From the author:

On the night of September 6, 2006, poetess Olga Beshenkovskaya died in Germany. We were not friends, we were only friendly, we saw each other a few times, we understood the poems so differently that we didn’t even argue about them - and at the same time I feel that the world without her has faded for me. This happens between people of the same literary generation: they are not close, but they need each other. Now it seems to me that Olga was by my side all my life: in the 1960s in the Palace of Pioneers (where we, almost the same age, did not meet), and in the 1970s, in the poetry circles of Leningrad, and in the 1980s, in the literary semi-underground, in stokers. A month before her death, on August 7, she called me. The reason would be trivial: somewhere, her words about my poems accidentally ended up in print; by an editor’s mistake, they were prefaced not with poetry, but with criticism of my article. “I want you to know... when I’m gone...” The reason for the call was different: after a year of thinking, Olga decided to tell me that my last poems leave her cold. It is this farewell review of hers that I present as Preface to Cuneiform. I didn’t allow any of my fellow writers into my previous books, I didn’t want anyone’s prefaces, I rejected offers that others would consider flattering, but I want to keep Olga’s review and connect it with these poems, of which she read more than half. I am indebted to her. For more than thirty years I have been repeating her line: “There are fewer forms in nature than it sometimes seems...”