"Memoirs" by the outstanding writer and literary historian Emma Gerstein (born 1903) are dedicated to Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Lev Gumilev, Nikolai Khardzhiev and other writers and scientists, without whom we will not imagine the 20th century of Russian culture. Under the polemical pen of E. Gershtein, not only "pictures of literary life" of Moscow and Leningrad of the 20-60s, full of drama, arise, but also the bygone era of great upheavals is manifested in its tragic completeness.