Biographies and memoirs

“Whoever the person is, even Pushkin, his first text will be “Childhood,” even if it is not written. Pushkin’s childhood seemed weak, as if he never existed....

“There is nothing more exciting for me than to find in my memories a previously invisible bookmark of time and that page after which life, if not changed, th...

“In the summer of 1988, Valya N. accompanied a group of foreign students on a trip to Azerbaijan. Valya N. and my mother were great friends. Valya N. suggest...

“Eighty-six, September. I'm fifteen months shy of two months. After the last lesson, I was the first to jump out into the recreation area, but Zhenya Demidov...

“I’m sitting at a large table in the kitchen, spreading out the chaos of random objects into a space the size of a spring-bound notebook. I haven’t written a...

“You see others sitting, eating, or mostly lying down, but Gusik resembled a restless bird, like a swift, which seems to do nothing but flutter over the grou...

“In my adolescence, when I just began to show interest in the female sex, I came across the following saying in one of the girl’s songbooks decorated with fl...

“I was born in Penza in 1979. When my grandmother talks about her childhood, she remembers the famine of the 30s, my grandfather remembers the German occupat...

“Is there a real skimmer in your house? Which is used to remove (in decent houses) real pulp. Pulp is for those who understand. In time immemorial, the days ...

“And this is the result: I’m lying in bed, clutching a tin box of chocolates, gripping the edges of the box so tightly that there are red marks on my fingers...

“Now childhood seems to me a cloudless and fleeting time, but then it dragged on maliciously under the sign of a total shortage of everything that we classif...

“My grandfather said: fear is the most vile feeling, the most useless. Never confuse fear with caution. The coward always dies first. Or his own people will ...