Beast and egg

During the revolutionary, civil war years, the Russian modernist writer and calligrapher Aleksei Remizov, known for his fantastic and bizarre literary imagination, created the secret society ‘the Order of the Monkey’. The society was formed of members of the Russian cultural elite and gave out orders to its members as rewards for excellence in the fields of art, literature and culture. The monkey was chosen as the society’s symbol, supposedly since monkeys are known for their intelligence and cunning as well as their wilfulness and unwillingness to obey rules and norms.