It is a book written by a well-known writer. Shklovsky wrote all his long literary life . But it's not just memories .. In addition to the memory of the memoirist, the book contains the living mind of a contemporary who knows how to listen to the progress of time and grasp its changes. In the book there are things written in the twenties ("ZOO or Letters are not about love"), before the war (memories of Mayakovsky), in the most recent period ("Once upon a time" and other memoirs, which were printed in the sixties in the magazine "Znamya" ). In. Shklovsky talks about the people he met, about the environment in which he was - most often it is people and the environment of art. There were many meetings, people are depicted a variety of - from the forgotten and half-forgotten to those whose names are deeply rooted in the history of our culture (Gorky, Tsiolkovsky, Eisenstein, Vs. Ivanov, Babel and others). Their portraits add up to a picture in which there are many living details that allow you to feel the spirit of the time and see in what a difficult struggle young Soviet literature grew up.