These are my notebooks, which I began to keep while serving in the army, or more precisely, in the Pacific Fleet. For forty years they rode with me through cities and towns, I showed them to almost no one, continuing to write down “for memory” what seemed interesting to me, and treated them as a working tool. As for my naval diaries, I don’t understand at all , why didn’t I destroy them at the time? Of course, they did not contain secret information. But anyone who lived in Soviet times can imagine where my dreams of directing would have gone if these notes had caught the eye of some guy from Staraya Square or a lady from the Mosfilm party committee. That’s why I hid the diaries all these years. But time passed. And with such a speed, such a kaleidoscopic whirlwind, the landscape of our external and internal life changed that it seemed to me that these notes, made either in pencil or with a fountain pen, now at one end of the country, now at the other, become a definite document of awareness of time, history, and man.