The autobiographical prose of the famous poet and prose writer David Shrayer-Petrov (b. 1936) describes virtually his entire life and professional activity - as a microbiologist and writer, from school to the present day. After graduating from medical school in Leningrad, Shrayer went through a difficult path of becoming a research scientist, which ended in the USA, where he emigrated with his family in 1987. In parallel, the literary destiny of Shrayer-Petrov developed quite successfully, his books were published in the USSR and then in Russia, his reputation invariably grew. The reader of this book will learn first-hand about the difficult fate of the Russian intellectual, who lived for a long time as a “refusenik” in the context of the Soviet system, but ultimately realized many of his life aspirations in the United States.