The book contains a significant part of the letters of the Petrograd/Leningrad poet and translator A.V. Tufanov and his wife. The correspondence covers different periods of their lives: the relatively calm 1920s, prison and camp in the early 1930s, administrative exile in Orel (1933-1936), subsequent life in Novgorod (1936-1941) and Galich (1941-1942). The published texts provide expressive pictures of the life of the Russian province and the plight of people, torn from their usual environment and doomed to wage a grueling daily struggle for survival.