Mikhail Demin (1926 - 1984) is a modern Russian writer, the son of a major Soviet military leader. In 1937, he lost his father, became a vagrant, and served in the army during the Second World War after a two-year prison sentence; after the war, due to the threat of “automatic” re-arrest, he hid in the criminal underground. In 1947, he was arrested and sentenced to six years in the Siberian camps, followed by three years of exile. After his release, he began publishing first in the Siberian, then in the central press. In the USSR he published four collections of poetry and a book of prose. Since 1968, Mikhail Demin lived in France. Over the years, he published several books of an autobiographical nature, which had wide success in Europe, America and Japan.