«Atlantes Hold the Sky…»: Memoirs of an Old Islander

“The Atlantes hold up the sky with stone hands…” — this song became a true hymn of the “sixtieths” generation, and Alexander Gorodnitsky himself is a living classic and one of the founders of the genre alongside Vladimir Vysotsky, Bulat Okudzhava, Alexander Galich, and Yuri Vizbor. But this book is more than memoirs of a celebrated bard. As a world-renowned scientist, an honored figure of science of the Russian Federation, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Gorodnitsky traveled the entire world, sailed across all oceans, and many times went down to the seabed in deep-sea manned vehicles (including depths of more than four kilometers), was at the North Pole and in Antarctica, and took part in the search for the legendary Atlantis. Alexander Moiseevich calls himself “an islander” for a reason: born on Vasilyevsky Island, he has visited the shores of many islands—from Jamaica and Guadeloupe to Novaya Zemlya, Bermuda, and Easter Island. All of this—scientific expeditions and far journeys, sensational discoveries and unforgettable meetings, poems and songs, pre-war childhood and the Blockade, turning points in history and the смена of eras—Alexander Gorodnitsky tells in this book.