2003 Kormiltsev founded Ultra.Kultura publishing house and managed it as the editor-in-chief until his death in 2007. The publishing house specialized in controversial and radical texts, one its first books was a novel by a White power skinhead from Moscow Dmitry Nesterov. Its release led to a break up with the Inostranka. Nevertheless, Kormiltsev kept publishing authors from a wide ideological spectrum, from Subcomandante Marcos to William Luther Pierce. Ultra.Kultura was always at the center of public scandals, it was accused for propaganda of drug use, pornography, and terrorism. Meanwhile, Kormiltsev never professed permissiveness, he agreed that such literature required age limits.[7][3][8]

In late 2006 all copies of the combined Ultra.Kultura edition of Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture and Apocalypse Culture II were sought by authorities, and most were seized and submitted to flames, owing to the book's inclusion of an essay by David Woodard that was alleged to promote recreational ketamine use.[9]