“If they gave me a book with such an author on the cover, I would immediately understand that it was a hoax. Why John? How can this John have the last name Shemyakin?! It's kind of absurd. If they had told me that in the author’s veins the violent blood of Kamchadals and Scots, Ural Old Believers, Germans and Manchus was intricately mixed, I would be convinced that this is an obvious fake. If I had learned that the author, a historian by training, also studied in theological seminary, for some reason spent a year on a tanker in the Pacific Ocean, assuring the crew that he was a first-class cook, worked as a glass container receiver, deputy head of the Samara city administration, and as a result became a manufacturer of petroleum products purification systems, a whiskey dealer and the father of a large family, I would He immediately stated that such a zigzag fate does not exist. And even if it does happen, it looks a little wild outside the hospital walls. So be it. Short stories of madness about myself and my extended family will not get any worse. Quite the contrary. Read them with a feeling of well-deserved superiority - this feeling has never let you down, and will not let you down now.” John Shemyakin John Shemyakin is a famous Russian blogger, whose Facebook page has more than 50,000 subscribers, a subtle and witty intellectual, the author of delightful autobiographical tales, invariably causing a furor in the Runet and intensively diverging into aphorisms.