Aleksander Wat, one of Poland's most important twentieth-century poets, recorded these extraordinary conversations with the poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1965, creating a memoir that captures the intellectual and political history of Eastern Europe from the 1920s through the postwar period. Wat describes his youthful involvement with Futurism and his editorship of Poland's leading communist literary journal, then his arrest by Soviet authorities after fleeing to occupied Poland and his years in Soviet prisons and Central Asian exile. The conversations range from detailed accounts of Lubyanka interrogations to philosophical reflections on Marxism's appeal to intellectuals and the nature of Soviet totalitarianism. Wat discusses his relationships with other writers, his evolution away from communism, and his attempts to understand how he and others could have believed. Milosz, who had his own complicated relationship with communism, proves an ideal interlocutor, asking probing questions that draw out Wat's analysis. The book offers both historical testimony and profound meditation on the twentieth century's ideological disasters. Wat speaks as someone who lived through catastrophe and emerged with hard-won understanding, neither making excuses nor wallowing in guilt. Essential reading for understanding the appeal and the horror of totalitarianism as experienced by someone who knew both intimately.