“European education is when your father is shot or you yourself kill someone in the name of something important, when you die of hunger or wipe out an entire city from the face of the earth. I’m telling you, you and I went to a good school, and we were raised properly.” One of the most mysterious European writers of the twentieth century, Romain Gary (1914–1980), wrote his first book between combat missions during the Second World War, and already in 1945 year, the novel “European Education” was awarded the prestigious Prize of French Critics. The novel has been translated into 27 languages, and now this small masterpiece of poetic realism is for the first time in Russian.