Fyodor Chaliapin ... is a legendary singer who conquered the whole world with his voice — the Mariinsky and Bolshoi Theaters, the Metropolitan Opera, the Shuttle Theater, Covent Garden. Tall, stately, with expressive facial features, piercing eyes, he made an indelible impression on me in his best tragic roles — the Miller, Boris Godunov, Mephistopheles, Don Quixote. Chaliapin shocked the audience with a violent temperament, always found accurate and sincere intonations for each word of the song, organically and reliably kept on stage. Fans of his talent were composers Sergei Prokofiev and Anton Rubinstein, actor Charlie Chaplin and the future English King Edward VI.The book "Mask and Soul" by F.I. Chaliapin was written and released in Paris a decade after emigration. In it, he told about what he had been hiding from the public for so long — about his life in Russia, about the people with whom fate brought him, about the bitter fate of an exile, about homesickness. The reader will also find here the artist's soulful reflections on art, theater, and the stage — how he prepared for concerts; what he thought and experienced when performing arias; how he reacted to criticism and reviews of his performances.On the pages of his memoirs, Chaliapin throws off the stage mask of the famous singer and opens the soul of a man who devoted his whole life to art.