The collection includes articles of recent years, both previously published in periodicals and specially written for this book. E. Bobrinskaya is interested in the Russian avant-garde as a holistic cultural phenomenon, as a universal phenomenon, an attempt to synthesize art and life, so characteristic of the era of the great utopias of the 1910-1920s. One of the constant topics of the researcher is the influence on the Russian avant-garde of archaic, "barbaric" forms of art, primitive, amateur performances, and children's creativity. It was to them that the Russian "leftists" turned in search of a kind of "paradise of archetypes." Even the notorious shocking of Mayakovsky and Larionov, the motives of culture-building and "antiquity" among some futurists, according to E. Bobrinskaya, are nothing more than peculiar echoes of savage "pre-art."