The book by literary and art historian Monika Spivak talks about the phantasmagoric project of the Stalin era - the Moscow Brain Institute. The Institute was engaged in posthumous diagnostics of genius and had the right to remove the brains of famous people for eternal storage in a specially created Pantheon. Along with the biological research itself, a comprehensive study of the personalities of those whose brains were added to the collection was also carried out there. The book, which is the second, expanded edition (the first was published by the Agraf publishing house in 2001), presents the answers of N.K. Krupskaya on a questionnaire from the Brain Institute, as well as detailed portraits of three writers who were honored to be in the Pantheon: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Andrei Bely and Eduard Bagritsky. “Psychological portraits”, made under the guidance of a major Russian scientist, professor at the Brain Institute G.I. Polyakov, are published from typescripts stored in the State Museum of A.S. Pushkin (department “Memorial apartment of Andrei Bely”).