“Swan Song” is the author’s title of the novel, known to a wide range of readers as “The Vanquished.” The book by Irina Vladimirovna Golovkina, the granddaughter of the great Russian composer Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov, was first published in 1992 in the magazine “Our Contemporary” in an abbreviated form. The author's title and preface, part of the text, and some words characteristic of the author—for example, “intellectual” and “intelligent”—have disappeared. Nevertheless, even in abbreviation, the novel about the life of the Russian intelligentsia during the dictatorship of Stalin was a bibliographic rarity. The book truly became the author's swan song. Everything here is permeated with love for Russia and loyalty to it - in happiness, in sorrow, in joy, and in trouble.

In this edition, readers will become acquainted with the original text of the novel for the first time. Here the side plot lines are outlined more clearly; individual episodes that were unclear in the journal text due to omissions become clear; figures of speech and figurative expressions appear unchanged, characterizing not only the author’s individual style, but also the language of his era.

The new edition of the novel is accompanied by a biographical sketch about the author, written by her grandson, and photographs from the Rimsky family archive. Korsakov.