This book by the patriarch of Russian culture of the 20th century, a wonderful writer, public figure and human rights activist, literary critic and Germanist Lev Kopelev (1912 1997). A participant in the Great Patriotic War, for ten years he was a "resident" of the Gulag "for the propaganda of bourgeois humanism" and allegedly sympathy for the enemy. For a long time, the best friend and prototype of one of the central characters of Solzhenitsyn's novel "In the First Circle" - since 1980, deprived of Soviet citizenship, Lev Kopelev lived in Germany, where he died. The narrative offered to the reader is part of an autobiographical trilogy. The book "Keep Forever" was first published abroad in 1976 and 1978, and then in the USSR in 1990.