Memoirs of the famous screenwriter, VGIK professor I.M. Manevich (1907–1976) were written in the early 1970s and were not intended for publication in conditions where this would inevitably involve significant censorship editing. The events and heroes of several decades of Soviet cinema history are not the whole story. Here is a broad cross-section of the life of the Russian intelligentsia, for whom the external outline of existence - war, evacuation, the threat of repression - never overshadowed intense spiritual searches and the desire to be creatively realized in their work.