Simon Elevich Shnol is a professor, Doctor of Biological Sciences, one of the organizers of the world's first Department of Biophysics at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. An amazing memory and the talent of a storyteller easily unite different episodes of life in time and space. Through the prism of the biography of Simon Elevich, we see a whole era, from the repressions of the 1930s and the devastation of the war years to the revival of the country and the formation of new scientific knowledge.