Love cannot be eternal. This is what skeptics usually say. However, life never tires of convincing them otherwise. The sizzling love story of Ivan Turgenev and Pauline Viardot, the wife of the director of the Italian Opera in Paris, Louis Viardot, lasted more than forty years. This little ugly woman drove all the men of her time crazy. But only the Russian writer I. Turgenev decided on the most terrible possible torture of the soul. He became a family friend, and she became his main happiness and great pain. The book you are holding in your hands is proof of the existence of true lifelong love, the most complete version of the novel in the letters of I. Turgenev and P. Viardot ever published in Russia. “I am subject to the will of this woman. She obscured everything else from me, that’s what I need..." (I. Turgenev) "We understood each other too well to care about what they said about us, for our mutual position was recognized as legitimate by those who knew and appreciated us ..." (P. Viardot)