The 2-volume book of personal recollections, literary memoirs, immediate reactions of a literary critic and thoughtful opinions of a scholar covers a greater part of the second half in 20th-c. Russia. In agreement with the promise in the book’s title, literature was more than part-time, it was life itself, books as real as people, sometimes even more real. The author is with them who love classical Russian and English literature and is very strict on others whose tastes are being shown off as radically modernist or avant-garde. Pushkin and Shakespeare are the objects of the academic study and eternal fellow-travellers for the author who rejects Joyce with Ulysses , Pasternak with Doctor Zhivago , and Bunin with Dark Avenues [ Tyomnye allei ], presumably not on any political or moral reason but primarily as the books badly written. Urnov’s own book is sincere when the author speaks about his position in life and literature, and it will stay as an opinionated commentary to the time partly gone, partly going on.