This whole story is built around a dialogue between two great people: an outstanding thinker and a great poetess of the bygone century. The fable about the confrontation between a hedgehog and a fox, which has not survived to this day, appears in this story as a very extraordinary view of the entire literary process. The eternal confrontation between the tyrant and the poet unfolds in completely new circumstances, when this poet is a woman. These two are immediately recognizable. Not a single name is spoken, but it is obvious that the authors of such difficult dialogues are one of the brightest thinkers of the twentieth century - Isaiah Berlin and the great poetess Anna Akhmatova.