“Swan Song” is the author’s title of the novel known to a wide circle of readers as “The Defeated.” The book by Irina Vladimirovna Golovkina, granddaughter of the great Russian composer Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, was first published in 1992 in the magazine “Nash Sovremennik” in an abridged form. The author’s title and preface disappeared, as did part of the text and some words characteristic of the author—for example, “intelligent” and “intellectual.” Nevertheless, even in abridged form, the novel about the life of the Russian intelligentsia during Stalin’s dictatorship was a bibliographic rarity. The book truly became the author’s swan song. Everything here is permeated with love for Russia and loyalty to it—in happiness and in sorrow, in joy and in trouble.