Today, little is known about Leonide Jilkin beyond his dates of birth and death and this work, which comes from the psychiatric hospital of Afonino, near Yaroslav.
In his essay Russian Art Brut: A Taste of Flint (Alexandre Lobanov and Art Brut in Russia, Paris: abcd, 2003), Régis Gayraud discusses the text accompanying this drawing, inspired by the prestige of Soviet science. In it, Jilkin develops a pseudo-scientific argument intended to demonstrate that the weight of a newly hatched chick, together with the weight of the fragments of its shell, is equal to the weight of the egg before hatching. Gayraud questions the nature of this proposition: is it an example of what he calls “scientific paranoia,” or does it reveal at least a partial awareness of the parodic dimension of this technical discourse?