The first ten years of the existence of cinema in Russia were a time of great discoveries, but also unjustified hopes. You can now immerse yourself in the live experience of a moviegoer at the beginning of the last century not only by viewing preserved films, but also by looking at the cards of popular actresses, posters, trade ads, candy wrappers and drawings from the magazine "Satyricon". Russian Russian pre - revolutionary cinema and Russian modernist caricature-two sides of the mirror of Russian life broken by the revolution-collided for the first time in this book. The informal intimate syllable of the book-album "The Silent Empire" suggests in the reader a desire not so much to get another encyclopedia with a set of facts, but to try to experience the atmosphere of imperial (semi -) cultural life in a different way before and soon after the statistically legendary 1913. Silent cinema appears not as a strange boring alien art, but as an intimate mood of modernist consciousness.