You don’t have to read this book from beginning to end. You can start from the end instead. Or from the middle. Or from anywhere else. Or you can simply not read it at all—just skim through with your eyes. Even not the whole book, but only some of the chapters.
This isn’t a novel. It’s stories about the life of one person. Though not just one person—everyone who lived at the same time as the book’s author. And it’s for everyone, too—those with different tastes, viewpoints, interests, and age preferences.
Are you interested in celebrities? Please—here are meetings with B. Okudzhava, V. Voinovich, M. Svetlov, M. Sholokhov, and also with Y. Luzhkov and A. Kashpirovsky. And here are letters by I. Ehrenburg and a drawing by P. Antokolsky published for the first time.
And if you like high-stakes stories, you can read almost detective-style stories about “rootless cosmopolitans” or “the great construction of communism.”