Kuomintang rule, Japanese invasion, socialist transformations, "cultural revolution," Deng Xiaoping's reforms - these and other events are told by the heroes of Ilya Falkovsky's book, who passed through the millstones of history and managed to survive. All of them are former and current professors who gave the Chinese reader Russian classics and compiled dictionaries of the Russian language. Despite the years of the ban on learning the Russian language in the PRC, they carried love for him throughout their lives.