What will the autobiography of a Soviet intellectual look like if we place it within the conceptual framework of a reader's biography? The author of these memoirs, N. Yu. Rusova, undertook to conduct such an experiment and turn to her personal past, relying on the books she read and the impressions caused by them. A connoisseur of fiction, she talks about her reading range, paying attention to philological and historical details. In her narrative, her favorite poems and prose are not only closely related to events in her personal or professional life, but also immersed in a political and cultural context. An important task that the author sets for herself is to preserve on the pages of the book evidence of a forever lost reading culture. Natalya Yuryevna Rusova is a professor at the Russian language department of the Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University. Kozma Minina, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences. Author of the books “From allegory to iambic: a terminological dictionary-thesaurus on literary criticism” (2004), “Text. Culture. Education" (2009), "The Mystery of the Lyric Poem. From Derzhavin to Brodsky: a commentary on poetic texts" (2005), "Quanta of Russian culture: a cultural commentary on poetic texts" (2008), "The Lexicon of Power: a dictionary-thesaurus of political associations" (2008; with N. E. Gronskaya), "Thirty the third letter in a school lesson, or 33 poems by Joseph Brodsky" (2009), etc.