Meetings with Nikolay Liliev

Every time I look up at the bookshelf where I keep everything without which it is difficult for me to imagine my everyday life, my gaze involuntarily falls on a small collection of poems in dove color, already faded by the years, which bears the familiar title "Birds in the Night". Miraculously surviving the bombings and the endless journeys from apartment to apartment, this collection of poems with an Art Nouveau cover, on which the bird of wisdom stands with calm self-confidence on a large letter P, contrasts somewhat unusually with its colorful young sisters and hides among them with a slightly old-fashioned shyness, not particularly characteristic of our time. Born in another era, very different from the current one, it comes with its presence not only to resurrect in my mind a bygone stage of our literature, but also to remind me of my first contact with Nikolay Liliev - one of the poets who had a certain influence on the spiritual biography of my generation.