Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958) is known primarily as a satirist writer, author of unusually funny stories and feuilletons. His characters are ambiguous: on the one hand, they are naive, even simple-hearted, but sometimes they are capable of humiliating, insulting, and sometimes even killing, especially when it comes to their property. Nevertheless, they cause truly Homeric laughter.In addition to the selected stories of the writer, this book included a cycle of short stories "The Blue Book", which he called "a brief history of human relations", where stories about modernity alternate with stories about the past.