Traces the history of the George Costakis collection, one of the outstanding group of Russian avant-garde work housed since 1977 in the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow. Costakis contributes a detailed essay "Collecting Art of the Avant-Garde." S. Frederick Starr surveys the history of the period, of collecting in Russia and the role of Costakis in promoting the art of this period. Editor Angelica Zander Rudenstine provided documentation of the works, captions and supplementary commentaries. John E. Bowlt contributed a chronology outlining events in the visual arts, literature, the performing arts, and politics in Russia from 1894 to 1934. The Sackner Archive holds Proun 2c by El Lissitzky and A Game in Hell by A. Kruchenykh which are depicted in this book.Costakis offers five rules for the collector: 1) A real collector must feel like a millionaire even when he is penniless; he must act as if he has money coming out of his ears. A work of high artistic quality is literally priceless to the collector - he will always find that he has paid less than its worth; the passage of time will show that it has risen in value not merely twenty times, but one hundred times, five hundred times, and more; 2) Rationalization is the collector's greatest enemy; 3) The real collector is ready to give up everything he has for a work that he covets; 4) A collector must not haggle. It is more advantageous for him to pay too much than not to pay enough; 5) One of the most important precepts for the collector is that he must precisely, even ruthlessly define the limits of his collection, and he must resolutely remind himself that - on this particular matter - his reach must never exceed his grasp. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.