No artist has received such national recognition and no one has been subjected to such fierce persecution from professional criticism as Ilya Sergeevich Glazunov, the founder of the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, an outstanding personality of the 20th century. His life resembles a constantly active volcano, spewing out avalanches of goodness towards people, friends, students and streams of hatred towards evil, adepts of the avant-garde, which is opposed by a thousand paintings written by him in the glory of high realism. Famous journalist and family friend Lev Kolodny talks about a rich creative and social the life of the artist, about his bright and tragic fate. As the author writes: “My book is the first attempt to explain the reasons for many paradoxes in the biography of this great man, to destroy the trap of distorting mirrors into which art critics, who know nothing about the artist’s struggle for the right to be free, are trying to drive him.”