“An artist receives a correct assessment only a hundred years after his death! It is sad? No. This is simply stupid.” This remark of Georges Bizet (1838–1875) in a letter to Leonie Halévy, despite the apparent paradox, is generally not far from the truth. The studies of French musicologists, which appeared only a considerable number of years after his death and, for the most part, did not claim to fully cover the work of the author of “Carmen”, and the works of Russian researchers were very limited by the absence at that time of a number of manuscripts of the great composer, including relating to such works as “The Cup of the King of Fula”, “Ivan the Terrible”, “Sid” and others. The discovery of a significant number of these manuscripts, as well as the truly ascetic work of G. Filenko, who collected and published in 1963 almost all the letters that have reached us Bizet, open up new perspectives in the study of the composer’s creative heritage, the tragic circumstances of his life and the mystery of his untimely death. The proposed book by N. N. Savinov is one of the first domestic works that most fully and comprehensively covers the biography of the life and work of the great composer. Many illustrations are published in Russia for the first time .