This unique book contains for the first time everything that the people's memory has preserved about the true events of Peter's life, everything that eyewitnesses of his deeds and actions could tell. From those that had national historical proportions to quite intimate ones. From these tales comes the most vivid and reliable biography of the great man. One could also say that this is a folk biography of Peter the Great. This publication will be in time, since Peter the Great turns 350 years old next year. The book contains more than four hundred and thirty stories about the last Russian Tsar and the first Russian Emperor. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these stories were called anecdotes, but not in the current sense of the concept. An anecdote was then called a description of a historical or everyday incident that was worth remembering, conveyed a living feature of a time and a person, was instructive, vivid or simply funny.