About the book: 2011 / This is a story about the short life, work and tragic death of the world famous Russian artist Nicolas de Stael. He was born into the family of the commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress at the very end of the peaceful era and briefly walked with his nanny in the kindergarten near the commandant’s house. War, revolution, and the Bolshevik coup broke out. The family hid underground, fled to Poland... At the age of five, Nikola became an orphan, lived with foster parents in Brussels, studied to become an artist, and traveled around Spain and Morocco. He grew up tall and handsome, but the mental wound of the terrible flight was hardly curable. He began to really write only in the last ten years of his life, but left behind about a thousand works. In the last months of his life, he worked by the sea, in Antibes, suffered from an absurd love, and in his early forties committed suicide by throwing himself from a roof onto the ancient stones of the Antibes pavement. One of his last paintings was recently sold at a London auction for eight million pounds.…