About the book: 2020 / Efim Kurganov – Ph.D., Slavic philologist, researcher of the genre of literary historical anecdote. For the first time in Russian literature, it was he who built the genealogy of this unique genre, tracing its heyday in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Dovlatov, Platonov. Sometimes the reader does not even suspect that writers introduce anecdotes known in their era into their works, which they often make the basis of their texts. And the anecdote no longer becomes just an artistic element, but the main component of the narrative style of this or that author. Efim Kurganov identifies the sources of borrowing jokes, introduces them and shows how they were transformed in “Eugene Onegin”, “Little House in Kolomna”, “The Inspector General”, “Chameleon”, “Teenager” and many other classic texts. This book is similar to a detective story investigation, a fascinating quest on Russian literature, the answers to which amaze with findings and kindle even greater interest in it.