Memoirs of the outstanding historian, publicist and public figure Semyon Markovich Dubnov (1860-1941) - a true encyclopedia of Jewish life in Russia. The memoirs are written on the basis of the diaries that S. Dubnov kept throughout his life and in which the richest panorama of the events of the second half of the 19th - first decades of the 20th centuries was recorded. Direct participant and witness of the decisive events of the era - the decline of Gaskala, the origin and development of Palestinian philosophy, and later Zionism, the revolution of 1905-1907, the creation of Jewish political parties and organizations, the February and October revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War, S.M. Dubnov scrupulously restores the picture of his past years, paints portraits of his friends and associates - writers and poets Sholem Aleichem, H.N. Bialik, Ben-Ami, S. Frug, N.S. Leskov, A. Volynsky; political and public figures - M. Vinavera, 0.Grusenberg, A. Landau, G. Sliozberg and many others.