Lev Mikhailovich Tarasov (1912–1974) - poet, prose writer, artist, art critic, specialist in fine arts of the second half of the 19th century. As the son of a white emigrant, from a young age he found himself on the periphery of the “new society”, not fitting into it either socially or aesthetically. Brought up on classical literature, combining in his poems the creative principles of both the Symbolists and the “Budetlyans”, in love with the poetry of A. Blok and V. Khlebnikov, a failed student of Andrei Bely, Lev Tarasov created his own poetic world, which remained practically unknown to the reader. A long-term employee of the Tretyakov Gallery and then editor of the publishing house “Iskusstvo”, he left a huge creative legacy: poems, poems, prose, diaries, drawings. “Negative Lines” is the first attempt to present the poetic part of this heritage with sufficient completeness.