This book is an attempt to re-build the history of Russian modernism through the history of montage. The development of editing in the culture of the 20th century received a powerful impetus after the invention of cinema and its transformation into a fashionable art form. Analogues of film editing in the 1920s developed in other forms of art - literature, poster graphics, theater. Different authors and in different periods use it either as a local technique, or as a sequential method, or as a holistic aesthetics. In the years 1930–2000, editing methods repeatedly changed their functions and semantics. By watching how they become almost invisible from decade to decade, then are used again in a variety of contexts, one can see fundamentally new subjects in the development of art of the late 19th–21st centuries, from Stéphane Mallarmé to Internet collages compiled from blog notes and video recordings . This book tells how editing first became the “style of the era” of the 1920s in a variety of countries (USSR, Germany, USA...), and then became increasingly necessary for uncensored literature and “alternative” movements in cinema and visual art. Among the heroes of the book are Dziga Vertov and Artem Vesely, Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, El Lisitsky and Sasha Sokolov, Andy and Lana Wachowski and Pavel Ulitin.