Stanislav Olefir is from the generation that did not play “war games” - only “war”: he could not easily mentally relate to this word. They didn’t know how to celebrate a victory - how can you rejoice at a day that claimed the life of your father, godfather, grandfather, uncle? But for all their seriousness, the “younger children of the war” retained more than just frightening memories of the terrible years: amazingly bright, sometimes even funny episodes remained in their memory. In the collection of sketches under the general title “When I was little, we had a war... “It’s as if all the signs of the era were intertwined together. Collectivization and the German offensive, the liberation of the village and the post-war famine, “enemies of the people” and prisoners - all this is in the book, and all this is not here. Stanislav Olefir talks about defining historical events in brief essays using the stories of ordinary people, avoiding big words and generalizations. And since life in the village where the action takes place is unthinkable without animals, they become the heroes of almost half of the stories: dog friends, voiceless chickens and the glorious piglet Sherstyuk, deftly avoiding mines in search of potatoes, turn out to be no less interesting than people. Life of a German-occupied Ukrainian village is shown through the eyes of a boy 4–7 years old, for whom any event is equally significant. A box of matches unexpectedly given by a German soldier or a goat punching holes in the roof of a dugout with its hooves are images that equally touch a child’s soul. War reveals all that is most important and hides the momentary, superficial - the prose of Stanislav Olefir makes you feel this to the fullest. Stanislav Mikhailovich was born in Zaporozhye in 1938, lived for more than 40 years in the Magadan region, Chukotka and Kamchatka, died near St. Petersburg in 2015. By profession he was an agronomist and chemist teacher, and by vocation he was a hunter and traveler, so most of his books were about the taiga, the Far North, and wild animals, with which he was familiar first-hand. The collection you are holding in your hands is unique in this sense: the action takes place in completely different places, in different times, and the focus here is primarily on people. The publication is supplemented with illustrations by Alexey Kapninsky (Kapych) - light, stylistically precise, deliberately childish: it seems as if the main character himself created them.