From the author:

I write about myself, in other words, about poems, my own and those of others. At once I break both of my long-standing vows: to avoid the first person singular pronoun and not to mix poetry with prose. I am writing about myself in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I lived in Leningrad, with leaps (or, if you like, enjambments) into the future, until the 21st century. I try, as much as I can, to get away from auto-apologetics, from settling scores, from the carpet of memoirs: “I’m walking on the carpet, you’re walking while you’re lying...” Trying. But I realize that you can’t jump over your head. Rousseau reproaches Montaigne for the fact that, supposedly in a fit of straightforwardness, he communicates unfavorable things about himself, but in reality, only those unfavorable things that ultimately paint him in an attractive light. Russo tried too. In his Confession, he is a servant, a thief, an Alphonse, and an onanist, but still “essentially the best of people.” Why? Because this is the biological task of man and the blade of grass: to defend oneself, to believe in one’s ultimate triumph. Literature is all about this: about self-affirmation. Anything else will be untrue. Another way has been tried: to write about yourself worse than you are, to attribute to yourself all imaginable abominations - for how else will you attract attention to yourself these days? But here they are really fooling us. My memoirs are addressed to the literary reader, one of whose main pleasures is to disagree with the memoirist, to note his stylistic and human mistakes. It is a very specific pleasure: to critically trace a piece of non-fictional human life. He will have to read the poems inserted into the text. Otherwise, I'm afraid there's nothing to read here. But it is precisely this reader who will understand: not only the poems, but everything that is included in the text, thanks to the poems, constitutes for me a single range of values - without enjambment.