There he met Emilia Kanevsky, a pianist turned art dealer who had visited Kabakov’s studio in Moscow in the Seventies, and who had gone West soon after With a couple of marriages behind them each, they wed. There was The Man Who Flew into Space, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away and The Man Who Flew into His Picture. Later, Kabakov turned these conceits into installations, shown as “10 Characters” in London in 1989. The Man Who Flew into His Picture became a chair and a blank canvas bearing the merest trace of a silhouette. For works like these, the American curator Robert Storr calls Kabakov the anthropologist, archaeologist and chronicler of the Soviet Union, a sort of Russian Proust. “He is by special historical appointment the Soviet Union’s last and most eloquent ambassador.”Kabakov, more simply, says of his years in the Soviet Union: “I had this enormous desire to depict this life in my work.

I was a small particle of this everyday life, and I wanted to show it.” But was he able to show his work? “No!” So who saw it? “Nobody. I was afraid somebody would come and see the installations, and that my work would be destroyed, and I would go to prison I did The Man Who Flew into Space. But I would put it up, show it to friends, then take it down.”Kabakov is now famous the world over, but has yet to have a show in Moscow. Always a private subversive rather than a political dissident, he stayed in the Soviet Union until it began to fall apart in 1988. His father was rarely at home, as far as Ilya and his mother had a home: they scavenged a life at the margins of society, moving from room to room, sleeping on tables and chairs, eating very little. Somehow, Ilya managed to win a place (dim local officials failed to spot the Jewish origins of his name) at the Moscow Art School.

There, he was given a classical, Russian training, and should have graduated a good Social Realist painter. Instead, he became a highly popular illustrator of children’s books – by day. By night, he founded Moscow’s conceptual-art movement, playing host to a circle of artists and writers who met at his studio on Stretensky Boulevard.At first, in his “unofficial” art, Kabakov explored the gap between the visual arts and literature, making albums of drawings and texts, peopled by fictitious apartment-dwellers and animated by their fantasies. He was born in Dnepropetrovsk, in the Ukraine, in 1933, to Jewish parents. If Hitler had been a better artist, he would have been able to realise his ideas – in art.

If he had been part of an institution, with a collector or a gallery, we wouldn’t have had a worldwide war. Probably.”Ilya Kabakov knows what happens when utopias go wrong. There will be extraordinary things to see, to touch, and to read; things to make you laugh, and things to make you think. “It’s a memorial to utopia,” says Kabakov.”The world is full of utopias,” Emilia translates. “Everybody dreams about different utopias; but the problem is that the moment a utopia is realised, sometimes there are catastrophic results That moment when a utopia can become a dangerous thing …