At the end of the 1960s, on the threshold of his fiftieth birthday, David Samoilov (1920–1990) turned to prose. Work on the treasured book continued until the poet’s death. In “Memoirs,” memories of childhood, adolescence, youth, the war years and the terrible post-war seven years were organically combined with reflections on modern history, the paths of Russia and the Russian intelligentsia, the fate and purpose of literature in the twentieth century. Among the heroes of the book are “the last geniuses” (Nikolai Zabolotsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova), Samoilov’s senior contemporaries (Maria Petrovykh, Ilya Selvinsky, Leonid Martynov), his closest friends and peers who died in the Great Patriotic War (Mikhail Kulchitsky, Pavel Kogan) and those who chose different roads in the second half of the century (Boris Slutsky, Nikolai Glazkov, Sergei Narovchatov). The composition and composition of the “Memoirs” corresponds to the author’s plan; in the “Appendices” section other memoir essays by Samoilov and his notes on literature from different years are published. The work of Samoilov the prose writer is described in the foreword by the widow of the poet G.I. Medvedeva. The interpretation of the “Memoirs” is devoted to the afterword of the ordinary professor of the National Research University Higher School of Economics A. S. Nemzer: the research was carried out within the framework of the Fundamental Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in 2014.