Writers and cultural figures evacuated to Tashkent at the beginning of the Patriotic War lived in one colony. A kind of large communal apartment from Soviet times. Truth, consisting entirely of intellectuals. At that time, on the streets of the city one could easily meet A. Akhmatova, K. Chukovsky, A. N. Tolstoy, F. Ranevskaya, Vs. Ivanov, E. Bulgakova, S. Mikhoels, V. Lugovsky - you can’t list them all, but the faces all recognizable. Everyone experienced their own drama, some everyday, some spiritual, some love. This book is both a narrative and a unique collage of diaries, notebooks, and eyewitness accounts. Much is being published for the first time, in particular the correspondence between V. Lugovsky and E. Bulgakova.