This book is by an amateur writer, a dashing businessman Aleksandr Panikin (1950-2002), who at the age of seventeen came to Moscow from Krasnodar to become an actor, tried his hand as a theater manager, and then, stirred by his failures and by his own bold and enterprising spirit, stepped into the treacherous and, for him, exciting, waters of Russian commerce and created the successful concern Paninter.
Mikhail Petrovich Artsybashev (1878-1927), one of the most popular writers of his time, whose collected works were published in ten volumes, became a forbidden author in Russia after his emigration in 1923.