At the “front door” of democracy, critic Alexander Arkhangelsky reflects on modern culture, which he compares with the measure of freedom. The reader is invited to think about the fate of “tamizdat” (the catalog of a Russian bookstore in Paris appears in his field of vision: N. Berdyaev, P. Florensky, A. Solzhenitsyn); about the poetics of political text; about the magazines “Ogonyok” and “Our Contemporary”; about the cultural life of recent years. A special place in the book is occupied by the question of the spiritual foundations of today's culture, its relationship to religion, and the untapped reserves of its development.