The first book of the two-volume “Pushkin. Brodsky. Empire and Destiny” is permeated with Pushkin’s theme. Pushkin, the “singer of empire and freedom,” is present even where he is not directly mentioned, because his fate, like the fate of other characters in the book, is organically connected with the tragedy of the great empire. The chronicle “The Death of Pushkin, or the Premonition of a Catastrophe” is not just a story about the last years of the life of the great poet, historian, thinker, but, above all, an attempt to show his visionary power. He desperately tried to warn Russia of the coming disasters. It was not for nothing that when the catastrophe came in 1917, the name of Pushkin became a kind of password for those who did not accept the new bloody era. How, following Pushkin, the great poets Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Blok, and Russian religious philosophers perceived the tragic fate of Russia—the Red Terror and the destruction of culture—is described in the large essay “Disintegration, or Roll Call in the Dark.” In the book, the reader will find a whole gallery of portraits of various participants in the hundred-year drama - from the Decembrists to Pobedonostsev and Stolypin, from Alexander II to Kerensky and Lenin. The last part of the book covers the Soviet period until the early 1990s.