About the book: 2008 / Widespread use of rare archival documents, unique family correspondence of the Serovs, rarely quoted memoirs of the artist’s contemporaries allowed the author to create a biography of one of the brightest masters of the Silver Age, Valentin Alexandrovich Serova. A student of Repin and Chistyakov, Serov became famous as an unrivaled master of deeply psychological portraiture. In his work, Serov reflected both the external splendor of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and the growing social conflicts at that time, which led the country to the brink of the abyss. The artist created a wonderful portrait gallery of world-famous contemporaries - Chaliapin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Chekhov, Diaghilev, Ermolova, Stanislavsky, thus transmitting their powerful creative impulses into the coming century.