The famous poet and essayist Lev Rubinstein occupies a very unusual position in modern Russian journalism: he has been given the rare role of a “writer in a magazine” - an insightful and biased chronicler, day after day observing and analyzing the social evolution that the country has been experiencing for two decades. His many years of work are an attempt to record and comprehend changes in social mores, sentiments, and morality. The author himself, avoiding strict genre designations, calls his texts simply “prose”, or - more specifically - “non-fiction prose”. In these texts, the reader will clearly distinguish the signs of a story, a documentary essay, a memoir fragment, and an intellectual reflection on the events of modern history. The spirit of the times looms behind these texts. The book includes Rubinstein’s prose, published in the last few years in the magazines “Itogi”, “Weekly Journal”, “Politburo”, “Big City”, “Esquire”, and online publications “grani.ru” , "polit.ru", "ej.ru".