About the book: 2005 / Lazar Lazarev is a literary critic of the “Novomirsky” series, one of the elders of modern literary criticism and journalism, the editor-in-chief of a company that enjoys constant authority in literary and scientific in the world of the journal Voprosy Literatury, in which he has been working for more than four decades. The book “Notes of an Elderly Man” incorporates the experience of the author, who for a long time was in the thick of remarkable events in social and literary life. His observations are insightful, his evidence is accurate. The names of the heroes of the essays are widely known: V. Nekrasov, K. Simonov, A. Agranovsky, B. Slutsky, B. Okudzhava, I. Erenburg, V. Grossman, A. Tvardovsky, M. Gallai, A . Adamovich, V. Bykov, D. Ortenberg, A. Tarkovsky.