The memoirs of contemporaries about Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam included in the book reveal many episodes of their biographies in a new way against the background of the literary and cultural life of St. Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad), Moscow, Voronezh, Kalinin, Pskov. Of course, readers will be interested in the testimonies of Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Zenkevich, Rurik Ivnev, Nadezhda Volpin, Anastasia Tsvetaeva, Nadezhda Pavlovich, Elena Galperina-Osmerkina and many other memoirists.