Every real writer is essentially autobiographical. His own life is a kind of experimental field on which he explores and tries to understand the nature and essence of man. And it doesn’t matter how detached or in what images he later conveys his discoveries. Gogol once wrote that Chichikov, Manilov, Nozdryov, and Khlestakov all came from his soul. It is important that artistic autobiography does not at all mean a retelling of real events that happened to the author. Without writing there is no work of writing. Autobiography and artistic construction are always a single whole. The author of the famous novels “Crocodile”, “Fortress”, and the fairy tale novel “The Conqueror of the Rats” offers the reader a book of stories related to the theme of human life - his growing up and aging. If you like, this is a book about life, divided into a number of episodes, sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic. In the words of Pushkin, “a collection of motley chapters.”