A contemporary actor of Kalmakoff's time named, Mgebrov, recounted a rather peculiar encounter with the talented, but, deranged, devil-obsessed painter:
One day, while I was visiting him, he whispered to me mysteriously that, for some time now, he'd been painting the devil. 'I have all the sketches upstairs' he said with a strange glint in his eye. 'I stay awake late into the night and keep watch for him. I've caught a glimpse of his eyes... his tail... even his hooves... but I haven't yet seen him entirely. Still, I've made hundreds of sketches - do you want to see them?' And, in fact, in the dusty attic of his bizarre little home he showed me a fascinating and frightening variety of sketches portraying the devil's eyes, tail and hooves. He was absolutely certain that these were things he'd seen.
All his works betrayed a certain eroticism - an eroticism so overwhelming that it could only be attributed to Satan himself, or worse, to a force even greater than Satan, to something infinitely more awesome and terrifying... A couple of years ago I saw a truly prodigious painting of his... A painting that was pervaded entirely by his hyper-diabolic eroticism. It depicted the sexes of a man and woman in union. But, using that array of colours so particular to him, he created strange rhythmic patterns around them, evoking a sense of mystery. The two sexes were rendered in such a way that you believed you were witnessing the creation of the world.