Alexey Shchusev. Architect No. 1. Vaskin A.

"The beauty of the recipes has no recipes!" - Alexei Viktorovich Shchusev liked to repeat. It was an amazing person. The structures built according to his projects would have been enough for an entire city in which there would be a place for temples and theaters, stations and bridges, metro stations and hotels, residential buildings and sanatoriums, and even one mausoleum. And all this is done with great taste and sense of proportion. But how could one architect manage all this? Where did he get the strength and where he drew inspiration, calling himself the "eternal Stakhanov"? The book of the writer and historian Alexander Vaskin tells about this.

The figure of Alexei Schusev appears before us against the backdrop of a complex and contradictory era in which the outstanding architect was created (or rather, two eras - royal and Soviet). He passed everything - fire, and water, and copper pipes, survived the rise and fall, but managed to maintain human dignity and his own creative handwriting. On the work of Schusev in Russia, Italy, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Uzbekistan; about his relations with prominent figures of Russian art - Mikhail Nesterov, Vera Mukhina, Pavel Korin, Ivan Zholtovsky, Alexander Benois, Evgeny Lancer, Natalia Goncharova, Nikolai Roerich; This book tells about its unfulfilled projects. When writing a biography of Schusev, the author studied a lot of archival documents, many of which are given and quoted here for the first time (including a table of gymnasium assessments and even a work book). The book goes to the 150th anniversary of the architect.