In Kolyma, where the author was lucky enough to live for almost a decade and a half, people sometimes find gold nuggets. Do not rush, reader, to count me among those lucky ones. However, I’ll tell you frankly, I got richer than any of them. I went to Kolyma “for the fog and the smell of the taiga.” I was incredibly lucky. It was not for nothing that I started talking about nuggets. Situational humor is like gold nuggets: you come across it extremely rarely and, surprisingly, extremely unexpectedly. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was and is a real luminary of situational humor. He simply enjoyed human stupidity. How many funny cases this true humorist described!!! If readers, having familiarized themselves with the humoresques of this book, consider the author to be at least in some way similar to the great master, I will be immensely happy. And I don’t need anything else.