Любовь и скорбь

The book of essays by Yu. Osipov tells in a new way about amazing people, places, events that have become the pride of Russian culture of the past two centuries. The last gardening creation of Andrei Bolotov and Pushkin's Mikhailovskoe, Lermontov's Moscow youth and Leo Tolstoy's farewell to Moscow, Zhukovsky's travel albums and Gogol's companion things.

All these and other chapters are united by grateful memory, the desire to look more closely at the dear features of the Past and thereby again to gain spiritual and moral guidelines that are now blurred. They turn the reader to the guiding milestones of the Twelfth Year, the Siberian destinies of the Decembrists, the asceticism of Lev Polivanov and the living miracle of his famous gymnasium. Revealing the unknown in the known, reminding us of the forgotten, the author of the book makes us witnesses to the visionary insights of Dostoevsky in Staraya Russa and the Melikhovo days of Chekhov, throwing a bridge of time from the painful time of preparation for the first Pushkin anniversary to the mysterious Petrograd short story by Alexander Green.

The heroes of the essays are shown as our contemporaries, who continue to pave the way for us into the future.