Yevgeny Prigozhin once wrote a children's book that takes place in a land of tiny people

• The head of a Russian mercenary group fighting in Ukraine once wrote a children's book.
• Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, is believed dead after an explosion on his plane.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is now maybe dead after an explosion felled his private plane this week, might have once believed there was nothing he couldn't do.

He ran a chain of restaurants and a catering company, which caught the eye of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He engineered a plan to interfere in US elections. He ran a Russian mercenary group accused of atrocities in Ukraine and across multiple continents. And he staged a mutiny against Russian military leaders, marching his squadron halfway to Moscow before decamping to Belarus, considerably weakening Putin's international standing (though Putin might have just gotten his revenge).

He was also once, The Moscow Times reports, a children's book author.

Prigozhin is perhaps most famous for leading the charge on the front lines of Ukraine. As the head of the Wagner Group, he once filled its ranks with Russian prisoners and threw them at the front in eastern Ukraine. Prigozhin is also well known for his exploits in Africa, where his mercenaries work to destabilize the region in Russia's favor — mostly in the form of gold mining. Wagner has also operated across the Middle East, including Syria and Libya, and dozens of other countries around the world.

Long before all that, in the 1980s, Prigozhin spent nearly a decade in a Russian prison for fraud and other crimes. After his release, he opened a hot dog stand to get back on his feet. He parlayed that into the restaurant and catering business. He became known as "Putin's Chef."

It was in 2004 that he undertook the writing of a children's book with his two young kids. There were only a couple thousand copies published and it likely never went on sale. But The Moscow Times managed to get its hands on it. And it's a doozy.

The book, which runs almost 90 pages long, follows the story of a small man, named Indraguzik, who lives in a world of other small people, who all live among normal-sized humans. It includes intricate drawings that may or may not have been Prigozhin's work.

The story begins when Indraguzik falls from a theater chandelier where he lives with his family. Essentially an adventure tale, it follows Indraguzik's journey back home.

Along the way, he meets various characters, full-sized humans, and even the king of this world, who Indraguzik promises to help. Some magic then happens. We won't spoil the ending. But you can get the gist here.

The seemingly wholesome tale stands in stark contrast to the news from Prigozhin's own life.

"He's a diverse person, striving for self-realization within what is possible," Konstantin Kalachev, a Russian political expert, told The Moscow Times. "As long as being good was in fashion, he was good. But then the time came for evil, and he became evil."

Prigozhin's life, he said, was "a mirror of the times."