The name of Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold is glorified in the history of Russian theater. He went from a provincial youth taking his first steps on stage to a famous director who embodied the ideas of the “theatrical October” in his work. Meyerhold's inconvenience for the authorities and inability to make compromises became the reason for the closure of his theater, and then his death in the basements of the Lubyanka. A proud, capricious, vain genius, a virtuoso director-inventor, a sparkling inventor, an excellent actor, an arrogant, hot-tempered, autocratic, sometimes cynical dictator and an eternal troublemaker - this is how Vsevolod Meyerhold appears in a new book by cultural critic Mark Kushnirov.