About the book: year / In the story "In the footsteps of Tamantsev" the hero is looking for materials or witnesses to the activities of the Shapoval sabotage group during the war, but, in addition to mentioning them in the book does not find anything about the partisan movement in Belarus. Knowing about his interest as a writer, he is informed that a certain Kolovratov lived in the Far East, who was familiar with V. Bogomolov and served as his prototype for Tamantsev in the novel “The Moment of Truth.” The hero goes to the Far East to write a film script about him. While searching for materials, he comes to the unexpected conclusion that Kolovratov never met Bogomolov and invented many facts of his biography. But he made it up because it was like two peas in a pod like the biography of a famous literary character. There, in the Far East, the hero unexpectedly finds the diary of one of the partisans of Shapoval’s sabotage group. However, the hero cannot connect these two lines, he lacks some fact or stroke that could draw a line in his narrative. “The poison of writing is so deeply ingrained. in me that I could not present the material to the reader in raw form, in the form of some travel notes describing the road, means of transportation, and most importantly, the people who met me along the way, both in the present and in the past. Notes - without beginning and without end, without beginning and end; notes - in that irregular and asymmetrical form in which a literary work cannot exist, but life itself exists beautifully, without even for a second feeling inferior.” And then the hero turns for help to a man who was fighting in Belarus at that time. He tells him the story of how at the beginning of forty-four he, a fifteen-year-old boy, dreamed of accomplishing a feat - blowing up a bridge.