Valentin Pikul’s book, prepared for the writer’s sixtieth birthday, includes his famous novel Bayazet and a large section of historical miniatures dedicated to forgotten pages of Russian history of the 16th – 20th centuries. With skill, passion, and passion, the writer embodies significant events in Russian history, curious incidents, and the destinies of individual people into completed plots, into vivid, memorable images, into an inexhaustible source of surprise, worship and reader optimism, to enrich our knowledge about the past of the Motherland, to sense the continuity of time.