These notes from the workbooks of an outstanding filmmaker have never been published before. The hand of the censor or editor methodically wiped out everything that spoke of the tragedy of Grigory Kozintsev, and moreover, of the tragedy of several generations of Soviet artists: Sergei Eisenstein, Dmitry Shostakovich, Andrei Tarkovsky and many others. Kozintsev's records, striking in their drama, accurately convey the spiritual atmosphere of the forties and seventies.