What would happen if, by the will of fate, an academic art critic ended up in a news factory in the early 1990s? The articles collected in this book by the famous art critic and associate professor of the European University in St. Petersburg Kira Dolinina were published by the newspaper and magazines of the Kommersant Publishing House from 1993 to 2020. It would seem that these texts, born of informational reasons, should have disappeared along with them, but over time they gathered into a kind of mini-textbook on the history of art, where all the great ones are in place and not only all the most important things are said about them, but also serious things are explained in simple language art historical problems. The range of heroes is vast - from Rembrandt to Degas, from Manet to Kabakov, from Umberto Eco to Mamyshev-Monroe, from Akhmatova to Brodsky. All this came together into a kind of, following the definition of the great historian Carlo Ginzburg, a “microhistory” of art, with which the history of museums, street art, women artists, forgotten marginalized people and, of course, obituaries are intertwined.