John Shemyakin is a famous Russian blogger, whose page on Facebook has more than 70,000 subscribers, a subtle and witty intellectual, the author of delightful autobiographical stories that invariably cause a furor on the Runet and intensively diverge into aphorisms. “Few people know that I: worked a year as a cook on a tanker in the Pacific Ocean; for six months he bore the name Eugene; was the impresario of the sorceress Lyuba; played Admiral Nakhimov on stage; studied at the theological seminary; worked in 1993 as deputy chief of staff of the Democratic Party of Russia; published poems about love in the Pioneer magazine; in 1984, he traveled to Nicaragua to collect coffee; was bitten by a poisonous snake; suffered chlorine poisoning while producing belts for Wrangler jeans; accepted empty bottles from the vodka store where he worked as a salesman and was a teacher in the department of general history at the university.”