About the book: 2019 / The book by the famous philosopher, writer and public figure Vitaly Averyanov contains his poetic works - poems, songs, epics, satirical ballads, epigrams, jokes written over more than a quarter of a century (1990 – 2016). They clearly reflect the modern era. It is surprising that, being relevant, poignant, sometimes tragic or comic, these works, in which the lyrics imperceptibly flow into the epic, often sound like Russian folklore, like primordial folklore. Noting this trait of the poet, his senior colleague Alexander Prokhanov compares Averyanov with Khlebnikov and Klyuev and emphasizes: “Bringing out of the twilight the disappeared beauties of language, and with them the disappeared experiences and emotions so characteristic of Russian antiquity, is a huge poetic task.” The folkloric and sometimes deliberate antiquity of Averyanov’s artistic language does not turn into archaism, but becomes a symptom of modern poetic thinking, when, in his own expression, “the time of the storyteller” comes. It seems that Vitaly Averyanov, with his guitar and style of singing, could go wandering to Ancient Rus', and to the USSR, and to Russia of the 22nd century - and everywhere his songs, poems, “tales” would not sound like “outdated” or, on the contrary, “fashionable” - but like eternal Russians…