For many years, the well-known Moscow collector Vladimir Belyakov gathered “last words” of great people. Words that “somehow sum up all the chatter of our whole previous life.”
For the first time, the author offers his unique collection—numbering not just dozens, but hundreds of these rare specimens of oral work—to the public. So what words were spoken by people who reached the grim edge of life? What did the august suicides leave in their final notes? What did the crowned hangmen or members of a criminal fraternity cry out to the annoying crowd gathered at the black scaffold? All of this has always aroused—and continues to arouse—genuine and equally justified interest among readers.