This book is published to mark the 80th birthday of Larisa Iosifovna Bogoraz. She wrote the memoirs for more than ten years, but never finished. They have been preserved in the form of dozens of scattered passages with a lot of questions and details that require clarification. And, of course, their full publication requires a lot of textual work, commentary, and reference materials. Let's hope that such a publication will be published in the future. In the meantime, we have printed in a small edition a kind of draft of the memoirs, without any reference apparatus, without photographs, as a gift to Larisa Iosifovna’s loved ones, to whom nothing needs to be explained.