This is a late lyric, where the "necessary" is poetry itself as a way to stay in the world, and the "residual" is everything that remains after losses, disappointments and years spent: memory, irony, faith (sometimes arguing with God), habits of language and a clear sense of personal freedom. Inside, there are short aphoristic texts and more detailed things, with constant mental play, internal dialogue and precise rhymes: "rhyme and death recedes" becomes not a slogan, but a working rule of survival.The intonation of the book is polyphonic: there are prayerfully restrained lines and sarcastic satire, everyday self-irony and philosophical conclusions. Kolker freely weaves cultural and historical references (from antiquity to European classics) and turns them into personal experience — not "scholarship", but living optics.The collection is structured into several sections (cycles are marked as (1)–(9)); together they form a diary of the year — with themes of time, aging, separation, exile, language, and love (including animals, home, and existence itself).Yuri Kolker (born March 14, 1946, Leningrad) is a Russian poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. In 1969, he graduated with honors from the Faculty of Physics and Mechanics of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, in 1978 he received a PhD in Physics and Mathematics; he worked in scientific institutions, and in 1980-1984 as a stoker (operator of gas boilers). He was published in the USSR from the early 1970s, then in samizdat and abroad; in 1980 he received a warning from the KGB because of the manuscripts that were on the lists. In 1981-1983, he prepared the first annotated two-volume edition of Vladislav Khodasevich's poems (published in Paris in 1983). In 1984, he emigrated to Israel (lived in Jerusalem), and since 1989 he settled in London and worked for the BBC Russian service (1989-2002).