For the first time in Russian, the novel by Milan Kundera (the famous author of the books “The Joke,” “The Farewell Waltz,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “Immortality,” “Ignorance,” “Broken Wills,” etc.)) “Life is not here,” written in 1970 and telling about the fate of a young poet during the era of terror, when “the poet and the executioner ruled hand in hand.” Within the framework of an individual biography, the reader unfolds a story about love and betrayal, about poetic talent and political conformism, about the clash of lyrical consciousness with youthful self-love, about the combination of Poetry and History. According to the author himself, this is a book about how poetry, on “one fateful day,” turns “into an art that embellishes atrocities,” smiling at the world with a “bloody smile of innocence.”