It is difficult to imagine science without conferences, without reports and their discussions. It is in live dialogue that scientists test their conclusions, express new ideas, get excited and joke, come to agreement and disagree. But “what remains of the fairy tale later, after it has been told?” After all, not all reports find their way into printed form, and from replicas, disputes, private conversations and the very spirit of discussions, nothing remains but vague memories. Is it possible to travel back in time and hear how passions ran high at the first post-Soviet humanitarian conferences? It turns out that it is possible: this atmosphere is preserved in the reports on thirty historical and philological readings of 1991–2017, written by Vera Milchina, a leading researcher at the IVGI RGGU and STEPS RANEPA. Her book can be read as a guide to the works of the last twenty-five years, or as a fragment of the collective memory of the scientific community and sketches for the portrait of an entire generation of scientists, past and present.