Before you is a collection of civil lyrics, articles and rough notes by Robert Rozhdestvensky (1932–1994), one of the galaxy of “sixties” poets of the “Thaw” who survived their country. The poems are arranged in chronological order, from the early, naive oaths of the fifties (“I will not betray the flag of the color of my blood”) to the bitter last poems of the early nineties (“don’t call me to go on a campaign, we are already waist-deep in blood”). The compilers deliberately did not cross out excessively “communist” poems: against their background one can see the formation of the poet, his maturation. And therefore, the collection can be read as memoirs, a very personal account of the times of “thaw” and “stagnation”, or it can be read as a love novel, the story of a man who loved his homeland, sacredly believed all its beautiful lies and high truth, but then his country died, and along with confusion came wisdom to him. It’s also a detective story, where secrets are revealed too late, and time turns out to be the killer.