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Pavel Basinsky is a famous writer, literary critic, author of the best-selling biographies “Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise” (BIG BOOK award), “The Passion of Maxim: Gorky”, “The Saint against Leo. Leo Tolstoy and John of Kronstadt."

The new book “No Violinist Needed” is a collection of literary portraits: from Pushkin and Turgenev to Prilepin and Grishkovets.

Why didn’t two great contemporaries meet - Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? What do Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" have in common with Gorky's poem "Man"? Why does the butterfly from Varlam Shalamov’s story “ask questions much more terrible than Bradbury’s famous butterfly”? What did the poet Boris Ryzhiy, the singer of the troubled nineties, who died - like Lermontov - at the age of twenty-six, manage to tell us? What is the secret of Boris Akunin’s success, and why do you not have to read Viktor Pelevin’s latest novels to the end?