Keenly interested in the arts, Stalin admired artistic talent. He protected several Soviet writers, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, even when their work was labelled harmful to his regime. He enjoyed music, owning around 2,700 records, and frequently attending the Bolshoi Theatre during the 1930s and 1940s. His taste in music and theatre was conservative, favouring classical drama, opera, and ballet over what he dismissed as experimental "formalism". He also favoured classical forms in the visual arts, disliking avant-garde styles like cubism and futurism. He was a voracious reader, with a library of over 20,000 books. Little of this was fiction, although he could cite passages from Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Nekrasov, and Walt Whitman by heart. He favoured historical studies, keeping up with debates in the study of Russian, Mesopotamian, ancient Roman, and Byzantine history. An autodidact, he claimed to read as many as 500 pages a day, with Montefiore regarding him as an intellectual. Stalin also enjoyed watching films late at night at cinemas installed in the Kremlin and his dachas. He favoured the Western genre; his favourite film was the 1938 picture "Volga Volga".