What is the book about? In a meeting of Soviet writers in the worst of the Stalinist era, in the late forties. As a projection of all such meetings, which were at one time a process, a funeral liturgy and modern gallows, amid accusations and self-accusations, men stop being men and the reader delves into a mystery only treated but disturbing: the power of the writer to the writer who has sold his soul to the devil.
Arguably, this is a book written for four hands: interspersed with fragments of an unfinished work that Boris Yampolski titled required assistance, we find the contributions and comments of his friend and fellow writer, Ilya Konstantinovski, who Yampolski entrusted the manuscript shortly before dying.
In direct and forceful phrases Yamposlki no truth on ethics and the environment that was among the writers of the Soviet Union in dozens of novels and research papers.
This edition is also published, translated from Russian for the first time last encounter with Vasili Grossman, a text of Yampolski that, as an epilogue of some chapters of Life and Fate, published in 1976 Kontinent magazine. The memory retained Yampolski that last encounter becomes for the modern reader in a tribute to the author of one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

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"Assistance is also required gazetteer a who's who of Soviet postwar letters, and a devastating verdict against literary generals executioners of true literature."
Enrique Fernández Vernet