The renowned philologist Alexander Zholkovsky managed to create his own original metaliterary genre - the vignette: a fragmentary, fictionalized, free memoir. The author has collected under one cover more than fifty vignettes, previously scattered across the Internet and paper periodicals, to which he also added two new stories. The book features famous cultural heroes (Nadezhda Mandelstam, Umberto Eco, Yuri Shcheglov, Omri Ronen) and long-lost acquaintances, students of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University and randomly met girls, medical workers and characters from social networks. From these scattered witty notes, an amazing mosaic of personal fate and a great era, comedy of manners and drama of life is formed. Attention! The book contains obscene language.