The book includes selected essays by Joseph Brodsky, written in emigration in the 1980s–1990s. Most of the essays were printed in the author's collections 'Less Than One' (1986) and 'On Grief and Reason' (1995), and are published in Russian translation. To them have been added the rarely published 'Reflections on a Spawn of Hell' and 'A Writer in Prison'. These are texts about history and freedom, about the nature of power and the attitude towards it. Brodsky reflects both on the essence of creative work regardless of the state system, and on the influence of external circumstances on the writing person.