Brodsky and Akhmatova are iconic names in the history of Russian poetry. In his Nobel lecture, Brodsky called Akhmatova one of the “sources of light” to whom he owes his poetic destiny. Meetings with Akhmatova and her poems connected Brodsky with the poetic tradition of the Silver Age. The author examines in his book episodes from the life and work of two poets, showing the deep relationship between the two poetic systems. Life events are fancifully refracted through the prism of poetic lines, becoming facts not just of biography, but of literary biography - and some features of Akhmatov’s poetic language are clearly heard in Brodsky’s poems. The book combines a conversation about the fates of poets with a conversation about specific poems and their slow reading. Denis Akhapkin, philologist, associate professor of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State University, specialist in the works of Joseph Brodsky. Published in the magazines “New Literary Review”, “Zvezda”, Russian Literature, Die Welt Der Slaven, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, and others. He was a fellow of the College of the University of Helsinki (2007), the Ekaterina Dashkova Russian Center at the University of Edinburgh (2014), and the Center for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Mutual Understanding (2018).