Essays included in this collection are memoirs about contemporaries—somewhat like prose requiems:
To Valery Bryusov — “The Hero of Labor”;
To Osip Mandelstam — “The Story of One Dedication” (1931);
To Maximilian Voloshin — “The Living About the Living” (1932);
To Andrey Bely — “A Captive Spirit” (1934);
To Konstantin Balmont — “A Word About Balmont” (1936);
To Mikhail Kuzmin — “An Evening Not of This Place” (1936).
“Art in the Light of Conscience” (1932) is a critical view of the philosophy of art.
“Art is the same as nature… Truly: a work of art is a work of nature, something born, not created… And what is the difference between a work of art and a work of nature, a poem and a tree? None.”