“What freedom, what wonderful daring, what accuracy, precision in everything and what an extraordinary folk soldier’s language - not a hitch, not a single false word!” – wrote I. A. Bunin about the poem “Vasily Terkin” by Alexander Tvardovsky, an outstanding Russian poet with a dramatic fate. The poem “Vasily Terkin” became one of the peaks of the poet’s work, in which the people’s soul came to life in its entirety. The book also includes the poems “The Country of Ant” (“the high culture of verse” was already noted in this poem by B. Pasternak and N. Aseev), “House by the Road”, “Beyond the Distance - Distance”, “Terkin in the Other World”, “ By Right of Memory” (published only in 1987), which describes the tragic fate of Tvardovsky’s father, a dispossessed and exiled peasant blacksmith; landscape lyrics, war poems and poems of recent years, stories and essays.