I lived with my grandfather for about 22 years under the same roof. I met him when I was three years old. This book is practically a memoir, in which I tried to preserve all his stories as close as possible to the way I heard them. The book is divided into three unequal parts: under the Tsar, in the village, the First World War and the Revolution. The biggest one is the first one. He most loved to remember this happy time. He was a small man who came from the people. But it is precisely such people, gathered in a mass, that make history. There is no deliberate romance or preference for any political or other theory here. Everything that was written was exactly like that, from me in the book there was the most minimal literary treatment. It is impossible to imagine such a thing. Everything written in the book, it seems to me, was able to be kept in the spirit of how it was told to me. Most of the stories were repeated many times, with variations, adding details, but some I heard only once.