If you use Nabokov"s definition of "A Shropshire Lad" as a "book about young men and death", then Kibirov"s goal was to write a book about an old man and life. Unfortunately, there was no hope that all potential readers remembered Hausman"s poetry. For this reason, I put his text on the left and my own variation on the right. I hope that the outright insolence of this undertaking and the unsophisticated defencelessness of my own poetry will convince kindly readers that the book was inspired not by post-modernist nihilism or delusions of grandeur, but by a love for these outstanding poems and out of respect for their author. As I was writing this forewarning, I had the strangest thought: suddenly I, like so many other contemporary poets, realized that I have been writing in others" margins my whole life and that perhaps now I"d just uncovered Polishinel"s secret. There is good reason to suspect that it is just so. IN RUSSIAN.