The second volume of a six-part survey of the State Tretyakov Gallery gathers 797 portraits by 169 artists, spanning more than two centuries - from the court of Peter the Great to the Soviet 1940s. Here are the faces that Russia chose to keep. Dmitry Levitsky and Vladimir Borovikovsky paint an aristocracy still certain of itself; Orest Kiprensky gives Pushkin the profile the whole country now remembers; Ivan Kramskoy and Ilya Repin turn the portrait into an argument about character; Valentin Serov can undo a sitter with one glance. Anna Golubkina works the same faces in clay and marble, and her heads hold their own beside the paintings. Emperors and peasants, writers, chemists, merchants' wives, actors, children and the artists themselves. Large reproductions, each with its painter, title and date.

Alexander Nemirov is the publisher of Aeneas Press. For The Gallery Masterworks he chose the plates and their order, checked the rights of every reproduction, and wrote the English captions and commentary.