Our city has never experienced a shortage of poets, neither it is the case now – poetry has always lived here, and will live forever more. The Golden Age of poetry came and went; the Silver Age is also history now. Gone is the twentieth century that some historians consider to be the Bronze, and some – the Iron Age of our poetry. But no matter what we call it, for our poetry the twentieth century turned out to be a time of trial. The time forced our poetry to become everything that poetry is not about: to deliver the ideologically and politically correct content, to become "useful", and to march in step with the soviet regime. And poetry wanted to be free, wanted to be independent of any imposed conditions, rules and "guidelines". And it was only a matter of time before our poetry split into two camps: the official and unofficial kind, one that bore the regime's seal of approval and one that was denounced by it.We are inviting you to a guided tour of memorable poetic places of our city that harbored the proud and free spirit of the unofficial and uncensored poetry of the twentieth century. We recommend you to end your tour in the Museum of Political History of Russia. Its exposition will help you to better understand and decipher many poetic images and metaphors, help you to trace how the language and the poetic forms changed with time, and see why the lives of many poets ended up the way they did. And then the figures of these poets and things that they created will come alive for us and will open up to the eyes of a contemporary person in all the historical complexity of their meaning.We will start our tour on Nevsky Prospect that, until 1944, bore the name of the 25th of October. What happened on the 25th of October of 1917 hardly needs an explanation: the imperialist period of Russia's history ended, and the soviet one started.