Solomon Volkov’s book “A History of Russian Culture in the 20th Century from Leo Tolstoy to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” offers a detailed analysis of issues in Russia’s cultural life of the 20th century. Destructive wars, revolutions, and the harshest terror repeatedly increased the expressiveness of the past century’s Russian culture, but it paid a high price for this: many deaths, shattered destinies. By his education and interests, the author is closely connected to questions of music, ballet, theater, and the art market—integral to Russian culture. Literature giants from Tolstoy, Gorky, and Blok to Pasternak, Brodsky, and Solzhenitsyn; great homegrown musicians, artists, and figures of theater and cinema: Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Vrubel, Nesterov, Malevich, Kandinsky, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Shalyapin, Nijinsky, Dyagilev, Richter, representatives of the new era—Venedikt Erofeev, Dovlatov, Schnittke, Rostropovich, Nikita Mikhalkov, and many others—are the main characters of “A History of Russian Culture in the 20th Century.”