The poet Nikolai Starshinov (1924–1998) is one of the unforgettable people, whose biography has absorbed all the signs of the era - its greatness, drama, paradoxes and contradictions. A front-line soldier who wrote classic lines about the war (“When, breaking oblivion, / The guns began to roar, / No one shouted: “For Russia!” / But they walked and died for it”), a wonderful lyricist, long-term editor of the Young Guard almanac “Poetry” , a tireless mentor to several generations of young poets, an enthusiastic collector of folk ditties, an unsurpassed fisherman, he is still present in literary life today in the bright memory of him. Many incidents from his eventful life have already been mythologized, many of his jokes (and he was a cheerful and cheerful person) have become aphorisms, his literary and fishing stories are still common among writers and fishermen... It is no coincidence that today there is a literary prize named after Nikolai Starshinov, and the Starshinov Cup for sport fishing. And most importantly, he is the most remarkable of the Young Guards, because a book is being published about him, the first of those who worked in the Young Guard, in the famous ZhZL series.