'I write not about myself and not for myself, but about those whom I was given the chance to know… I write about them and for them. About myself I try to speak as little as possible…' — wrote Irina Odoevtseva in the preface to her memoirs. A Russian poet, the beloved pupil of Nikolai Gumilev, she left Russia in 1922. She lived a long life and returned to her homeland in 1987 — the last representative of the distant Silver Age. She lived to see her books published in the USSR — the memoirs 'On the Banks of the Neva' and 'On the Banks of the Seine' came out in the late 1980s in colossal print runs. The heroes of these memoirs are Nikolai Gumilev, Georgy Ivanov, Osip Mandelstam, Zinaida Gippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Ivan Bunin and many others. And now, years later, this book — a monument to an era, its living testimony — is read with great interest. Odoevtseva's phenomenal memory allowed her, even after many decades, to reproduce conversations, discussions, and arguments of that time. In the last years of her life, I. V. Odoevtseva conceived a third book of memoirs — 'On the Banks of Lethe' — which, however, remained unfinished: only a few chapters were published in the Paris newspaper 'Russkaya Mysl''. These chapters are included in the present edition.