The book by Vadim Pugach includes entertaining essays about Russian classics, about the works of Leskov and Zoshchenko, Bunin and Khodasevich, Nekrasov and Lermontov and other well-known writers. This fascinating book is intended for all lovers of Russian literature, and it is not so much about about the vicissitudes of fate, as much as about the secret springs of some works: classics that have been studied, it would seem, far and wide, turn with their unexpected sides (for example, in the essay “The Last Journey of Svidrigailov”), and the faces of contemporaries become significant and memorable.