The famous French writer, short story writer and critic, the largest representative of world psychological prose, Marcel Proust (1871–1922), opened new spheres of the human psyche for literature. He was the first to describe a special type of memory work - involuntary recollection, on the basis of which his entire autobiographical novel (or series of novels) “In Search of Lost Time” is built. This work is a special mechanism that, on the one hand, allowed Proust to be unusually frank ( Thus, for the first time in world literature we encounter a detailed description of homosexual relationships), and on the other hand, he camouflaged the real life of the writer. It is this peculiar game of Proust with the reader - the intention to hide what seems unacceptable, but at the same time the irresistible desire to tell everything about himself - that makes studying the biography of the famous Frenchman truly exciting. The author of the book, philologist Galina Subbotina, perfectly demonstrates the above, carefully , bit by bit extracting fragments of the writer’s real life from the myths and fictions of his novel. sign of information products 16+