For the first time in history, a detailed account of the life and work of Nikolai Yazykov, one of the greatest Russian poets. Yazykov was unlucky. Despite all his colossal talent, he remained for subsequent generations in the shadow of Pushkin and Lermontov, and for almost 200 years no one tried to deeply and seriously comprehend his truly tragic fate. The author tried to find his answer to the most pressing questions, without shying away from “slippery” topics. Was Yazykov really so possessed by envy of Pushkin that he was his false friend, something like Salieri under Mozart? Did he really hate people so much at the end of his life, because of his incurable illness, that he forever stained himself with evil poetic libels, “denunciations in verse,” against the best and most advanced representatives of Russian thought and culture? In order to get to the bottom of the truth, we had to reconsider a lot in established views on the Pushkin era, in the assessment and significance of many figures. An intellectual detective story, as one might define the genre of a book, is able to keep the reader in suspense until the very end.