In December 2008, I attended the First International Symposium of Translators of Arabic Literature, which was held in the capital of the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria by the Ministry of Culture of that country. There, during one of the breaks between meetings, I met two colleagues-lecturers. Having learned that I had once participated in the translation of one of the novels of the famous Algerian Arabic-language writer and public figure 'Abd al-Hamid Ben Haddougi (1925-1996) into Russian, my new friends invited me to come to the annual international symposium, the next session of which was planned to be held in December next year, i.e. 2009. As usual, I forgot to think about this conversation, but in November 2009, I did not know what to do. An invitation was sent to me through the Algerian Embassy in Moscow on behalf of the administration of the Algerian Wilaya2 Burj Bou 'Arririj to participate in the same symposium. I began to work on a report in which I was going to tell my Algerian colleagues about the decision of the Raduga publishing house and the Foreign Commission of the USSR Writers ' Union to publish a collection of the Algerian writer [Benhedouga, 1987], what works were included in it, and, most importantly and most interesting of all, about the fate of the people-editors, translators and the author of the preface-thanks to whose efforts the book was published. After all, all this is part of the recent history of our Arabic studies, the history of Russia's inter-literary and inter-cultural relations not only with Algeria, but also with other Arab countries. 3 I am ashamed to say that when I was preparing for my trip in Moscow, I knew absolutely nothing about the places I was going to visit. The information presented in this article was obtained by me later - from books written by local historians from that wilaya and kindly presented to me by my new Algerian friends [Vashan, 2007; Mukhtari, B. G. (1); Mukhtari, B. G.(2); Dalil al-bayan..., 2007; ... Читать далее