A collection of letters by a most extraordinary member of East European intelligentsia, sent from Moscow, Mostar; lately Paris and Rome, where the author has lived since leaving war-torn Bosnia. Matvejević , vice president of the International PEN Club, was born in Yugoslavia, the son of a Russian emigre. His letters are about the past and the present of Russia, as welll as his hopes and fears for her future.

Book One: Heroides To my forbears Seven thousand days in Siberia Sinyavsky-Daniel Brodsky Eurasian letters The Gulag Archipelago Book Two: Steles Soviet itineraries On letters, open and closed Kolyma To Varlam Shalamov Russian letters Hostage to the truth Cause for dismissal Yellow star, white star Confession Book Three: Epitaphs Rehabilitations Nikolai Bukharin Peter Kropotkin, the dark prince Maxim Gorky Lev Trotsky Goli Otok, a different gulag Book Four: Apologias Mikhail Bulgakov Nadezhda Mandelshtam Ariadna Efron Kruzhok Portraits of Stalin On writers' perestroika To Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev Archives and memory: to Boris Yeltsin An interrogation Our disappointments: to Brodsky Final letters Heirs without heritage Emigration and dissidence The collapse of the intelligentsia A perverted slavicism The gulag so long ago... Afterword: An open letter to the Reader