The second volume of the collected works of Viktor Shklovsky is dedicated to the diversity and internal unity of biographical strategies, thanks to which the narrator’s style determined the author’s fate. The volume combines an early autobiographical trilogy (“Sentimental Journey”, “Zoo”, “The Third Factory”), essay memoirs about the Patriotic War, written and published before its end, later memoir books returning to the beginning of life and literary career, as well as books and oral memories about V. Mayakovsky, who became for V. Shklovsky not only a friend, but also a special kind of screen onto which he projected ideas about time and himself. Shklovsky manages to include in his memoirs not only his contemporaries (O. Brik and V. Khlebnikov, R. Jacobson and S. Eisenstein, Yu. Tynyanov and B. Eikhenbaum), but also those whose names have long belonged to history (Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Marco Polo and Afanasy Nikitin, Suvorov and Ferdowsi). Collected together, these works allow us to see the figure of their author in a completely different way, to reveal a connection where previously they saw a gap. The comments trace the additions and changes that the novel “Zoo” has acquired over the course of 50 years of lifetime reprints.