"Clarity and Joy. A Book of Short Essays" is the second, revised and expanded edition of the book of the same name, first published in 2018.

Mikhail Nemtsev is a philosopher, historian, and writer. He was born in 1980 in the south of Western Siberia. He is the author of the poetry collections "Intellectualism" (Omsk, 2015), "Like in the Movies" (Riga, 2023), and the book "This Is How We Learned to Talk About Death. Diary 2022–2023" (Chisinau, 2024). He enjoys paper books. Literary reviewer and critic Olga Balla:

"...I'm afraid of exaggerating, but this is one of the most interesting, if not the most important, books... Nemtsev's book returns us to the very point where philosophy began, where Socrates once began: there's nothing yet, no answers to questions, no questions themselves, but there's a concern about the foundations of life, which you don't yet know what name to give them, so you probe them with whatever means are at hand. Moreover, this point is located beyond philosophy as such (incidentally, we won't encounter a single philosophical term here) – and yet, at the same time, it already is.

Nemtsev literally shows how philosophy is born.
Poetry captures such things best. Nemtsev's semantic practice shares many features with poetry: imagery, sensitivity to the narrator's momentary inner movements, and to how an understanding of the universal human is born from the speaker's particular circumstances – physical, emotional, and objective.

As for "clarity" and "joy," in this case, these aren't psychological categories. They're philosophical categories: two true criteria for a thought that's truly realized.