The plot-forming core of the memoirs of Rebekka Markovna Frumkina, a world-famous scientist, founder of a large research school in linguistics, was and remains her studies in science. The occupations were acutely conflictual, for which one had to pay dearly - with health, loss of loved ones. She was lucky enough to study with major linguists and mathematicians, participate in the development of mathematical linguistics, refute her own results and write books that were kept in the public domain at Leninka, but in a special closet so that readers would not steal them. The drama that R. writes about. M. Frumkin, stretched over many decades of the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, reached its apogee in the eighties and led to the collapse of schools, the drain of brilliant minds, personal disasters, disappointments and irreparable losses. Its echoes are still discernible in attempts to destroy the Faculty of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities, which brought together scattered fragments of the scientific community in the 1990s.