We are all former children, and we haven’t explained a lot about ourselves, we haven’t understood. Trying to reconstruct school times is quite painful, but these times are something to be grateful for. The purpose of this book is to chronicle bygone childhood and school years: there is no one else to do this except us. Ulitskaya’s collection of memoirs about post-war schoolchildren became a bestseller, but the conflicts of childhood and adolescence in the sixties and nineties turned out to be no less dramatic and touching. The best way to understand yourself today is to remember yourself then. “School of Life” is a new project in the “People’s Book” series. Open it - and it will become clear why our generation gave up almost everything and still stayed on the edge of the abyss. Dmitry Bykov