Annotation: What would happen if an academic art critic in the early 1990s, by a twist of fate, found himself in a news factory? The essays of well-known art critic Kira Dolinina, collected in this book, were published by Kommersant Publishing House newspaper and magazines from 1993 to 2020. It could reasonably be assumed that these texts, born of informational necesseity, should have disappeared with those informational needs. However, over time Dolinina’s texts have come together as a kind of mini-textbook on the history of art. Here, all the greats are in one place, accompanied not only by the most important details of their lives and works, but also by explainations of serious issues in art critiscism that have been rendered in plain language. The spectrum of greats is vast—from Rembrandt van Rijn to Edgar Degas, from Edouard Manet to Ilya Kabakov, from Umberto Eco to Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, from Anna Akhmatova to Joseph Brodsky. This all comes together in what can be called – borrowing from the great historian Carlo Ginzburg – a “microhistory” of art, with which are intertwined the histories of museums, street art, women artists, forgotten and marginalized peoples and, of course, obituaries.