Probably, not all readers will recognize this man’s face with a soft smile and a wise, slightly ironic look from under his glasses. But when they see his drawings, they will immediately say: this is Boris Efimov! Because from early childhood, even without being able to read, everyone recognized this confident, thin stroke and this clear line. Years passed, times changed... Only the Master’s handwriting, no matter what, remains unchanged. And the artist wrote this book completely in his own style. With the same subtle, confident, laconic strokes, he creates expressive portraits of those who met him along the path of life. And this list is long and impressive: Stalin and Trotsky, Mayakovsky and Lunacharsky, Kukryniksy and Herluf Bidstrup... And the person closest and dearest to the author is his brother, the wonderful journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who perished in Stalin’s dungeons... Boris Efimov’s book intertwines the funny and the tragic, light and dark, and it is impossible to separate them, because all this together is life.

Boris Efimovich Efimov is the same age as the century. He was born in 1900 and, together with his country, survived everything that befell it: wars and revolutions, NEP and war communism, the terrible 30s and formidable 40s, the Cold War and the Thaw, “stagnation” and “perestroika” and, finally, our times, which have yet to be named... And all this he not only saw, heard and remembered, but also drew. Since 1922, Boris Efimov has been one of the leading cartoonists of Pravda, Izvestia ", "Crocodile". His cartoons on topical political topics always had a wide resonance abroad (the English Prime Minister Sir Austin Chamberlain, depicted in one of them, even sent a note to the Soviet government). But something else is much more important: during the Great Patriotic War, newspapers with drawings by Boris Efimov were not allowed to be rolled out by soldiers, but were carefully stored in duffel bags and field bags... Boris Efimovich is still cheerful, energetic and full of humor. And he boldly looks with us into the new century!