The most honest and truthful book about school. “School of Life” is a collection of school memories compiled by Dmitry Bykov from people who studied in the 1960–1990s.
It was released in the “People’s Book” series based on the results of a large literary contest “We Come from School,” unique in its kind and covering more than 10,000 citizens of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan— as well as former citizens of the USSR living in the USA, Germany, and Israel. “We are all former children, and we haven’t said everything about ourselves, haven’t understood everything. An attempt to reconstruct school times is rather painful, but those times are worth being thankful for. The purpose of this book is to make a chronicle of gone—child and school—years; besides us, no one else can do it. A collection of memories about post-war schoolchildren, compiled by Ulytska, became a bestseller, but the conflicts of childhood and adolescence of the sixties-to-nineties proved no less dramatic and touching. The best way to understand yourself now is to remember yourself back then. ‘School of Life’ is a new project of the ‘People’s Book’ series. Open it—and you’ll understand why our generation gave up almost everything, yet somehow managed to hold on to the edge of the abyss.”