The personal diaries of the Russian filmmaker, who has emerged as the foremost director of the last forty years through his work. A person who, with his way of life and his work, revealed that he had a universal view of the world and beings, which made him a master at expressing, better than anyone else, the unspeakable.

His personal notes, brought to light by his wife after his death (1986), reveal a man who struggled almost daily with fate, an unjust and irrational fate, as the poet of dreams and beauty had to contend first with the absurdity of the Soviet regime, then with the bitter taste of exile, and finally with the pain of death at the end of his short life.

In the Martyrdom, the reader encounters a Tarkovsky stripped of any idealizations and sanctifications that have been attempted over time. They meet the anguished yet simultaneously creative way of thinking and acting of the director who became the "poet of images."