This book is a unique monologue by an outstanding researcher, philologist, anthropologist, professor of several universities, academician Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov (1929–2017). The famous scientist here answers the main questions of history, talks about his life that passed through the tragic decades of the twentieth century, about his father, writer Vsevolod Ivanov, about the geniuses with whom he was friends - Bakhtin and Kolmogorov, Pasternak and Shalamov, Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, Kapitsa and Sakharov , - about the environment in which he grew up, remaining its last witness and chronicler, and about his experience of free existence in an unfree country. Elena Yakovich, famous journalist and director, author of the books “The Daughter of the Philosopher Shpet”, “Walks with Brodsky and so on” ”, films about Joseph Brodsky, Vasily Grossman, Sergei Dovlatov, Yuri Lyubimov, created this book based on the documentary series “And God Sleeps Between the Lines” she shot, shown in the series “Witnesses of Time” on the Kultura TV channel. The book includes rare photographs from the archives of the Ivanov family, covering almost a century of literary and scientific life.