Most of the works of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, including such famous ones as "Picnic on the Side of the Road", "The Land of Crimson Clouds", were written and published under strict censorship. As a result, almost all of the author's texts were distorted and mutilated to some extent, either by the editors or (under pressure from their superiors) by the authors themselves. Moreover, distortions and corrections have been wandering from one reissue to another for many years. Therefore, the task of restoring what was lost and correcting what was mutilated, returning the censored bills, and offering the reader the source texts in the very form in which they were originally created by the authors was perhaps the most important in preparing for the publication of this collection of works. In this sense, the publication offered to the reader is the primary source and even, one might say, the true one.
There was also a second task: to publish everything possible in a single collection, at least a lot - more or less worthy - of what had never been published before. In this sense, the proposed collection is the most complete that has been released so far. Each volume contains comments by Boris Natanovich Strugatsky. This is a description of the long creative path from debut to mastery, autobiographies, correspondence between the co-author brothers, excerpts from diaries, chronicles of the writing of all the works of A. and B. Strugatsky. In addition, the publication includes excerpts from critical articles and reviews about Strugatsky's books, written immediately after the first publication of the work, they allow you to plunge into the atmosphere of the past years, find out (or remember) how official criticism reacted to Strugatsky's new works, for which they were scolded or praised, compare different opinions about the works and, maybe it's more acute to feel how much our lives and ourselves have changed during this time. The 5th and 6th volumes include memoirs by N. Berkova and B. Klyueva. Two women who stood at the turn of the war against bureaucrats and censorship for the purity of the genre, two legendary editors, whose offspring contributed to the formation of the taste of more than one generation of fiction readers, talk about friendship and collaboration with the Strugatskys and the difficulties of publishing their works. The collected works use photographs from the archives of B.Strugatsky, B.Klyueva and the Ludena group: V.Borisov, V.Efremov, V.Kazakov, Yu.Fleishman.