Oleg Agranyants is a Russian writer who emigrated to America, a former employee of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and US federal agencies, known to readers from a series of ironic detective stories - the trilogy “In Search of Mephistopheles.” On the advice of Maupassant, I decided not to abuse the reader’s patience and not to write mossy memoirs, but to tell the world cheerful and funny stories that abound in the author’s biography. About how he read Akhmatova’s poems and listened to Vertinsky’s advice on how to treat ladies. About how Yuri Gagarin taught him to deceive his wife, and the future anti-hero of Beslan Dzasokhov ran around the ladies' toilets. About how on a tropical island he was engaged in activities “incompatible with diplomatic status.” About how, during a conversation with the director of the CIA, he tried to understand whether Gorbachev was a spy. These are stories not about deeds, not about ideas, but about living people. Sometimes they are funny to the point of anecdotal, sometimes they are sad. But thanks to the author’s undoubted literary talent and rich life experience, readers not without intelligence will not be left indifferent.