Pages from My Life. Mask and Soul

Fyodor Ivanovich Shalyapin (1873–1938) — a great opera artist and a truly iconic figure for Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Possessing a magnificent voice and exceptional stage talent, he dazzled on the capital's stages, toured the world, and had a tremendous impact on the development of opera art. Contemporaries said that Shalyapin did not come to the stage to act but to live the lives of his characters. His Boris Godunov was the embodiment of the tragedy of a tsar torn apart by power and conscience, his Mephistopheles — the embodiment of the devilish temptation that leads into the abyss...

A lively and mocking intellect, charisma, and artistry, which contributed to Fyodor Ivanovich's stage successes, invariably attracted the most significant representatives of the cultural horizon of the era. The memories of fateful meetings and his remarkable creative ascent to the heights of operatic glory were expressed by Fyodor Shalyapin in two remarkable autobiographical books: “Pages from My Life” (1916), written with the participation of Maxim Gorky, and “Mask and Soul” (1932). Both are a sincere, poignant, and humorous account of how the fate of the great master was formed. This amazing biographical duology gives us the opportunity to compare the “two Shalyapins” — the celebrated Russian artist at the peak of glory, whose gaze is filled with hopes for the future, and the world-famous celebrity, the Parisian émigré, mentally surveying the past.

The appendix publishes memories of Shalyapin left by his friends: the book “Shalyapin. Meetings and Shared Life” by Konstantin Korovin and the biographical essay “Shalyapin” by Ivan Bunin.