The book is an epistolary diary of the great Russian writer Viktor Petrovich Astafiev. A diary made up of several hundred of his letters, sent almost daily from year to year to relatives and friends, fellow writers, aspiring authors, to publishing houses and editorial offices of literary magazines in different parts of the country. With utmost sincerity and frank directness, they reflected the life of an outstanding master of words for fifty years: his joys and sorrows, victories and losses, the depth of the spiritual world and the secrets of the creative laboratory of a prose writer. They contain the suffering thought and sorrowful thoughts of the son of his Fatherland about the fate of his long-suffering Motherland and its people, of which he was a great part. Most of Viktor Astafiev’s letters are published for the first time.