What many consider Sveshnikov's Kafkaesque romance is actually a sublimation of the difficult and traumatic memories of his youth. At 19, he was arrested on a trumped-up case of preparing an assassination attempt on Stalin and sent to the camps almost to certain death. Sveshnikov quickly lost his health and was driven to the brink of madness by starvation and disease. But he survived by a miracle thanks to the help of his friends, and his drawing sessions helped him keep his sanity. The works of the 1980s are considered by many connoisseurs to be the pinnacle of Sveshnikov's art. His phantasmagorias were becoming more and more complex in terms of subject, and painting was reaching the highest degree of elaboration.

Former official sculptor Petr Belenok exchanged a well-fed life in Ukraine for the thorny path of an underground artist in Moscow. He lived in poverty. And today he is one of the most sought-after artists of the post-war unofficial art. Prices for the best paintings have doubled over the past year and are regularly storming the million-ruble mark.

“There is an angel and a devil in you. We like the angel, but we will erase the devil out of you”, Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, tried to teach him. Khrushchev himself had no idea that in less than two years his “comrades-in-arms” surrounding him would remove him from power and give up with great difficulty the organization of the staged murder. And in another 13 years, his “ideological enemy” Ernst Neizvestny, who was standing in front of him, would build and erect a tombstone for him. He would erect it in time for his emigration.

The innovator of metaphysical still life, an intellectual, a loner, an artist out of time, a recluse, shunning fashion and current trends. Today Dmitry Krasnopevtsev is one of the most expensive and sought-after masters of unofficial postwar art. The artist is still a favorite of collectors, as it was in the times of Richter, Costakis, Sanovich.

Alexander Kharitonov was aptly nicknamed “the preacher of good”. Not without a hint of a religious fondness. And so it is. Not only in narrative, but at the level of aesthetics Kharitonov drew on religious styles, especially Byzantine mosaics. He was also inspired by beadwork on church vestments. So his “pointillism” is not the divisionism of Paul Signac, but mosaics, beads and pearls in painting techniques.