The book’s author is a descendant of a famous aristocratic family—the son of the philosopher Yevgeny Trubetskoy—who introduces the reader to the atmosphere of Russian society on the eve of the 1917 revolutions in a vivid and engaging way. Having gone through harsh trials that fell to his lot in the early years of Soviet power—being sentenced to death on an invented charge and then exiled from the USSR—he seeks in his memoirs to emphasize the ideas of good, justice, and love for the Motherland.