Diverging Paths

In each of the essays of the book, curator and researcher Yegor Sennikov captures the fates of individual people from the flow of history: from the once all-powerful Leon Trotsky to the pilot of the white army, Vsevolod Marchenko, who perished in the Spanish Civil War; from the creator of "Worker and Collective Farm Woman," Vera Mukhina, to the poet Irina Odoevtseva, who returned to the Union after 65 years.

He captures these moments to imprint with a flash of instant photography, telling how the 20th century dealt with them in a couple of pages, and then moves on. Politicians, poets, and artists, award winners and émigrés, refugees and returnees—all of them traversed tangled roads, sometimes choosing them, sometimes accepting them, reconciling with the inevitable.

A jerky, swift book where the portrait of a harsh time is composed from disparate fragments, resembling something of today.