...“And genius is a friend of paradoxes” - a genius can indeed be a friend of the paradoxes of his biography... As soon as a writer is ranked among the host of classics, an undivine miracle occurs: a living person is replaced by an icon in the form of a portrait in the literature room, and everything that is not fits into the canon, as if erased from his biography. And it doesn’t fit very little. Pushkin - “The Sun of Russian Poetry” - in life was a heartthrob who destroyed many women’s destinies, and in his personal correspondence he was sometimes a vulgar man. One can be touched by the light passages from Ivan Shmelev’s “The Summer of the Lord,” recently introduced into the school curriculum, but how can we forget that at the same time as this book he wrote fiery odes in support of Hitler? At school, these difficulties are circumvented by offering children a convenient myth, “textbook gloss” instead of a living person. This book also contains some not very attractive details from the biographies of Russian classics. They are quite enough to shake off the granite-cast-iron overcoat of an official icon from their bodies. When writers become much more alive than on the pages of textbooks, their positive impact on us becomes more valuable.