It was Russian publisher Florenty Pavlenkov who began printing the first series of biographies under title Life of Outstanding People in 1890 in Saint Petersburg. It included the first books about Herzen, Nekrasov and Lev Tolstoy. In 1933, the publication of this series was resumed on the initiative of Maxim Gorky. The first edition of the series was not the biography of Lenin or Marx (which might seem logical), but book Heinrich Heine by Alexander Deich. The publishers might probably think politics to be a transient and poetry an eternal phenomenon, and were quite right.