The diary of Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin is one of those phenomena in the history of Russian culture about which legends have been formed for a long time and about which even now we know far from everything. Many of the author's contemporaries heard the reading of various fragments and admired what they heard (but it also happened that they were indignant). After the diary was purchased by the State Literature Museum, for many years it was practically taken out of circulation, although formally it was never in the archival “special storage”, and the few researchers allowed to read it almost never could imagine the text in its entirety. First full publication The text preserved in RGALI allows us not only to penetrate into the semantic structure of the writer’s works, to identify the range of his artistic and private interests, but also to a certain extent complements our ideas about the appearance of the era.