Diary of My Meetings. A Cycle of Tragedies. From Maxim Gorky to Anna Akhmatova

Yuri Annenkov (1889–1974), a wonderful graphic artist, painter, and theatrical designer, began his creative path in the 1910s, quickly taking a prominent place in the cultural world of St. Petersburg. Narrating about his contemporaries, outstanding personalities with whom he was connected by sincere friendship, he constantly speaks of himself and how his life story and fate unfolded. The literary portraits written by the artist, stylistically akin to his own talented graphics, which adorned the book, were called 'synthetic images', meaning extremely generalized and focused on something significant. Annenkov gave his diary a subtitle that reflected the sad lines of the biographies of his characters.
Among them are Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok, Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, Georgy Ivanov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Sergey Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Alexei Remizov, Sergey Prokofiev, Ilya Repin.
And alongside these figures, dozens of others emerge, and behind the private stories stands the history of Russian culture over many decades.