About the book: 2023 / The Thaw period is interesting not only for the totality of events that formed a certain cultural paradigm, but also for the life strategies that the heroes of the era chose. Continuing the research begun in In the book “The Thaw: Events,” Sergei Chuprinin this time shifts the focus and introduces the reader to the iconic characters of that time. His new book is a kind of encyclopedia containing biographical sketches about writers, translators and philologists, editors and publishers, officials and chroniclers of the Thaw era. The author’s task was not only to establish accurate information about these people, but also to create their psychological portraits in order to, if possible, reconstruct the motivations behind their actions - noble or dishonorable. These essays make up a great “human comedy” of the Thaw era, and the fates of their heroes often intersect in the most bizarre way. Sergei Chuprinin - Doctor of Philology, Professor at the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky, editor-in-chief of the magazine “Znamya”».