This publication presents a commented review of articles and materials collected in a book dedicated to Mstislav Anatolyevich Smirnov. His productive activity—performing, pedagogical, scientific and administrative—was inextricably linked with the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory during its almost highest artistic flowering. A voluminous portrait of a musician and a scientist is created during the gradual approach to the object of attention. In the memory of those who knew him, among whom there are many well-known figures of national culture, he remained a representative of the spiritual elite of society, “the soul of the conservatory.” The worldview and style of his life are typical for the generation of the “sixties.” The materials of the book give an idea of the role and place of music and the musician in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods of Russian history. Also, the festschrift introduces the scientific priorities of the researcher such as the correlations of the emotional life embodiment of a person in the art of sounds and the hypothesis of an inherent complex of psychological aspirations in the Russian ethnos. This complex forms a particular spiritual world of Russian music and determines its profound originality.