The story “Coward” (1875) by V.M. Garshin was first published in the journal “Otechestvennye zapiski” in 1879, with the subtitle “From a notebook.” In the original edition, the story, for censorship reasons, could not be published, and Saltykov-Shchedrin asked Garshin to make the necessary changes to the text. In a detailed description of Kuzma’s illness, the illness of one of Garshin’s comrades at the Mining Institute, Semyon Kuzmich Kvitka, is accurately reproduced. “We were on duty with him, two at a time, day and night,” Garshin wrote to his mother on March 12, 1876. “We need to wash this wound with a syringe, remove the material from it with a sponge, and so on. I didn’t think before that I was capable of this, but I turned out to be no worse than others.” Unlike the hero of the story, Kvitka remained alive. The “disaster on the Tiligul embankment” mentioned in the story is a train crash on the Odessa railway, during which more than a hundred recruits died.