Vladimir Moshchenko’s new novel is about the time when poets were Poets, when Georgia was closer to us than Paris or Berlin, when friendship between Russian and Georgian poets (the main apologist of which was Boris Leonidovich Pasternak. - Ed.) was not a side symptom of life, but its rule. A glorious era with, as usual, not a happy ending... Further, a quote from Evgeny Yevtushenko (about Moshchenko, about the “glorious era”, about Poetry): “Once (by the way, Alexander Mezhirov recommended us to each other in Tbilisi back in 1959) the intelligent stranger stunningly appeared before me in police uniform. Then I didn’t yet know that he was a graduate of both the Higher Academic Courses of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Higher Party School, and here he was not far from the Soviet James Bond. I could not understand that so much reverence for love, for poetry, for music, for chess, for Georgia, for Hungary, for Christianity and, most importantly, for human friendships could be united under the shoulder straps of one person. After all, you can’t deceive with anything other than poetry. Well, Mother Russia, what else will you surprise me with?! Perhaps for the first time I saw a truly Pushkin-like Russian man, capable of uniting in his soul the diversity of so many simultaneous loves, although many of my contemporaries were not enough to fall in love with someone or at least something. I think each of us can take on the road of life the words of Vladimir Moshchenko: “So the frost burned me. And a snowball twisted into a snake, and a fragile leaf from the day before yesterday... And what will happen to me in the future and will I learn to look into the distance at least a little smarter, at least a little more fearlessly?