The subject of research of the author, one of the key figures of the Russian theater of the Silver Age, is art, its origins and essence. In his theoretical constructions, N. N. Evreinov (1879-1953) sets himself the task of capturing that "flickering line" between art and non-art, for which he develops an original grid of categories, each component of which forms its own circle of concepts. Written from the beginning of the 1930s. the work, which summed up the theoretical developments and philosophical constructions of the thinker of previous periods, absorbed the theoretical heritage of both predecessors and contemporaries, it also "hears" disputes about art, its goals, state and fate of the first quarter of the twentieth century.