Baron Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France and alchemist who served as the prototype for Bluebeard, went down in history as perhaps the most famous sadist, sexual pervert and serial killer. But didn’t the popular rumor thicken the color, and after it the storyteller Charles Perrault - was the baron really so vicious? And Mazepa? Not a Pushkin character, but a real hetman of Ukraine - who was he, a traitor or a hero? And what do the beautiful Circassian Satan, who became the wife of the Russian nobleman Nechvolodov, and Lermontov’s Bela have in common? And who is Eulalia Kadmina, whose fate was reflected in the heroines of Turgenev, Kuprin, Leskov and a number of other lesser-known authors? And were there specific, rather than collective, prototypes for the heroes of Fenimore Cooper, George Orwell and Varlam Shalamov? The writer, author of the newspaper “Top Secret” Sergei Makeev talks about this and much more in his highly entertaining book.