Jeffrey Brooks is Professor in the Department of History at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of When Russia Learned to Read (1985), which was awarded the 1986 Wayne S. Vucinich Prize, Thank You, Comrade Stalin (1999), and Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State (2006), with Georgiy Chernyavskiy.

• List of illustrations; Preface; Introduction: an age of genius; Part I. Emancipation of the Arts (1850–1889): 1. Freedom and the fool; 2. Desire and rebellion; 3. Artists and subjects; 4. Anton Chekhov in his time; 5. The writer as civic actor; Part II. Politics and the Arts (1890–1916): 6. After realism: art and authority; 7. The performing arts: Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; 8. Celebrity, humor, and the avant-garde; Part III. The Bolshevik Revolution and the Arts (1917–1950): 9. A new normal; 10. Irony and power; 11. An era of the fox; 12. Goodness endures; Epilogue.

'Just before and after the October Revolution, the Russian literary, artistic, and performing arts enjoyed a moment of unprecedented brilliance. Brooks casts this Silver Age against the backdrop of Russia's radical renovations in commerce, industrial economy, and social structure - the result being a rich and effervescent synthesis of cultural, material, and political enquiry.' John E. Bowlt, University of Southern California