The biography of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) - the “premature genius” who sent a powerful impulse to the poetry of the 20th century - was recreated on a documentary basis by the famous Belgian writer, critic J.B. Baronyan and published in Russian translation for the first time. The life of such an extraordinary person as Rimbaud is similar to the plot of an adventurous, in some ways even criminal, novel. A native of the provincial town of Charleville, who in adolescence showed a rare poetic talent and composed several dozen poems - most of them are now ranked among the masterpieces of world poetry - he did not receive any noticeable recognition from his contemporaries. During his lifetime, Rimbaud's scandalous fame came from his romance-like friendship with the talented French poet Paul Verlaine, which ended in the shooting from a revolver and the imprisonment of one of the friends. After the breakup, twenty-year-old Rimbaud said goodbye to poetry forever and continued his wanderings, to which he had been inclined since childhood, in the East: a mercenary soldier in the Netherlands Indies (now Indonesia), an administrator in construction and trading companies, a private merchant in Aden and Ethiopia, driving caravans with weapons to these little-explored lands... He was going to become an orientalist, but at thirty-seven years old fate put an end to his life.