Two friends who graduated from high school - a Jew from a shtetl and a Russian nobleman from a noble family - decided to play a risky joke: exchange documents and live under a false name in an unfamiliar environment. For one of them, the Russian Popov, who became Rabinovich for a year, the prank turns out to be anything but harmless. This, in brief, is the plot of Sholom Aleichem’s novel “The Bloody Joke,” which he began writing in 1911, when he learned about the notorious “Beilis Affair,” and finished in January 1913, even before Menachem Mendel Beilis, falsely accused of the "ritual murder" of a Christian boy was acquitted by a jury. Sholom Aleichem wanted to publish “The Bloody Joke” in Russian, but this did not happen during the writer’s lifetime. This edition is the most complete and accurate translation of one of the best, but still little known in Russia, works of a classic of Jewish literature.