The book is based on a collection of memoirs about I.E. Babel (1894-1940). Living testimonies of contemporaries (F. Iskander, Lev Slavin, K. Paustovsky, Lev Nikulin, Leonid Utesov and many others) allow us to more fully imagine the personality of a wonderful Soviet writer, to feel his human originality, complexity and brightness of his artistic world.