Samoilov seemed to deliberately “conceal” his poems of the 1940s, publishing only a very few. He considered them still immature, which was confirmed by the cool assessments of his friends, who once enthusiastically accepted his youthful, pre-war poems. However, in recent years the perception of his early poetry has been changing. Of course, the poems are uneven, which is typical of apprenticeship, but among them there are many brilliant ones, with a powerful, fresh breath, underestimated by their contemporaries, because they were ahead of their time. The purpose of the book, which combines his writings of the 1930s–1940s with diary entries about poets and poetry, is to show the dynamics of the author’s creative development, to clearly demonstrate how the poet, in his own words, “prepared as he prepared.”