The Second Book presents a wide panorama of the literary and social life of the 1910s and 1960s. A master of precise and caustic formulations, an equal interlocutor of the greatest poets of the century, Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam shows the reader with searing directness into what abysses a man of the twentieth century fell. The "second Book", even more harsh, biased and evil than "Memoirs", is not just a recreation of the biography of Osip Mandelstam and the preservation of his memory - it is a sentence passed by the poet's widow to the whole country and epoch.