The book contains essays about the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences - some of its departments and laboratories, expeditions, and employees. They do not represent a systematic account of the history of the Institute. Their goal is to tell readers, especially young ones, about the valuable, in our opinion, elements of the institute's intangible heritage: about research attitudes and motivations, work style, details of everyday life, the nature of relationships, about the atmosphere inherent in the academic scientific community, of which the Institute is a part.Essays grouped into three sections. The most extensive of them is the third, containing memories of people who left a deep mark in the memory of colleagues and in the life of the Institute. The other two sections are about expeditions and field stations, about the Institute as a whole or about its laboratories and departments. The essays contain variations of the same plot or image. They were preserved deliberately for the sake of the polyphony of the picture. How complete it turned out and how successful it was in achieving its plans is for the reader to judge. For geographers, historians, students, for everyone interested in the life of the community of scientists - geographers.