The collection consists of articles from different years, the purpose of republishing which is to present different facets of the work of V. E. Vatsuro. Here are collected small notes about Pushkin from the “Vremennik of the Pushkin Commission”, planned institute works “Bulgarian themes and motifs in Russian literature of the 1820–1830s.” and “Mitskevich and the Russian literary environment of the 1820s”, research related to the preparation of texts for the collections of poems by Khemnitser and Nekrasov in the “Poet’s Library”, prefaces to individual editions of the works of Denis Davydov and Delvig, a newspaper interview - the reaction of V. E. Vatsuro on the situation in the country after the 1991 revolution (“We’ll work hard - it’s good to have experience”), and finally, an essay about Gorbachev - unexpected for an academic scientist, although quite consistent with the general desire of historians of the past in the early 1990s to conceptually comprehend the current moment.