About the book: 2001 / One of the first Soviet classics, author of the famous "Armored Train 14-69" Vsevolod Ivanov belongs to the generation of writers who experienced an unprecedented rise, and then, for several decades, they wrote works “on the table”, with no hope of ever publishing them. Vsevolod Ivanov reflects on his fate and the writers of his generation in his diaries, which are published in full for the first time. Ivanov’s diary entries from the period 1924–1963. include a description of historical events of that time, portraits of contemporaries - politicians, writers, artists, actors and directors (B. Pasternak, M. Zoshchenko, I. Ehrenburg, A. Fadeev, A. Mariengof, P. Konchalovsky, S. Mikhoels and etc.); memories (of St. Petersburg in the 20s, friendship with the Serapion Brothers), thoughts about the role of art in modern society. The war diaries that form the bulk of the book differ in many ways from the nonfiction of 1941–1945. They acquire the features of artistic prose, close in its poetics to the “fantastic realism” of M. Bulgakov and A. Platonov. The diaries are accompanied by scientific commentary, which allows us to consider them in the context of historical time, the literary life of that period and literary life.