The Story of My Life is a collection of episodes from the life of the legendary Dine Verny (1919–2009), which she told to writer and director Alain Jaubert. The word "episodes" does not fully describe Verney's eventful life - "adventures" would be a much more appropriate description. Therefore, this book is more reminiscent of an adventure novel than a classic autobiography. So who was Dina Verni? At a young age she became the muse of the great French sculptor Aristide Maillol, and decades later she founded the Maillol Museum in Paris and donated eighteen of his sculptures to France, which are today exhibited in the Tuileries Garden. During World War II, Verney was a member of the Resistance, helping refugees from occupied France cross to Spain. She was arrested twice - after the second arrest, Verny spent six months in prison and was rescued through the efforts of Maillol. After the war, she opened a gallery in Paris and began showing contemporary art there. In 1959, Verny visited the Soviet Union for the first time, where she met nonconformist artists such as Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov and Vladimir Yankilevsky, whom she exhibited in Paris, at a time when their art was banned in their homeland. Being very musical, during one of her visits to the USSR, Verny collected songs of former Gulag prisoners and in 1975 released an album in France called Chants des prisonniers sibériens d’aujourd’hui. The collection almost immediately began to be distributed illegally in the USSR, and Verni was banned from entering the country. Very little literature about Dina Verni has been published in Russia. I am glad that now the Russian reader will have the opportunity to learn more about her. I would especially like to thank Olivier Lorquin, Dina Verny’s son, as well as her grandchildren, Alexander and Pierre Lorquin, for their help in preparing this publication. Anton Belov, Director of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art The publishing design has been preserved in PDF A4 format.