On the banks of the Neva

“I write not about myself and not for myself, but about those whom I was given to find out ... I write about them and for them. I try to talk about myself as little ... ” - Irina Odoevtseva wrote in the preface to her memoirs - the Russian poet, the beloved student of Nikolai Gumilyov, who left Russia in 1922. She lived a long life and returned to her homeland in 1987 - the last representative of the distant stroke century. Her memories “on the banks of the Neva” were published in Russia in the late 1980s with a colossal circulation-150,000 and were vocational as a revelation. And today this book - a monument to the era, its living testimony - is read with great interest. Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Georgy Ivanov, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky appear on its pages ... Odoevtseva’s phenomenal memory allowed her to reproduce conversations, discussions, and disputes of that time after many decades