"Before us is a book based on an astonishing discovery - twenty-three letters addressed to a lady (and three to her husband): until now we knew nothing about the existence of these letters. The lady was a neighbor of Marcel Proust, who lives on the fourth floor of the house 102 on Boulevard Osmanne. Undoubtedly, the publication in Russian of these letters will complement the portrait of the author of the "greatest French book of the twentieth century" in a peculiar stroke, showing him as a private person in the atmosphere of everyday life with all his fleeting joys and troubles. Not only creative insights, painful searches for impeccable form, journalistic and newspaper peripeteias, but also any, even the most insignificant, facts and events of Proust's everyday existence serve as a result of creating a full-blooded image of a genius writer in all its grandeur and earthly imperf" --