📚 Friday greetings to all book lovers! Where would you like to escape to today — fantasy, drama, detective stories, or historical chronicles? “Book Compass” will show you any route! Today, Grigory Germanovich Dityatev, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public Health, Healthcare and Social Work, shares his recommendation. "The memoirs of one of the most famous Soviet writers became a guiding thread for me into the history of the 20th century back in school. The final volumes of Ehrenburg’s Collected Works include his wartime memoirs, People, Years, Life. This is an honest book about how difficult it is for a creative person to find their place in life. Back in gymnasium, during the First Russian Revolution of 1905, Ehrenburg got involved in politics, and this coexisted with his studies and first crushes. But the cause of his life wasn’t the revolution — it was the force of art: poetry and prose. He devoted himself to it wholeheartedly throughout his life, and it helped him become a true Human Being. After his arrest and exile, he fled abroad and lived in Paris from 1908 onwards. He witnessed and described the “golden era” of Europe before the First World War, capturing the Rotonde café with its patrons — future famous artists and poets such as Picasso, Modigliani, and Diego Rivera. Ehrenburg tried to make sense of the times and of himself. He doesn’t provide the answers, but he offers advice: don’t give up, keep working, and move forward. After the February Revolution, he returned to Russia and wrote the novel Julio Jurenito. In the 1930s, he visited Arkhangelsk and helped save the Gostiny Dvory from demolition. The book gives a comprehensive perspective on the 20th century — the story of how the time of poetry and romance transformed into an era that Pasternak called “the wolfhound century”. Reading People, Years, Life is certainly worthwhile".