About the book: 1983 / The title of Girshin's novel "The Diary of a Simpleton" (another title is "The Murder of an Emigrant") is accurate, it seems to me, expresses the content of the book. Before us are the diary entries of a recent emigrant, transferred by the will of fate from a totalitarian zone to the capitalist jungle of New York. The hero of the novel continues the gallery of so-called “little people”, begun by Bashmachkin from Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and continued in many classical examples of Russian (and Western) ) literature.