In St. Petersburg there lived amazing people with the most extraordinary biographies, which today many do not know at all or know very little about. Before you is a book of portrait essays telling about the bright and difficult destinies of famous Russians, St. Petersburg residents by birth and those whose life path was is inextricably linked with the city on the Neva. The author has collected little-known, sometimes inaccessible to a wide audience, facts from the life of his heroes - scientists, artists, inventors, politicians, military men, who formed the flower of the nation, who lived in St. Petersburg from the time of its foundation - to the present day. The book is designed to a wide range of readers interested in Russian history.