Vladimir Markovich Sanin (1929–1989) wrote about people who chose a difficult and dangerous path in life—polar explorers, firefighters, travelers. And he himself belonged to that same restless human breed: as a very young man, Sanin managed to take part in the Great Patriotic War; after the war, he finished the economics faculty of Moscow State University, worked for a newspaper, became a writer, and more than once went beyond the Arctic Circle, in the Arctic and Antarctica. The plots of his works are often based on real events, unfolding in unusual circumstances and closed communities (such as, for example, a ship’s crew or a mountain avalanche station).