"Diary" is a purely conventional genre definition for the prose of the well-known Soviet playwright Evgeny Schwartz (1896–1958). What we have before us is a distinctive autobiography of a deeply confessional nature. It contains thoughts on the writer's daily work, events he witnessed from the 1900s until the end of his life, and literary portraits of many contemporaries — M. Zoshchenko, V. Kaverin, M. Slonimsky, Yu. Tynyanov, K. Chukovsky and others — written truthfully, concisely, and vividly.