Eugene Schwartz is a famous writer, playwright, whose plays The Naked King, The Snow Queen, The Shadow, The Dragon, An Ordinary Miracle have long been loved by the reader. Schwartz's diaries are a special part of his creative legacy. He began leading them in 1926. True, at the beginning of the war, a lot had to be burned. The records that he made since 1942 have been preserved. In his diaries, the author set himself two tasks: to learn how to write prose, considering it very important for the playwright, and to find the most accurate words for conveying feelings, events and moods at one time or another in life. He created in them Schwartz and a gallery of portraits of contemporaries, including Korney Chukovsky, Samuil Marshak, Sergey Gorodetsky, Yuri German, Dmitry Shostakovich, Irakli Andronikov and many others. Schwartz talks about all of them warmly and ironically, sometimes sarcastically, showing famous people from a completely unexpected side.