The “Family Archive” series, started by the publishing house “Encyclopedia of Villages and Villages”, is continued by the unique, for the first time published in the most complete volume, memoirs and correspondence of the peasant Mikhail Petrovich Novikov (1870–1937), a talented self-taught writer and friend, who was executed in 1937 Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, with whom the great writer wanted to settle when he planned his departure from Yasnaya Polyana... In the memoirs “From the Experience,” Russia emerges from the late 19th to the first third of the 20th century, the tragic fate of the peasantry - the class that Tolstoy called “the most reasonable and most moral which we all live." Among the correspondents of M. P. Novikov are Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Joseph Stalin... Reading Novikov, Tolstoy admired and cried. I think this book will not leave the reader indifferent today.