Marcel Proust's (1871–1922) novel In Search of Lost Time has been a continuing challenge to readers around the world since its publication in the 1910s and 1920s. What is it: an immense book-cathedral in the tradition of great novels of the 19th century, a panorama of the refined culture of Europe at the “end of the beautiful era”, swept away by world wars, an experience of philosophical understanding of memory through the means of literature, an attempt by the author to understand himself, his thoughts about what it means to write a book and how to decide on it, or, finally, an invitation to the reader to understand what it means to really read a book? All this together and much more, which nine readers of Proust reflect on from different angles: literary scholars, philosophers, art historians. And, of course, the Search is a challenge for the translator, which Elena Baevskaya takes on in this book, revealing a fragmented, but at the same time unified view of the corpus of texts of the outstanding French writer.