About the book: year / This volume contains articles about the first post-war generation. It felt like something integral at the turn of the 60s and as a result received a rather ridiculous name: “sixties”. I looked for other definitions: “post-war dreamers”, “last idealists”, “children of silence”, “scribes”, etc. - but did not find anything satisfactory and decided to use the label “sixties” that had stuck to the generation. The articles were written in 1959–1963 and made up the book “The Nut Kernel,” which, after some publishing pains, was published in 1965; in this volume it makes up the first section. The second section is “Promotion” - articles that were not included in the “Nut Kernel” or written to follow the book in 1964–1969; Then it seemed to me that “young literature” was still alive: I hoped to collect these articles into a new book. By the beginning of the 70s, it became clear that the “generation” had broken up, and the incentive had disappeared. Then I began to write articles of a completely different tone, trying to understand what would happen to us. They were included in the third section: “Splitting.” “Scattering” is when it became clear what is happening to us. “Poles” are the most vividly and consistently embodied literary destinies in the era of the approaching collapse of the Whole. “Trajectories” are articles where the divergent paths of the once united generation of writers are traced. And, finally, “Traces” - rather in the sense in which this word is understood by experimental physicists - “tenors of the twentieth century,” the heroes of my youth, than in the hunting sense - articles written on the long trail of the heroes of “The Nut Kernel”; they were created at a time when, in the eyes of the generations that came after, the “sixties” had almost become a laughing stock.